421–430 of 495 posts
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You should be required to pass a test on what the word "socialist" means before you're allowed to start throwing it around like this.
I think I have a better idea than you do and your seelioning here BTW the way the NFL etc are set up is very similar state controlled enterprises where run under more socialist regimes British Leyland ICL and so on.
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The key is to have people you've worked with who can bring you in to their org and vouch for you.
You have never converted a cold client? Has anyone done this before?
To this day, I'm still not quite clear about what a consultant actually does. I mean, beyond some vague idea ("goes to some company, talks with people, gives some recommendation"). I'd really love for someone to give some example or describe in a tangible way what the work of a consultant entails, what skills one typically needs and actually employs, what a typical gig looks like from beginning to end and so on. If a…
My modal engagement was with a SaaS company with $20 million a year sales, a few dozen employees, and 1~3 very strapped people wearing the marketing hat. “How much email do you send?” “We have a newsletter.” “What else?” “Welcome to free trial email. “What else?” “Nothing.” I write proposal. You should: 1) Have a pre-sales drip campaign positioned as a “free course about X delivered over email” w/ 8 emails arriving o…
Is it easier to work for a consulting company as an “employee” before venturing out alone?
Perhaps other people here shared the same assumption that I did - that this essay was about moving from tech development as a contractor/employee to tech (development) consulting. It's not. It's about moving from developing to marketing. There's nothing wrong with that, but it was a let-down to me to discover that the path to riches meant mingling with the group of people I tend to like the least in a company. Also,…
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Making the company money is the not the only factor is it? Any engineer at google/facebook/etc are probabilistically making the company multiple millions per year too (terrible estimate from revenue divided by headcount). But probably only a handful of them would ever be able to demand the rate you charge because they are replaceable. How do you make sure the company won't just take your advice and hire a guy to do t…
By far, the majority of consulting engagements I’ve seen or participated in (Big 4 and freelance) are things that could easily be done if the company hired a few folks, for much less pay than this. Simple number crunching, tedious paperwork review, trivial integrations/dev work.. I would hazard a guess that at least 50% of all enterprise consulting spend goes to these tasks. However the indisputable fact is that thes…
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Does something like that exist for software consulting?
I have done similar work. I was hired to come in and assess the software that they were developing - they were working with some contractors, some vendors, and a smattering of other people, and wanted to know if their current method was working, how to address some concerns they had, and whether their current vendor was doing a good job. I discussed it extensively with them, looked over the code and repositories, the…
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That's a good example of a marketing consultant, but what about an engineering consultant? Would talking tech stack pros/cons pull in a similar rate?
It is weird how I get persistently drummed out of engineering because when I write cron jobs, SQL queries, and React dashboards I make special effort to connect them to business outcomes. Businesses, to a first approximation, don’t care about their tech stack except to the extent that it drives business outcomes. Can you articulate those pros/cons in a way a business cares about? Can you impact your deliverables to r…
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My modal engagement was with a SaaS company with $20 million a year sales, a few dozen employees, and 1~3 very strapped people wearing the marketing hat. “How much email do you send?” “We have a newsletter.” “What else?” “Welcome to free trial email. “What else?” “Nothing.” I write proposal. You should: 1) Have a pre-sales drip campaign positioned as a “free course about X delivered over email” w/ 8 emails arriving o…
I am curious how you even get into this type of work - how do you find the consulting opportunities in the first place? Do you seek out work somehow, or do you market and let the leads come to you? Is it easier to work for a consulting company as an “employee” before venturing out alone?
At first he undercharged, not as a tactic to start consulting but because he didn’t have confidence in what he was selling. I believe he started off at $5,000 and stopped consulting when he was charging $30,000 a week.
But most of his work came from pitching people. Write an email or make a call to a company that seems a good prospect and follow up. If five percent convert you’re doing pretty well. You also get referrals from previous satisfied customers.
As well as that Patrick wrote a lot on his website about what he did and how to do it, which functioned as a proof of competence and lead to some people contacting him to ask him to work for them. Authority, Nathan Barry, is all about this publicising proof of competence tactic.
Perhaps other people here shared the same assumption that I did - that this essay was about moving from tech development as a contractor/employee to tech (development) consulting. It's not. It's about moving from developing to marketing. There's nothing wrong with that, but it was a let-down to me to discover that the path to riches meant mingling with the group of people I tend to like the least in a company. Also,…
How about if you invert it. If somebody came to you and asked for a system that can send emails when certain conditions are met in a database and track the results, would you assume that to write the program you would have to hang out with sales people? The actual work (in the two weeks to implement it) is development.
That said, I think people are missing the key takeaway from the article. I think the most important thing in the article is right there in the heading "Clients Pay For Value, Not For Time". This is saying that you should frame your services in terms of a value proposition for the client. That is, how much money will you save them if they hire you to do X. Maybe X is "rewrite the backend to process transactions quicker" which will save them Y hours of compute time and reduce their AWS bill by Z a month.
Perhaps other people here shared the same assumption that I did - that this essay was about moving from tech development as a contractor/employee to tech (development) consulting. It's not. It's about moving from developing to marketing. There's nothing wrong with that, but it was a let-down to me to discover that the path to riches meant mingling with the group of people I tend to like the least in a company. Also,…