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So You Want To Be A Consultant
Stephen Friedl writes "I've been a self-employed consultant for almost 20 years - I still have my first customer! - and I'm asked often about the business by those who are considering it. It's not for everybody, and there are often surprises, so I've written up a Tech Tip that recounts my experiences and provides advice for the n00b. Executive summary: It's much more about customer service than it is about technical skill."
I am also a self-employed developer/consultant (although I'm technically a programmer, I find myself spending a lot more time on consultancy)
Keeping your first customer is NOT perse a good thing. Only if you still make money on work for that customer. The first 10 years of my own business, I found my self spending a lot of time giving phone-support for previously programmer stuff. Or for other stuff... or for no stuff at all (help, my mouse doesn't work properly anymore !)... The most difficult thing in being self employed is : learn to charge for everything. If you work on something, even if it is only 5 minutes : bill'em.
It's the only advice I can give. If you start a relationship with your customer based on free support (in the widest possible interpretation of support), yuo're fucked
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Yup, most businesses would rather have an IT consultant that takes twice as long (and three tries) to solve a problem than one that won't return phone calls for days. I know, I've lost customers while busy with other ones - not because they were in a hurry to get something done, but because they wanted to talk it through and know, quickly, if what they're planning (whenever we would eventually get around to it) was rational or even possible.
Communication, communication, communication. And it's not billable, most of the time - so take that into account when you set your rates for the time you can bill. You can spend 60 hours a week working in this mode, and only be able to charge for 15 of them sometimes.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"Consultant" used to mean an expert professional who could solve problems and provide advice based on years, even decades of experience.
With the Y2K and dot-com booms, "consultant" became used to mean someone with more than three months of IT experience...
Thankfully (for us real consultants), most of the amateurs have returned to horse farming, or whatever they used to do.
It'll still be a while, however, before "IT Consultant" on a business card impresses anyone.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Because all work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy?
My advice for new consultants:
Incorporate. Protect your savings, house, car, etc., if there's a disaster.
Be available. This includes evenings, weekends, and vacations.
Be responsive. Check your customer email several times a day and respond.
Excellent article and I suggest any consultant or person thinking of being one RTFA.
One thing I would like to add, though, is a fixed bid tip. The author admits he does not have much experience with this type of work and omits one important detail that can save a lot of headache for both parties and keep cashflow going during a large project.
Always try to do a fixed bid project with milestone based payments. This keeps the customer happy since they get to see the code at intervals, gauge the progress, and offer feedback. It lets you get paid as you go and helps you use customer feedback to make changes (and no matter how good the spec, there will be) as you develop.
When you are your own business you end up putting up money for various things, and when your incomming payments start to lag, you can end up in serious trouble.
Which is why being under-capitalized is the number one reason new businesses fail.
It's easier to wear the spandex than to do the crunches. --David Lee Roth
A financially-struggling consultant does not give a customer The Warm Fuzzy Feeling(TM)
Recently, I was in salary negotiations with a company without any competing job offers. I asked for a really high salary relative to others applying for the position. When asked why or do I have any other offers, I simply reiterated that I am very interested in this position, and the salary is what I have discovered through other companies is market.
The name of the game is: "Never show all your cards"
I saw this in a advertisment for a consulting gig.
50% Personality, 50% Technical Ability.
If you can't walk into an office and within 2 minutes be mostly comfortable and getting along with everyone, then you shouldn't be a consultant. You don't have a long time to get going, like you would if you were an employee. There's no training, no hand-holding. You are there doing your thing. It's actually quite fun and interesting most of the time!
I also still have my first client.... heh
-m
http://www.invisik.com
I'm much more on the technical side of consulting, and the only "marketing" I do is publishing original, technical content. Mainly I write C code all day, though I'm sure that this slashdot post is seen as "marketing"...
Steve
Steve Friedl / Unix Wizard / Microsoft MVP / www.unixwiz.net
Persons allergic to incompetence cannot be consultants. - Ioan Tenner
is competition from a class of people I call "idiots with a screwdriver and a copy of Norton". It's so easy to get started consulting (although it gets hard, fast) that just about anybody looking for work whose even seen a computer considers jumping in. It's really tough charging a decent amount for decent service when I've got morons charging half what I do and then calling Microsoft for support. Oh well, at least with everything going to India these shmucks are out their tech support life line. Should help weed out the worst of the bunch. My favorite is having another (usually better looking/more personable) consultant hiring me do to his job, and then double charging the customer. Oh well, I still get paid....
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- We don't do anything billable without a contract in place. This means there are no unpleasant surprises later when the client says "oh, I didn't realise this would be so much" or "we don't have the budget allocated." On the other hand, if there is no arrangement ahead of time (perhaps what I'm doing is outside the scope, or they're a new client) then we don't invoice, and the time we spent was our problem.
- Don't charge for the small stuff. Quick phone calls don't add up to a ton of short charges as they do with a lawyer. But it also means that if the subject is clearly long then I have to pay attention and be sure to tell the client "You know, this is going to take more than a few minutes. Let's schedule a time to go over this in detail." It also means, as TFA says, that you have to fire people for whom this doesn't work -- in that case the calls are just a symptom of something worse wrong with the client relationship.
Basically our principle is: if you wouldn't like to receive a bill for it, you probably shouldn't be sending one for it.I, too, run my own business. With the article author's definitions, I would be a consultant, although I never really decided what to call myself. The part of the article that I can relate with the most is deciding if you have enough self-discipline to work by yourself at home.
/. obsession, please let me know, that would really help with my productivity...
I've been doing this kind of work for the last six or seven years. And it took me the first five to figure out how to work at home. During that first five years, working at home was not easy! I hadn't yet developed the discipline needed, nor the mental state necessary for home and work to co-exist.
I eventually figured it out, and am extremely happy with my lifestyle right now. The first step was learning how far I had to distance my work life from my personal life. For example, we bought a new house this year. When looking for a house, the number one necessity on my list was an office area on a seperate level than the living area. We found one with a basement den that became a really wonderful office. It's a half level from the living room, and a full level from the bedrooms. Wonderful.
Something else I learned was that, no matter how much I thought I could get done with a TV on, it was best to be distanced from all television. The same goes with music with lyrics. For maximum concentration, I need to listen to instrumental music (fortunately my two favorite musical genres are classical and movie soundtracks). Interestingly, as long as I play only instrumental music, I have better concentration than if I don't listen to any music, because it will drown out other distracting noises. (headphones are also a good signal to the wife: don't bother me!)
Speaking of the wife, another challenge after getting married was not only me learning to work at home, but my wife learning to let me work at home. Make sure that everybody in the household knows that work time is work time. If you worked at an office, nobody would expect you to swing by the house to straighten up the living room at 2:30 in the afternoon. Don't make it an excuse for not doing any extra work (believe me, wives hate that), but make sure that your wife knows that while she's welcome to ask you to help out, not to expect it to get done until after your work time.
Now, if anybody has figured out how to cure the
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Well, it was, until the project kept growing, and they kept requiring me to bring on more people to help finish the project. I was opposed to adding people, but it was "if you can't, we'll have to find someone who can". We were billing on an hourly basis, but the lag time on invoices began to creep up, mostly due to the fact that my previous company was bought out, and the billing system cut-over didn't go all that well.
Long, sad story later, I was *way* in the hole, and about to vanish into a cashflow crunch that would eat my little company. I went to my client and laid out the situation for them. I told them that I had not expected to have so many people on the project (about 16 subcontractors, each pulling in around $50/hour), and pointed out all the efforts I had made to meet their shifting requirements. After a very reasonable conversation, my primary contact lit a medium-sized fire under the AP department, and I got a sizeable check that put us up to date.
So, I believe that sometimes letting the client know that they've put you in a bind can be useful. Particularly in this case, where replacing my whole team mid-project wasn't a great option for them.