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Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

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Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#11

Post by rpwilcox »

drewcrawford wrote: post #4

Source: I've run an iOS contracting company for the last three years. Here are some big problems: * Lead qualification. This is an enormous problem. Lots of people want revenue sharing deals, etc., and it takes too long to work out whether they're serious about the project and whether I'm the right fit. What do they do for a living? Is this a corporate or personal project? etc. * Client acquisition cost. Most of the…

Amen about the lead qualification. I just had this happen today: I spent a few hours on an email for a potential client whose project sounds like 3-6 man-months of work.

Now, does he really have that kind of dough laying around (ie: angel funding), or will I never here from the client again because he was hoping to get it done for $200? (Or worse: profit sharing / equity arrangements. Equity doesn't pay my rent.)

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#12

Post by cperciva »

Getting paid. I finish work; I send an invoice; I get an email back saying "thanks, we'll process this right away"; and I wait. A month later, I send another email and get told that it "slipped through the cracks" or "got lost", and a week later I get a check in the mail.

I think I'm batting roughly a 50% average on getting paid without sending the "uh, where's my money" email. I always get paid eventually and without complaints, so it's not as if people are trying to avoid paying; it just seems that people who hire me almost universally suck at doing paperwork.

And really, that's a bad way to suck. I suck at doing paperwork, but I at least pay my bills promptly.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#14

Post by Terry_B »

drewcrawford wrote: post #4

Source: I've run an iOS contracting company for the last three years. Here are some big problems: * Lead qualification. This is an enormous problem. Lots of people want revenue sharing deals, etc., and it takes too long to work out whether they're serious about the project and whether I'm the right fit. What do they do for a living? Is this a corporate or personal project? etc. * Client acquisition cost. Most of the…

What forms of advertising have you tried if you don't mind me asking? Just online stuff?

Effective or not, I've been struggling to think of ways to advertise a small contract development business to enterprises other than adwords and seo.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#16

Post by daeken »

wavephorm wrote: post #13

I would say, the unwillingness for companies to outsource the interesting work. IME, most consulting work is just grind, no interesting problems, and the pay rarely really makes up for the real amount of work.

Find your niche and only contract in that space. For quite a while, I only did reverse-engineering contracting; I gained a reputation for doing it, and my available work and hourly rate rose as a result of that. Figure out the intersection of what you're interested in, what people are willing to pay for, and what you're good at and you're set.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#17

Post by orthecreedence »

Honestly, never had to deal with any of these. My brother and I would only work for people who had the money and knew what they wanted up front. We were very straightforward (and firm) about our rates, and if someone didn't pay us on time, we'd stop all work on their project until they did. Scope creep was never an issue because we worked hourly ;).

The thing I didn't like most about contracting was having my time split up so much between different projects. I like to work on one thing for days at a time, and this wasn't always realistic with several projects going at once.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#18

Post by mgkimsal »

Terry_B wrote: post #14
drewcrawford wrote: post #4

Source: I've run an iOS contracting company for the last three years. Here are some big problems: * Lead qualification. This is an enormous problem. Lots of people want revenue sharing deals, etc., and it takes too long to work out whether they're serious about the project and whether I'm the right fit. What do they do for a living? Is this a corporate or personal project? etc. * Client acquisition cost. Most of the…

What forms of advertising have you tried if you don't mind me asking? Just online stuff? Effective or not, I've been struggling to think of ways to advertise a small contract development business to enterprises other than adwords and seo.

"enterprises"? of what sort? a particular industry? Networking with people in that industry at their events, perhaps even speaking at those events, would do you a world of good, ime.

Find some local networking groups that deal with the industr(y|ies) you target, and start to infiltrate their ranks :)

P.S. "low/no cost marketing" is one of the sessions at http://indieconf.com this year :)

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#19

Post by orthecreedence »

Omnipresent wrote: post #15

Perhaps finding clients should be there. How are you guys finding clients? Im looking for clients that I can deal with on the side along with my day job. How did you guys go about getting first client

Elance got us a lot of ongoing work, believe it or not. It seems like a tool for finding people in Russia to do your work for cheap, but a profile on Elance (at least a few years ago, mind you) got my brother and I two very large, ongoing contracts (which in turn led to more work from others as well).

Also, LinkedIn seems to be a very good tool for self-marketing nowadays, I hear a lot of people get work through it very regularly.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#20

Post by mgkimsal »

cperciva wrote: post #12

Getting paid. I finish work; I send an invoice; I get an email back saying "thanks, we'll process this right away"; and I wait. A month later, I send another email and get told that it "slipped through the cracks" or "got lost", and a week later I get a check in the mail. I think I'm batting roughly a 50% average on getting paid without sending the "uh, where's my money" email. I always get paid eventually and withou…

Ditto here. Maybe not 50%. Well... some of the work I do involves state agencies, and I've learned to deal with the pace of the machine. That said, once something's been 'approved' (meaning, an invoice has been approved) it's almost always I've had some clients I've worked with start off by saying (couple times a bit rudely) "now look here, we can't pay the day you submit an invoice - don't even think that's going to happen - it'll usually be 2-4 weeks before you get a check!". I figured they'd been burned pretty badly by people pestering them for money.

Turns about about 1/3rd of my subcontractors pester me the same, and I encouraged it because I used to paypal money the same day or next day after getting an invoice from them. I can do it, but there are times when I'm dealing with a lot of people, and other work, and simply don't have the time to deal with 'paperwork' but maybe once per week. I don't get the rudeness from people as much as the 'hey, i really need this money to buy food this week' stories. Word to the wise - don't pull that on me - it makes me want to find someone else who won't put me in that position.

So... maybe that should be another issue on the list of things you hate about contracting - dealing with subcontractors :)

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