I worked variously as an individual consultant, or either leading or as a member of small ad-hoc contract teams, or as a co-founder of a consulting firm, for about 14 years. If you don't like the process of selling yourself, you will not like this life.
We did eventually build up a stable of long-term clients, but we got those by doing lots of short-term work, each one of which was at least one interview-equivalent. You also have to learn how to judge when to pitch - you will get a lot of nibbles for jobs that don't make sense, are not serious, scams or beyond your capabilities. You need a well-tuned bullshit detector, and especially when you're hungry, correctly judging situations can be tricky. But writing proposals and estimates for everyone will bleed you dry, and you'll probably develop a rep as a sucker - a lot of companies solicit proposals they never intend to act on for various reasons.
In any case, good clients for consultants generally come from word of mouth. So you want to do good work for someone who knows lots of small business owners. Go look for those people. Small IT support shops are less plentiful now with the rise of cloudified commodity services, but that was my angle.
FWIW, I went back to full-time employment. We cold make it work, but we couldn't thrive, and it is hard to grow a shop on contract work (2x the workload generally means 2x the employees - there's very little leverage). I make significantly more as a wage slave than I did as "my own boss".
But you might well do way better. And there absolutely is a bright side - freedom is a big one. It was very hard to give up ownership of my time again. You also meet a lot of folks who can be very different from the sort you run in to in HugeCo technical silos.