In these economic times where contracts are drying up and clients are looking to outsource most of their work to remote teams. One aspect is definitely cost to execute Drupal projects and second is Size of the proejcts. Some large Drupal projects just need a bigger workforce that not every shop has.<br>
<br>It is interesting that you bring up a point that clients don't pay. I am sure everyone has experienced that while working remotely and I have earlier also stated that it would help the community if such clients are listed. I had one very large Travel Industry client which did not pay a huge chunk of our services. At one point of time, we had 16 developers working on that project. I later came to know that the same client also had not paid the previous development firm of another big chunk.<br>
<br>Whenever I come across such incidents, we tighten up our contracts that includes clients signing on clauses that state that we have right to publicize their payment defaults in public domain and also take ownership of domain and/or resell code to make up the losses if they do not pay up on any "undisputed invoice amounts" after 90 days. We easily walk away from projects where clients don't agree on these. In few cases where clients did not respond, I just highlighted these clauses and they then paid up. <br>
<br>I think clients are getting smart by knowing that Open Source projects have smaller dollar value and no one will bother to go for litigation. They take this to their advantage and dupe individuals and companies of money. We just have to realize this and tighten our side of things. <br>
<br>Again it would be great if such clients who default on payments are listed somewhere so other shops are extra cautious.<br><br>As far as finding work is concerned, best is networking. Then its <a href="http://drupal.org">drupal.org</a> paid services, <a href="http://drupal.org">drupal.org</a> groups, linked-in groups and job posts, orkut groups, facebook groups, twitter updates, craigslists as well as partnering and teaming up with other interactive agencies with complementary skills to sell Drupal solutions to clients.<br>
<br>We have automated a lot of our pre-sales activities by writing tools that automate pre-sales email marketing.<br><br>It is very important to qualify and quantify a lead. For us startup and shutdown costs for smaller projects are too high. We pass on such smaller projects to our subsidiary OpenKick Technologies which is more of our Drupal training arm with Jr. Developers hired through the training program. <br>
<br>Another thing which we learnt after running across payment defaults is is we always take advance on fixed price projects. We develop the code on our staging environment and only delivery when we have 70% of the money paid up. Client has to pay balance 30% within 30 days.<br>
<br>For clients who have signed up dedicated resources for ongoing work with OpenKick division, we do monthly billing and haven't come across any issues on that side yet.<br><br>With over 80 Drupal projects, we see a common thing at least on the bigger projects. The last 1% of Drupal development takes another 99% of effort and most of this is usability related improvements that are thrown at later stages. Most clients don't know Drupal that well and assume certain things to work in a certain way. We had to spend a lot of time in training and consulting them on how certain things are done in Drupal and it was difficult to bill for such hours. We then put a cap in our proposals that upto 10 hours of training/consulting on Drupal will be provided and we assumed that client has basic knowledge of how Drupal works. <br>
<br>Every day we learn new things in business and we put controls in place not to repeat the same mistakes.<br> <br>Roshan<br>--<br>Gloscon Solutions Inc - <a href="http://www.gloscon.com/portfolio">http://www.gloscon.com/portfolio</a><br>
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permanently destroy this email and all copies of it. <br>***************************************************************<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 12:21 AM, Sam Alexander <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:sam.polenta@gmail.com">sam.polenta@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><p>To respond to the thread about quitting the day job to freelance, I could also add that I have been freelancing for 10 years and aside from the issues mentioned, there are two which, for me at least, are prime. One is getting work and the other is getting paid.</p>
<p>Getting paid is usually not an issue, but I have had several clients over the years who failed to pay. Not only complete deadbeats who never paid anything but I twice had long-term gigs where I was basically telecommuting part time for someone (a small firm) and after a year, or 3 years in one case, of steady pay, the last month's paycheck never came. While this is not a major issue (in the long run), it *is* an issue.</p>
<p>The other is finding work. I am a good programmer and I know Drupal well, but I am a lousy salesman. People who can read my resume and appreciate my talents are happy to pay me a very good hourly rate. But for others who don't have an understanding of programming, I think they wonder why on earth should they give me such a rate when some other bozo is only asking for $30 an hour and he also claims to know how to program.</p>
<div>On the same note, I wanted to ask people if anyone has any advice on how to get new work. This is for sure my weakest point. This year has actually been, thus far, very good for me--a few small gigs here and there and two fairly large gigs which pay on time and are interesting work for me--and all at a good rate. But those two gigs are slowing down and ending soon and I am looking for more work, but, as usual, not entirely sure how to find it.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Thanks,</div>
<div>Sammy</div>
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