I'd like to get from "employed at a dead-end job for a sinking startup making a very humble salary with no benefits or vacation with a 4 hour daily commute" to the vicinity of "self-employed consultant working from home earning $XY,000 per week on client engagements".

Where/how can I quickly learn whatever skills I'm missing? (I might be under the gun soon to come up with an answer, since rumor mill is telling me that my $dayjob is going out of business on the 1st yet $dayjob['boss'] has remained silent about this.)

For the record: I'm technically not quite going 100% solo freelance consultant, a friend of mine (whom, unlike me, does not have a felony conviction for computer hacking that shuts 99% of doors) started an LLC that I intend to work under full time. Our website is https://paragonie.com

I've already seen a lot of Double Your Freelancing and read a bunch of 'patio11's blog posts.

For those interested in knowing, my skillset covers PHP, Java, .NET, JavaScript/HTML/CSS, and Shell/batch scripting, with a specialization in application security.

WHAT WE HAVE DONE SO FAR:

We've performed two code audits on cryptography applications in the past two months, but I'm not yet at liberty to post the reports (although the client did agree to publication later this year).

We have also started a community initiative to backport PHP 7's CSPRNG features into PHP 5 projects: https://github.com/paragonie/random_compat

We also have a new post on our blog (once per week, on average) that consistently resonates with the part of the PHP developer community I can reach and, usually, explains new security concepts from a developer's perspective. Based on the feedback I've received, this is generally seen as a high value offering that lots of people benefit from.

Is this a good start? Is there something I can do today that will help me reach businesses that need the skills I have to offer?