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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'm a student who started doing software design as a consultant. Now I started this while I was still in high school and have made $70k in 4 years. Note that this is without much experience or a degree, and while still being in school... so if you devoted your time to this, perhaps it would be very lucrative?
Even if you regularly invoice at the start of every month, customers have their own schedule for paying, and this can be nerve-wracking to deal with
I think that's the reason why I wouldn't do consulting/contracting. A friend of mine recently decided to be self employed as a consultant and the biggest problem is getting people to pay him in an orderly fashion. 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.
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.
It's much more about customer service than it is about technical skill.
...Not to be rude, but I've noticed this is the "rule" with the consultants that have worked on various portions of projects that I've been involved with (e.g. the guys customizing an ERP that our system will be integrating with).
The funny thing is that the consultants with the poorest technical skills make the most money (charge the most hours) - at least in the short term.
A lot more of your expenses can be quantified and written off as business expenses when you work for multiple people. Of course, there's a little more risk here for error, but the IRS doesn't seem to put you in jail if you make honest mistakes.
Oh, there's certainly a lot more freedom involved too. You make your own schedule, and you're in a much better position to tell someone to fuck off without impacting your lifestyle too badly. On the other hand, when you're not charting up billable hours, you're spending your time marketing. Always marketing.
I've been doing this for about 3 years now and I don't think I've billed more than 20 hours a week on average, but being able to select which 20 is really convenient for your sanity. There are some weeks where you won't work at all and others where you don't lift your head higher than your shoulders. If you can't stand regular routine, independent consulting is the lifestyle for you.
There's a certain anxiety that comes with alway having to market yourself to new clients and not being sure if you can make ends meet in six months, but this isn't so bad in the computer industry since if you run into trouble, you can usually fall back on a fulltime job before you starve to death. You definitely need to save up a cash cushion to help even out the unsteadiness of work, but simply knowing that you have it there puts you in a better position to weigh whether you wan't to prostitute yourself out for that ActiveX project.
Unless you have iron will self-control, working out of your house is usually a bad idea because you end up finding as many distractions as possible to keep you from working. You also never feel that you're "off", since your day always looks like a 16-hour work/play haze.
All in all, I certainly don't regret getting into this.
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.
"I've been a self-employed consultant for almost 20 years - I still have my first customer!"
:D
Parents...
Privacy is terrorism.
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
Actually, I think he's got it more close to correct than you do. I've been doing this for about ten years now, and although there is a lot of splashover in how the terms are used, the understanding of them among people I typically interact with is that contractors are single-job at a time, specifically skilled, with a specifically contracted engagement. Consultants, on the other hand, are those who typically manage a number of simultaneous engagements, often without specifically executed contracts, typically with a less well-defined issue at stake. I think what happened to muddy the terms is that a lot of companies found it was easier to hire contract labor if they called it 'consulting' and a lot of people found it more palatable to work without insurance and benefits as long as they got to think of themselves as 'consultants.'
I think you'd be surprised at the number of 'top professional companies' who use consultants; it's often less about hand-holding than bringing in fresh perspective or someone with experience at other companies for a common industry issue. I would agree it's less about customer service in those instances (although, in my own view of the 'types' of consultant out there, the two categories are 'technical', where you make your reputation by being correct, and 'sales', where you make it by handing out warm fuzzies... but I digress) because you are dealing with people at that point who have enough knowledge to know what it is they don't know, but it's definitely not the same as being brought in to fill in as a sysadmin for three months.
No relation to Happy Monkey
Persons allergic to incompetence cannot be consultants. - Ioan Tenner
The other challenge is that some people seem to think that "consultant" means you're unemployed. Some say, "Oh, so you're between jobs?" I then explain that I have a roster of clients and that I've been doing this for seven years. I have also learned to stop saying that I'm a consultant and to start saying that I have run a small marketing firm for seven years.
Occasionally, I also run into potential clients who think "consultant" just means that they can avoid payroll taxes. They don't understand that I have other clients and that, while a full-time ongoing engagement is something I'd consider, I'm not using consulting as a way to scam the government. I've run into some companies that have had "consultants" working for them full-time for the past five years. (Canada's tax laws do not allow this.) Fortunately, I don't run into people like this very often.
-- SYS 64738 --
try to find some consultant friends! especially in the "time and project management" departement it helps tremendously to have a colleague who can jump in when you are short in time or are on holiday - and who doesn't try to "steal" your customer..
everything else is almost identically to my businnes practice and i can say: "it works!"
regards,
PAT
SEO Test: TIGI und SEBASTIAN - Online Shop - V
Stephen Friedl fell at the first fence by writing up his experience and making it free to all. I am a **TRUE** consultant see:
If you want *my* insight into the industry and how to work it, I can arrange a coaching session or formal meeting together with comprehensive notes and a presentation - here are my rates...
AT&ROFLMAO
- The first one because I hadn't yet decided on a career focus and I wanted to leverage my native English language skills to quickly get a foot inside a foreign country's IT sector, as a freshly landed immigrant;
- The second came as one of those offers one cannot refuse, based on my excellent performance at the first job.
Once I got pigeonholed into Technical Writing, applying for any other job became a dauntingly difficult task. I just kept on getting comments like:- This opening is for a Project Manager. That doesn't match your profile: you're a Technical Writer.
- Hi! This is Ms.Clueless BitchAufHR from soonbankrupt.com, how ya doing? Thanks for your application for this Product Manager position. We were all sitting here reading your CV and we have a nice Technical Writer job for you.
- Oh, so you're fluent in 7 languages. That's good, cause we're badly in need of a Technical Writer who can do both English and German.
At some point, it almost felt like my college degree was being systematically ignored, which made me ponder whether I would be better off switching field rather than fighting the HR drones.I stopped sending out CVs and instead focused on contacting old friends, which paid off in spades: within a few weeks, I landed myself a CTO position at a really forward-looking startup where a mere acquaintance was working, based solely on his pitching my CV to his boss.
Since then, I haven't bothered with the CV mailing game; I utilize the power of social networking. It works.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
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'
The below comments serve only as guidelines and are not intented to be truths. Becoming a consultant is more than just deciding to become one. Here's where to start. You'll need no less than $10,000 to start depending on how good you are at bargaining. 1. Get an attorney. a. create an 'S corp' and 'LLC'. b. drawing up a consultant agreement form 2. Unless you own nothing of value or expect to own nothing of value in the next five years do the following; a. Obtain liability insurance of no less than $500,000 but preferably $1,000,000 and, if it has anything to do with accounting software/hardware $5,000,000. 3. Write down all the products or services you're going to offer. For lists less than 10 highlight the top three. 10+ the top five. a. For each of the highlighted - list five things benefits you'll offer. b. for each benefit list five things why it will benefit your customer. c. If you can't list five things then drop it. 4. Buy at least one terabyte of portable storage for backup purposes. 5. Bill by the hour (minimum 2 hours + expenses if incurred beyond normal) and bill monthly. Offer 10%, net 30. Either portal to portal (better if traveling 500+ miles) or on site. 6. Notify them when you arrive and have them sign. Notify them when you leave and have them sign. 7. Never give anything for free unless they're a new customer (and only for the first month) or if they incur monthly bills of over $1000 regularly and only then give one hour free). 8. Determine within the first three billing cycles if they are are bad customers (don't pay reasonably). Fire them...there are plenty more customers. 10. Get a very good business tax accountant (they are worth their weight in gold). 11. (unspoken) if you really believe in yourself - never give up.