51–60 of 276 posts
1. Taking on and continuing to work with asshole clients. 2. Setting my rates too low (I didn't account for taxes, paying both halves of FICA, and healthcare as much as I should have). 3. Not finding a good balance between finding clients and actually doing the work.
Longer write-up here: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-l... Some things I learned through mistakes: - Charge more. - Travel like a professional and bill the client. For my first business trip I used airline points, stayed at an Airbnb on my own dime, and even refused the client's offer to reimburse me. Stupid. (Full story here: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/stupid/ ) - If I'm not enjoying the w…
One additional tip here is to purchase cancellable / refundable airline tickets and hotel reservations. You don't want to get stuck with the bill if your client cancels a meeting or whatever. Made this mistake with a long-term client where it wasn't worth trying to get reimbursed for travel expenses for a canceled meeting.
2) Not creating content sooner. There hasn't been one thing that influenced my career as much as my blog - If there would be one thing I would do different it would be this: I would have started blogging earlier.
Longer write-up here: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-l... Some things I learned through mistakes: - Charge more. - Travel like a professional and bill the client. For my first business trip I used airline points, stayed at an Airbnb on my own dime, and even refused the client's offer to reimburse me. Stupid. (Full story here: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/stupid/ ) - If I'm not enjoying the w…
> Travel like a professional and bill the client. One additional tip here is to purchase cancellable / refundable airline tickets and hotel reservations. You don't want to get stuck with the bill if your client cancels a meeting or whatever. Made this mistake with a long-term client where it wasn't worth trying to get reimbursed for travel expenses for a canceled meeting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe that from several times I've read through freelance-related discussion on this site that the recommendation is explicitly not to charge per project. The reason being that it can be very hard to estimate the total time required for the project. Additionally, once a customer has payed they might say "oh, we though you knew that this (previously unmentioned) feature was required when we paid you." Scope creep,…
But they use the same argument to justify project based pay. You could just take longer, there's no way to know what the cost will be, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it better to charge per project or per hour?
Per project is dangerous. Consulting clients will change their minds frequently and you'll want to give them the latitude to do so, which means you simply can't estimate the time needed to complete a project without adding X00% on top to compensate. No one wants to have the "this is out of scope, I'm happy to do it but we need to talk about an amendment..." conversation. Per hour is not adequate for this type of work…
That being said, if you’re working with someone who actually deserves a discount - a client referred by a friend, a startup on a budget, etc., then it’s totally fair. I’d just be wary of tossing around discount claims to everyone.
Setting my rates too low. Here's what I figured out those many years ago. Clients who are cheap are also really into wasting your time and trying to micromanage the project. Clients who will pay a lot more also give you latitude to do your job (after all they're paying you to be the expert). Keep jacking up your rates with each new client until you hit a ceiling. Whatever you're charging now, without even knowing wha…
Just curious what do you consult on for 350/hr? Is this basic CRUD stuff? Wordpress template etc?
Happened like this: one very huge phone company wanted some very specific self contained component written in Java. They shopped around and did not find anyone willing to do it. My friend was working there and told them that he knows that genius consultant (yours truly). So they called me up and during negotiations I told them that I will do it for $20,000. I was prepared to bargain but they told me that I am very reasonable for that functionality. At no point they asked about exact time frame/hourly rate. They just said that the expect it to take no longer than a month.
Came home, fired up my PC and spent 3 very long days coding it. That was all about it. I wish I could nail contracts like this more often ;)
As a consultant your number one thing is making money. Find high paying clients, establish good relationships, do good work but don't get too far in the weeds of tech stuff. From everything I've read and experienced, deep technical work doesn't pay well or market well. Dumb stuff like setting up Magento is where the big money comes. People who are mainly technical seem to do better at companies. There are of course exceptions.
My business did not succeed. I still enjoyed the three years I spent on it. I got to work with lots of different things that I would never have had much chance to do otherwise, and get paid for it. I ended up going back into industry though once my primary client had to pull back my hours, and so far am happy enough with that decision too.
I've spoken to multiple freelancers to learn that the best way to actually find good clients that pay well is through word of mouth. There is inherent trust in the relationship when someone comes in as a referrals vs when they don't.
And that trust really changes the game in terms of how much more comfortable they are in terms of how they engage with you. They'll trust you with the project because they trust the referring source.
The alternative is spending a significant amount of time showing your skillsets to clients that don't know about you. Which means you may have to warm them over a few projects before they actually fully trust you. While starting off job sites maybe the only way to build a portfolio but we believe that everybody inherently has a professional network of good relationships they can tap onto, like old colleagues or friends from college that work in a similar industry.
[1] Here's a post I wrote about the ways different ways experienced freelancers find clients and most of them said that their best work came through word of mouth https://freelancefish.com/things-we-learnt-about-finding-cli...
[2] If you want to bootstrap your referral network, a friend and I are working on a tool that helps freelancers find work through word of mouth by reminding you to stay in touch with people and helping them in meaningful ways. It also encourages you to clearly articulate what you do and how the same people can help you in return. We just launched the beta a couple of weeks back and are slowly adding people onto the platform https://clienttree.io