[consulting] Freelancing, Finances and Finding Work

[Roshan Shah]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Again it would be great if such clients who default on payments are listed
somewhere so other shops are extra cautious.

As far as finding work is concerned, best is networking. Then its
drupal.orgpaid services,
drupal.org 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.

We have automated a lot of our pre-sales activities by writing tools that
automate  pre-sales email marketing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every day we learn new things in business and we put controls in place not
to repeat the same mistakes.

Roshan
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Gloscon Solutions Inc - http://www.gloscon.com/portfolio
* Drupal and Ruby on Rails Powerhouse
Skype : bpocanada
T : 604.630.4292 (Canada)
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On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 12:21 AM, Sam Alexander <sam.polenta at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
> 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.
>
> Thanks,
> Sammy
>
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