[Asterisk-biz] A question about ethics, I suppose

[Greg Boehnlein]

On Sun, 22 May 2005, Robert Wolpov wrote:

[DELETED]

> Unfortunately (for hourly based consultants) 9 out of 10 clients will ask 
> for more than they want to pay!  This is why you need formal payment terms 
> before the work is done!

At some point in the growth of your consulting business, you may want to 
approach clients with the idea of a "retainer" or a "pre-paid agreement". 
This is usually handled after a couple of jobs to ensure to the client 
that you are an upstanding and valuable vendor who follows through. In our 
organization, we sell blocks of consulting time to our clients that are 
valid for a year. This makes it incredibly easy to work with clients, as 
they have the flexibility of deciding how exactly their time is to be 
used. What we usually find is that instead of us having to throw them an 
extra few hours, they are very concious of what they ask us to do and 
provide us with a detailed list of work when they schedule the consulting 
time. It makes the work smoother and they are happier.

If we need to send out a sub-contractor who is an expert (I.E. a CCIE, or 
some expensive proprietary person) the clients know that we'll bill that 
contractor's time against their block at 1.5 or 2.0 hours depending on the 
rate of the consultant.

If the client requests after-hours work, we bill at 1.5 hours against 
their block. If they request emergency priority in our processing queue 
and want immediate dispatch, we charge 2.0 hours for every onsite hour.

This system has proven to be very flexible for us, and while it takes 
clients a bit to understand and grasp it, they invariably are happier with 
it. Those clients that aren't interested in a retainer type relationship 
are required to pay 65% of the job cost up front and the balanc at 
completion.

We've been working under this system for about 8 of the 10 years we have 
been in business and it works well. I'm sure there are clients that we 
do not touch because of our requirements, but then again I do not think we 
would have the resources to deal with them anyway, or that our prices 
would be out of their range. On many occasions, we have passed jobs down 
to smaller consulting firms that are a little more liberal. This lets the 
customer know that we are still trying to find a solution for them, even 
though we do not service them directly, and the smaller firms appreciate 
it and occasionally bring big fish to the table. It is a good arrangement 
for everyone.

-- 
    Vice President of N2Net, a New Age Consulting Service, Inc. Company
         http://www.n2net.net Where everything clicks into place!
                             KP-216-121-ST