Self-intro; Drupal consulting questions

I'm sorry I missed the meetup yesterday - I wanted to be there but had a conflict (getting myself elected to the Williamstown Planning Board).

I wanted to do a self-introduction as a prelude to asking for some advice...

I am not new to Drupal or web development (being Drupal.org member #5427, I practically qualify as a "founding father"). In 2004 I was the principal behind Advokit, a FOSS grass roots organizing tool (whose most notable users were Rock The Vote - and Ron Paul!). During it's life as a funded project (2003-2004) I was the product manager. After that, pretty much all the project's support fell to me working as a volunteer.

None of this has ever been related to my "day job" (as a self-employed cartographer), and even after my Advokit experience, I am still no code-slinging superstar (I suspect many people working in this field, if pressed, would admit to feeling similarly since the number of technologies that one needs to have at least a superficial working knowledge of is staggering). I recently came back to Drupal when I decided to explore moving a website that I manage for our local high school to Drupal (the current site is hosted by an application service provider and is endlessly frustrating to use). In the past seven weeks or so, I've gotten quite a baptism in Drupal's contributed modules, done some minor theming, etc. (somewhat broken dev site can be seen at http://communitycampaigns.net/mgrhs (logins are broken, I don't know why and that's scary)).

I've justified the time I've spent (and plan to spend) on three things: 1) Cartography business has been slow (and tired); 2) I'm having a lot of fun; and 3) maybe I could spin Drupal work out into a business. Dan commented at the previous (April) meetup that there was no shortage of work for Drupal developers.

However, I have a lot of uncertainty about #3. I'm 53, with family, etc., so I'm more acquainted with my limitations than a lot of people considering such a move might be! I'm doubtful that I can, all by myself, develop sufficient technical and business expertise, or have the time/energy to do the work to build a successful business from scratch. I'm particularly frightened at the prospect of being soley responsible for designing and deploying sites that are mision-critical for the client - there's so much that can screw up! Still, I do think I have valuable skills to offer. So it is pretty clear that I will need to collaborate with others. Williamstown is kind of off the beaten path. The advice I'm seeking is where to start with that - develop the relationships necessary. Any thoughts?

Thanks, Pat