[consulting] Business questions

[Henri Poole]

On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 17:30 -0600, Larry Garfield wrote:
> 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?
> 
Most of our clients come in from referrals. We're also on several lists,
including non-profit tech lists and we will respond to RFP (Request for
Proposals) when they seem interesting.

Most of the clients don't have a strong opinion on what kind of
technology we use to build their systems, although we do get a number of
clients who know and want Drupal or CiviCRM.

> 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"?
> 
We offer support to almost all of our clients.  We bill hourly, although
we do offer hosting with a limited amount of technical support included,
mostly related to security upgrades.

> 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)?

We bill by the hour. We estimate the time to enhance modules and create
new modules for the project. When possible, we also estimate time it
takes to submit the enhancements back to the community. We present this
as a useful investment for the client, because it makes upgrading less
expensive and opens up the opportunity for them to get the benefit of
other community enhancements.

> 
> Cheers!
> 
> --Larry Gafield
> 
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