i've grown from 1 (me) to 10 since october. we're trying to scale and it's tough. i'm exhausted. i'm working A LOT. i've got too many clients... but i can see the light toward having a stable set of clients with solid revenues - and i'm creating jobs for 10 people in a developing country, which i'm getting more satisfaction out of than i thought i would.
There is a curious form of homeostatis in consulting, where both "too many clients" and "I'm too tired" are signs that you are not charging enough money. You should charge more until they cease being problems.
The scary part about this advice is how freaking hard it is to actually chase away clients by raising prices, if you have a habit of delivering.
Rand Fishkin, whose SEO consultancy used to get up to $1k per hour (and was almost certainly underpriced given the class of client they worked for by the end), has a very instructive comment on the post about how they kept walking up rates without chasing anyone away. Basically, there is an unknown "true cost figure" in the client's mind which includes both your bill rate and risk of the project going totally haywire. As you lower the client's perception of risk, you can capture more of the "true cost" before getting "ugh, too high" feelings from the client.
great points - I totally know this. it's very helpful to hear. but... we've been growing so fast i haven't yet had a chance yet to raise them, and i'm paying the price of a fixed bid prjoject we took that was underpriced by about 50%. yet i don't regret the fixed bid because it helped us launch and we now have a killer client project to show for it.
Doing fixed-bid is another interesting angle I didn't cover; thanks for bringing it up!
It's yet another potential source of both great profitability (when you do something THEY think is hard in just 10 hours) or loss (as what you described).
I would like very much to go overseas with another competent, unwed developer or two, start a consulting company, and slowly build a good corporate culture by hiring the locals. Have you done a writeup on your experience?
About six months in now and I think it is going to work. Even in the middle of nowhere you can find good talent, one of my local devs is amazing, he'll be fantastic in six months and absolutely bad ass in five years.
Do it, it's fun, it's not that expensive and there is a huge need in these countries for people to come in and show how its done.
I believe www.mindvalley.com does something similar as they are located in Malaysia. I had an initial interview with them once and know a friend who worked for them. They pay quite low by US standards but charge as if they were in the US.
I m also interested in the same kind of career (spent the past 3 years in S.E Asia doing startup) so let me know when you make enough money&have nothing stopping you:)
