00:36 - Panelist Consulting Experience and Backgrounds

• Debugging Your Brain by Casey Watts


• Happy and Effective

10:00 - Marketing, Charging, and Setting Prices

• Patreon


• Chelsea’s Blog


• Self-Worth by Salary

28:34 - GeePawHill Twitter Thread - Impact Consulting

• Casey’s Spreadsheet - “Matrix-Based Prioritization For Choosing a Job”


• Interdependence

38:43 - Management & Mentorship

• Detangling the Manager: Supervisor, Team Lead, Mentor


• Adrienne Maree Brown

52:15 - Explaining Value and Offerings

• The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field by Mike Michalowicz


• User Research


• SPIN Selling: Situation Problem Implication Need-payoff by Neil Rackham
  

55:08 - Ideal Clients

Reflections:

Mae: The phrase “indie”.

Casey: Having a Patreon to help inspire yourself.

Chelsea: Tallying up all of the different things that a given position contributes to in terms of a person’s needs.

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Transcript:

CHELSEA: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 267. I'm Chelsea Troy, and I'm here with my co-host, Mae.

MAE: And also with us is Casey.

CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey.

And today's episode, we are our own guests. We're going to be talking to you about our experiences in consulting.

To get this one started, how about we share what got us into consulting and what we like, don't like about it, just high-level?

Chelsea, would you mind going first?

CHELSEA: Sure.

So I started in consulting, really in a full-time job. So for early in my programming career, I worked for several years for a company called Pivotal Labs and Pivotal Labs is chiefly, or was chiefly at the time, a software engineering consulting organization.

My job was to pair program with folks from client teams, various types of clients, a lot of health insurance companies. At the time, there was a restaurant loyalty app that we did some work for. We did some work for General Motors, various clients, a major airline was also a client, and I would switch projects every three to six months. During that time employed by Labs, I would work for this client, pair programming with other pivots, and also with client developers.

So that was my introduction to consulting and I think that it made the transition to consulting later, a little bit easier because I already had some consulting experience from under the Labs’ umbrella.

After I worked for Labs, I moved on to working at a product company for about 2 years and my experience at that product company burned me out on full-time programming for a little while.

So in my last couple of months at that job, I realized that I was either going to have to take some time off, or I was going to have to find an arrangement that worked better for me for work, at least for the next little while. And for that next little while, what I decided I wanted to try to do was work part-time because I was uncomfortable with the idea of taking time off from programming completely. I felt that I was too early in my career and the skill loss would be too great if I took time off completely, but I knew I needed some space and so, I quit my full-time job.

After I quit the full time—I probably should have done this before I quit the job, but I didn't—I called an organization that I had previously done some volunteer work with, with whom I discussed a job a couple of years prior, but for a couple of different reasons, it didn't work out. I said to them, “I know that you're a grant-funded organization and you rarely have the funding and capacity to bring somebody on, but just so you're aware, I like working with you. I love your product. I love the stuff that you work on. All our time working together, I've really enjoyed. So if you have an opening, I'm going to have some time available.” The director there emailed me that same day and said, “Our mobile developer put in his two weeks’ notice this morning. So if you have time this afternoon, I'd really like to talk to you,” [chuckles] and that was my first client and they were a part-time client.

I still work with them. I love working with them. I would consider them kind of my flagship client. But then from there, I started to kind of pick up more clients and it took off from there after that summer. I spent that summer generally working 3 days a week for that client and then spending 4 days a week lying face down in a park in the sun. That helped me recover a little bit from burnout.

And then after that, I consulted full-time for about 2 years and I still consult on the side of a full-time job. So that's my story.

Is anyone feeling a penchant for going next?

MAE: I can go. I've been trying to think how am I going to say this succinctly. I've had at least two jobs and several club, or organization memberships, or founding, or positions since I was 16. So wherever I go, I've always been saying, “Well, I've done it these 47 ways already [laughs] even since I was a teenager.” So I've sort of always had a consulting orientation to take a broader view and figure out ways in which we can systematize whatever it is that's happening around me.

Specifically for programming, I had been an administrator, like an executive leader, for many years. I just got tired of trying to explain what we as administrators needed and I just wanted to be able to build the things. I was already a really big Microsoft access person and anybody who just got a little [laughs] snarky in there knows I love Microsoft Access. It really allowed me to be able to offer all kinds of things to, for example, I was on the board of directors of my Kiwanis Club and I made a member directory and attendance tracker and all these things.

Anyway, when I quit my executive job and went to code school in 2014, I did it because I knew that I could build something a lot better than this crazy Access database [laughs] that I had, this very involved ETL things going on in. I had a nonprofit that I had been involved with for 15 years at that point and I had also taken a database class where I modeled this large database that I was envisioning.

So I had a bunch of things in order. I quit my full-time job and went to an income of $6,500 my first year and I hung with that flagship customer for a while and tailored my software. So I sort of have this straddling of a SaaS situation and a consulting situation. I embed into whoever I'm working with and help them in many ways. Often, people need lots of different levels of coaching, training, and skills development mixed with just a place to put things that makes sense to them.

I think that's the brief version [laughs] that I can come up with and that is how I got where I am and I've gone in and out of also having a full-time job. Before I quit that I referenced the first year I worked a full-time job plus at least 40 to a 100 hours on my software to get it ready for prime time. So a lot of, a lot of work.

CASEY: Good story. I don't think I ever heard these fuller stories from either of you, even though I know roughly the shape of your past. It's so cool to hear it. Thanks for sharing them.

All right, I'll share about me now.

So I've been a developer, a PM, and I've done a lot of design work. I've done all the roles over my time in tech. I started doing programming 10, 15 years ago, and I'm always getting burnt out everywhere I go because I care so much and we get asked to do things that seem dumb. I'm sure anyone listening can relate to this in some organization and when I say dumb, I don't use that word myself directly. I'm quoting a lot of people who would use that word, but I say either we're being asked to do things that don't make sense, aren't good ideas, or there are things that are we're being asked to do that would make sense if we knew why and it's not being communicated really well. It's poor communication. Either one, the other, or both.

So after a lot of jobs, I end up taking a 3-month sabbatical and I'm like, “Whatever,