What I want to do in the end is software development / consulting for large scale farms, which is probably far more profitable and scalable than the mining process itself. But in order to do that, I need to have my own farm to develop/test the software on.
What kind of software are you planning on writing? the mining field is pretty limited in that aspect, it's either a mining pool, a monitoring software, or firmware, none of these require having a large farm, just a few gears for testing, and a ton of coding skills and free time.
The other part would be the electrical and airflow design, you could learn a lot of things by trial and error when applying it to your own farm, but I am pretty sure a professional in those fields who knows nothing about mining will do a better a job.
With that said, if you really have the skills and time, then the best service you can offer would be miners repair, if you build the right team for it, you will make a lot of money, the only thing that is lacking in supply in all this mess are companies that can fix mining gears.