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Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

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Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#41

Post by tptacek »

dotBen wrote: post #26
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…

You need to get 50% payment upfront. Or work in blocks of money on account (eg for a $50k job, you have the client send you $10k in advance and when that is near depleted you have them wire you the next $10k, etc)

If Colin's clients are anything like our clients (very likely), that's a bad idea. Nobody he competes with is asking for anything up front.

Breaking projects into billable milestones is a good idea for other reasons (it's a buffer against scope creep, providing you with periodic scope/schedule resync points), but it doesn't solve the payables problem. It's bad business to tell a client "I'm not going to proceed on milestone 3 until you pay me at least milestone 1".

I'm sure there are people on HN who are shocked-shocked! to hear that suggested. But you can safely assume that HN consistently undervalues what is probably one of the most valuable assets a consultant can have, which is "ease of working with".

When you commit to 4 milestone phases, and you client says your payment is in process, you have to keep working. The client is depending on the job getting done. You may be tempted to reply "but I'm depending on being able to afford dinner tonight". Your client doesn't really believe that it's their problem that you're not well capitalized.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#42

Post by rpwilcox »

tptacek wrote: post #34
rpwilcox wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

How big a problem is that variant of qualification, really ? Why don't you just approach these things as if there's no real business there? I may be jaded about this because so many of our bids are competitive, and even a simple bid takes a couple hours to put together. We win most of them, but you get used to sinking time into deals that don't pan out and build it into the process.

I have a policy in which I don't estimate jobs where my gut says will take more than 40 hours worth of work. Beyond that it's Agile style iteration work.

I think this has two advantages: I don't put that much time into "no real business here" leads, or (if there is business there), there's no way I know the whole scope of a large project in one conversation.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#43

Post by phamilton »

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…

In accounts receivable, the employee who gets work done quickly gets promoted. In accounts owed, the opposite is true.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#44

Post by rjd »

orthecreedence wrote: post #23
rjd wrote: post #9

People wasting my time with stupid ideas. The amount of Groupon clones I've had come in front of me with "a special twist that will take the market by storm" is ridiculous.

Ha we had one of these once, but a Twitter clone. I kept trying to convince the person to just integrate with twitter instead of rebuilding it with a few tweaks, but to no avail. Sadly, we didn't end up taking the job...

The latest Groupon thing I had was a guy who came to with an idea of filling orders. People vote on what they want to do and then companies could see the customer interest and fill the order.

He had a mechanism in place that would have a group buying percentage rating, and naturally lower profit per sale for the person filling the order.

The first thing I said to him was, customers don't know what they are buying... they are gambling that companies supply something good.

From a companies point of this is a great mechanism to drop stock that isn't selling... which for most people would be stock people don't want... I doubt there would be many $99 Touch Pads, and mostly as seen on TV products...

He refused to acknowledge his system could be abused in this manner I suggested and the customer experience could end up quite bad (received products below the quality they expected).

I asked for some sort of spec, or numbers, or anything around what he wanted and I was presented with "I've told you everything, and you have the designs". The designs where ball point pen sketches he left on a piece of paper we found in a cafe where we had our first meeting.

I got a tad concerned at this point and pushed him for some other questions around his funding and sales men.

No sales staff, and he was taking out a loan to develop the work. At this point I said I wasn't interested as I got concerned that when money didn't start rolling in I might not get paid.

He got really angry with me after I declined and I felt a wave of relief as I assume he would have been the sort of client who would never have been wrong, and would have probably tried some stupid law suit blaming me for bad business decisions.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#45

Post by kls »

rpwilcox wrote: post #36
famousactress wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting to me. Budget isn't something the conversation leads with?

I've been thinking about revising my tactics some, to try to get a potential client to spill what kind of budget they have to work with before I even start thinking about anything else. It certainly helps sometimes in picking out project infrastructure ("I have to do this cheaply, so let's get inventive")

If they don't give me a budget I give them an hourly rate until I know what budget they are working with. That said, I prefer to work on an hourly arrangement if at all possible.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#46

Post by kls »

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

The biggest issue for you will be the side work issue. It limits your ability to take one a larger project. Which are usually the one that give you room to breath. In our group of developers we do have a few moonlighters but we have 5 full-timers as well. My suggestion to you would be until you can get out on your own full-time, team up with some other freelancers. It will broaden the projects that you can service.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#47

Post by pacomerh »

My biggest issue is synchronizing with the client. You make a perfect schedule with the right set of milestones that works for you and your other projects, but you have to be ready to answer the phone and break your flow to attend a client that is really excited because they got a whole bunch of assets for the site and they'd like to see them live :). So you have to ready to push your calendar and move people around.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#48

Post by kls »

medinism wrote: post #7

Getting unlimited calling from clients who are not serious is number one by far! signal to noise ratio in the freelancing market is dismal.

That is why many of us tend to stop taking non-network referred clients one we pass a certain point. It acts as a filter for the noise.

I actually made a pretty big mistake in that I took on a client that bought all of our capacity for the last 2 years. It was great while it lasted but many of my smaller clients have since moved on. So now that that project is winding down, I am back to the high signal to noise ratio while I build back up my client base.

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#49

Post by rpwilcox »

kls wrote: post #45
rpwilcox wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about revising my tactics some, to try to get a potential client to spill what kind of budget they have to work with before I even start thinking about anything else. It certainly helps sometimes in picking out project infrastructure ("I have to do this cheaply, so let's get inventive")

If they don't give me a budget I give them an hourly rate until I know what budget they are working with. That said, I prefer to work on an hourly arrangement if at all possible.

I think starting with an hourly rate is uninformative. For example, if a client's budget is low I might grab a RAD tool to get the job done (while letting the client know that this decision might hinder flexibility in the future.).

"You want a database on the web, that you can customize yourself, for $600? Great, let's grab a copy of FileMaker Pro, or sign up for Quickbase.com and get going" Yes, those solutions may limit potential of the app down the line, but they might actually be the right fit.

I'm another hourly-rate-all-the-way guy, but if I can extract the budget out of the client, then I can decide (essentially), "Given the client's other requirements, will a RAD/off-the-shelf/OSS-package-with-a-custom-theme work for this project... or do I just politely tell the potential client to get bent?"

Re: Poll: What Do You Hate About Contracting?

#50

Post by drewcrawford »

tptacek wrote: post #34
rpwilcox wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

How big a problem is that variant of qualification, really ? Why don't you just approach these things as if there's no real business there? I may be jaded about this because so many of our bids are competitive, and even a simple bid takes a couple hours to put together. We win most of them, but you get used to sinking time into deals that don't pan out and build it into the process.

> How big a problem is that variant of qualification, really?

I think there's a little bit of culture shock going on here between our particular contracting fields.

If you're doing enterprise-ish security contracting, you're not going to get an unemployed person in your lead pile by accident. I get three e-mails from unemployed people a week. I get 20+ leads a month from questionably-funded "startups". The number of revenue sharing posts per day on Craigslist is competitive with the number of police stations in the metropolitan area. etc.

Just to have a 30-minute conversation to determine if somebody is funded or not simply does not scale to the number of interested parties. Even reading all the e-mails and throwing them away is a massive time sink. Let alone estimating anything, thinking about the feasibility of anything, etc.

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