[consulting] Business questions

[Larry Garfield]

Hi all.  I've a few questions for the various Drupal consulting shops out there that I hope is appropriate here.  (I'm sure I'll get smacked down if not. <g>)  While I'm interested in the answers myself I figure they could be useful to others, or at least interesting to compare.

How do you get most of your clients?  Do they come to you asking for a Drupal solution specifically, or do they come asking for a web solution and you sell them on Drupal?

Since Drupal is open source with a strong community behind it, how do you handle warranty support for a site?  Do you offer support yourself, or do you fall back on "there's a community, use it"?

If you have to build a completely new module for a site, or make significant changes to an existing module, how do you handle billing the client for that time?  How many places bill hourly vs. flat rate?  Do you include "submitting and refining" time for patches (contrib or core)?

Cheers!

--Larry Gafield