I know it is cliche, but it is not how you start, but how you finish. I have seen guys on projects come in guns blazing, ready to change the world. Then maybe 6 months later they start to fizzle out, like their tank is running on fumes. The energy and enthusiasm isn’t quite the same. Some of the sexy has worn off, and now you are in grunt work mode. You can also get complacent in a long project and lose your edge. It takes a lot to finish the same way you start.

In a world of consulting, it is easy to fade out at the end. You just finished a long project and you have new ones coming up with new clients. Your interests are wrapped up in what is new, not what is old, and the old project suffers. Finishing that last 1.2 is always the hardest.

I will tell you this, people have very short memories. People only remember what you’ve done for them lately. You’re only as good as that last hour you bill. If you go out the way you went in, clients will ask you to come back. If you fade out, the last image they will have of you is a negative one.

Try treating the last hours of your project better than your first. Treat those hours as a time to sell yourself and prove your worth. Look at it as a challenge where you want to prove to them that you are the best and they would be crazy not to invite you back. Give them a reason to say “man that guy was good”. When you see the finish line, sprint, do not walk.

Show me the money

So, an interesting part of consulting on your own is that you don’t get paid until your client pays you.  This can be stressful. All clients are different and not everyone pays on time.  Luckily, I have great clients, so that is not an issue (yet).  Although this month my first 2 checks got sent to the wrong address and returned.  Unexpected things like this keep you on your toes.  You better have some sort of nest egg to pay bills, just in case.

MF’n taxes

Taxes suck.  Oh man.  You don’t realize how nice it is to have an employer take care of this for you until it’s on you to do it.  I have a great CPA, but I still have to track and manage everything.  I just got done filling out my forms and writing checks for the Q2 taxes (due June 15).  I hate doing that stuff, it makes me physically sweat.  Damn that Uncle Sam.

Looking for more work

If I am not constantly looking for more work and maintaining/creating relationships, I’m up a creek and paddles are expensive.  No one else is going to help me line up work.  I probably spend 25-35% of my time in sales mode.  I don’t mind it, I actually quite like sales and meeting people.  But it is much different than just writing code all day on projects that someone else found for you.

Saving

With money in the bank, it’s tempting to spend it.  I am scared to death to spend money.  I want as much as humanly possible in the bank just in case a drought hits.  Maybe I’m a bit paranoid and anal, but it makes me feel better.  That means I am not buying the new nice office chair I want, or a new MacBook Pro that I want (but don’t need).  I drive an old beater pickup truck, and it would be nothing to trade it in for a $400/month car payment and put it in the company name.  But that is $400 I might need later.  Save your money.

So far, after a month out, I wouldn’t want it any other way.  I love solving problems for clients and meeting all kinds of new and interesting people.  If you’re thinking about taking the jump, I highly recommend it.  But you better have thick skin and brass balls.

I try to exercise empathy whenever I can.  This is not easy to do and not everyone can do it, but you can try.  It also requires a lot of experience so you can literally put yourself in your client’s shoes, take a step back, and try to help.  For example purposes, I’ll touch on 2 types of clients, small companies and big Fortune 1000 companies.

Small Business Clients

If you have ever tried to create a start-up, like I have here and here, you know how incredibly difficult and stressful it can be.  Everyone handles stress different.  If you are working on a project for a small start-up, every day is a new day.  One day can be fantastic and the next day the sky is literally falling and crushing the founders.  If you are going to do consulting work for small businesses, you have to understand that.  You have to be able to relate to their stress and empathize with it.  Understand that they cannot read your mind and they probably need a lot of reassurance and hand-holding.  I struggle with this, b/c sometimes it’s easier to say ‘screw it’ and walk away.  But if you really want to help people, try better to understand them.

Big Business Clients

Big business is much different.  When you consult on a project for a large company, it is your job to make the project owners look good.  Sure, you want to get the work done, and do it well, but there is a much more political angle that needs to be played as well.  Whoever is dealing with your project is also dealing with stress, just a different kind from the ‘how am I gonna pay bills’ stress that you get with start-ups.  Maybe they went out on a limb to get the project approved, and it is their ass on the line.  Maybe they want/need to get promoted, and this is their shot.  You need to understand the dynamics of the group you are in.  If someone is being a pain in the ass, try to understand the stress they may be dealing with, and try to help fix it.

It’s up to you to determine if it’s worth dealing with really difficult people.  I am also not saying you should put up with abusive people.  I will be the first to walk straight out the door if someone gets abusive.

Happy consulting!

Now that I am fully independent, I have a lot of thoughts and lessons that I would love to share.  Even if no one reads it, I figure it would be theraputic to write. I am not a writer at all, so it’s foreign to me. I was the kid in school who increased margins all over the page to make my papers appear longer.

The goal is once a week, so we will see how that goes!

Sunday (4/18/2010)

I was sitting with my wife, looking for Twitter usernames.  We need a couple usernames for some new products our startup is rolling out.  Trying to find a Twitter username is as frustrating as looking for a domain name.  Everything is taken and most logical combinations of everything is taken.  The worst part is, the names I want are created by people who havent tweeted since 2007, if at all. I was able to find something that sorta makes sense but it wasn’t ideal.

Monday (4/19/2010)

I was doing my daily tech news reading and ran across this article.  It talked about Twitter releasing deleted accounts in the upcoming weeks and eventually releasing inactive accounts.  This was perfect for me b/c we didn’t need our name right away and I want it to be right.  The only problem was Twitter was going to do this silently, so the only way you will know is to constantly check the site.  Monday night I figured I would write a service that ran on my laptop and would email me when one became available.

Tuesday (4/20/2010)

I woke up thinking that I could make this service available to other people.  I mean, surely I am not the only one with this problem.  I called up Blake, told him my thoughts, and he thought it sounded like a cool idea.  So I spent the morning writing the service.  I spend the afternoon writing the website (ugly as hell of course).  Tuesday night I met Blake at Barnes & Noble and we brainstormed and he came up with a very slick design for the website.  He also came up with a lot of great ideas on how we would use Twitter and blogs to advertise this thing.  This is his area and I have learned A LOT from him this last week.

Wednesday (4/21/2010)

I polished up some last few things on the site and pushed it out by 10am.  Blake and I hit Twitter and the blogs just like we talked about.  We got some action at first, but not a lot.  Then all of the sudden the registrations went crazy.  I was rushing to make sure everything stayed up and ran smoothly.  The server did fine and we had a few hiccups, but nothing I couldn’t fix pretty quick.  We figured out that the source of the spike was a ReadWriteWeb article that was written about our service.  That was extremely cool to see.  Twitter was blowing up with retweets and we were well on our way to 1000 users, which I never figured we would get.

Thursday (4/22/2010)

We got lots of great feedback so I spent thursday fixing bugs and making updates to the site.  Our registrations continued to grow but was slower than on wednesday.

Sunday (4/25/2010)

Fast forward to sunday.  After an awesome 6 hrs of yard work and landscaping, I was checking email and Twitter.  Not much activity and we were hovering around 1200 users.  Then within 5 minutes we blew up to over 1300.  I immediately called Blake to find the source of the traffic.  We couldn’t find a blog or a tweet that would cause the spike.  Blake mentioned that we could have been talked about on TWiT and it turns out he was right.  Leo mentioned our service around the 50 minute mark of TWiT 245.  Now that is really cool!

So we went from idea, to RWW, to being mentioned on TWiT within one week.  All by using the power of Twitter and blogs.  At the writing of this post we are right around 1500 users.  That is a pretty fun week!