Consulting Archives - Glenn Stovall

Finding Development Leads, and Niching Down: Reader Question

Recently I received these questions from a reader: What has been your best method for lead generation as a programmer? Please tell me a bit more about this in detail if possible because this is the most important question I wanted to ask you. Do you target only a specific niche? My Answer: How To […]

Why I’m Quitting Freelancing

After a second full-time stint, I’ve decided to seek full-time employment opportunities. I’ve had a few people ask me why I’ve made this switch, so here’s my reason why. First, to clarify: I don’t mean to put freelancing as a profession or those who make that career choice on blast. I have plenty of friends […]

Win Clients With Robots: Marketing Automation for Consultants

A few weeks back a reader asked: Where should consultants start with marketing automation? I wanted to take a second to answer this. Here’s the challenge consultants face: working to relationships based business. You want to be efficient without being robotic. How can you put systems in place that make you more effective without turning clients off? Most of the times, […]

What Did The Contractor Say to the Consultant?

There are three terms used for a technical service professional, often interchangeably: contractor, freelancer, and consultant. Let’s put a more specific point on it. Contracting… is the closest to employment. As a contractor, you are effectively an employee that doesn’t get benefits or pay payroll taxes. Engagements are often months in length, and 40 hours/week. […]

Who Do You Serve? Defining Positioning

The first problem any service business needs to solve is deciding who they are going to serve. Being a generalist makes marketing harder. If you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one. Other consultants Philip Morgan and Jonathan Stark advocate for what they call the fool-proof positioning statement: I help $TargetCustomer solve $expensiveProblem. Unlike […]

6 Places You Can Look For RFPs

Are requests for proposals a trap? It’s debatable. Some agencies and consulting make a lot of cash from some large clients. Others spend hours writing proposals and don’t make any progress. If you want to try your hand at winning RFPs, here are some sites you can check out: CommBuys Mirren Ariba Find RFP RFB […]

How To Use Pipedrive to Close More Sales

Many sales conversations go nowhere. It’s frustrating and like it’s a waste of time. How often do you start a conversation with a potential client, only to have them ghost you after two emails? Having a process to follow up and start new discussions helps alleviate this problem. I use Pipedrive to keep track of this, […]

Process Documentation: The First Step to Eliminating Tedious Work

Looking for ways to spend less time doing parts of your job that you hate? You have three options: Eliminate. Delegate. Automate. I’m a minimalist. I like to take a Marie Kondo approach in business and life. Tasks get on out plate more quickly than they get off, and we don’t always stop to reflect […]

How to Constructively Handle Clients Who Want Quotes Yesterday

Asking “how much will a website cost?” is like asking “how long is a rope?” or “how much is a house?”. But the client might not know that. They’ll want a quote in the first 5 minutes of talking to you. How do you respond to these requests? Definitely not with a price. Setting a […]

How do You Create a Portfolio Before You Have Clients?

Clients buy based not on what you can potentially do, but what you have already done. A portfolio showcases previous accomplishments, but if you’ve been doing work for a company, you may have an NDA or non-compete clause in your contract preventing you from showing off your work. Having a portfolio reduces the risk of hiring […]

Overcome the Fear of Transitioning to Full Time Freelance

Have you considered quitting your job and becoming a freelancer? Has your startup shut down and now you are forced to consider becoming a freelancer to pay rent? Going out on your own is a scary proposition, but the rewards are worth it:

How to Raise Your Rates with Existing Clients

Every Freelancer I Know(Myself Included) Made The Same Mistake Starting Out: Charging Too Little Maybe it’s because they didn’t have experience. Maybe it’s because they thought the formula was rate = salary rate / 2000. They didn’t consider all the overhead and liability of being an independent business owner. The Good Ones Wise up. They […]

Increase Retainer Profitability Using Assets

One way of selling retainers to clients is what I call the “cell phone plan retainer”: A client pays you $X,XXX dollars a month, and you work for up to XX hours that month. In effect, you are pre-selling a bank of hours. This approach comes with tradeoffs: You get recurring revenue, and your client […]

When Should You Write a Proposal for a Potential Client?

I once spent six hours putting together an in-depth project proposal with a $20,000 price tag, only to hear the client respond “I was thinking more like $500.” It stings when you put hours into a proposal, only to get turned down, or figure out the client is a dud.

Cut Unpaid Hours with a Streamlined Proposal Process

It’s inevitable that every client project comes with unbillable hours. You have to talk to the client, assess their needs, and put together a proposal. If you’re not careful, proposals can be a real time sink. Your proposal has to do a lot of work. It has to:

On Gross Potential Income and F*** You Money

Pre-S Warning: This week’s post contains crass language. If kids are nearby, you may want to cover their ears.

Breaking Out Of The Bad Client Cycle

Working with bad clients puts your business in a vicious cycle. You start out meeting with a client that sets off your Spidey sense a little. You need to pay rent this month, so you agree to the work against your better judgement. You end up working with a client that belittles you, doesn’t trust, […]

Reduce Scope Creep with This One Question

Scope creep is inevitable in software projects. But that doesn’t mean that all scope creep is inevitable. When a client asks you for functionality that wasn’t in the original spec, why are they asking for changes? There can be several causes.

Is Freshbooks The Right Invoicing Software For You?

To get paid promptly, you need to send invoices promptly. And if you are billing hourly, then untracked time leads to uninvoiced work. Freelancing is hard enough without you taking money out of your pocket.

How to Create A Developer Portfolio When You Can’t Show Your Work

It can be difficult to stand out from the crowd of other developers, especially when a potential employer can post a job posting online and have dozens of proposals from developers overseas offering to do the same job at sub-minimum wage prices. How can you compete?

How Do You Deal With a Meeting-Happy Client?

Do you have a client that wants to meet all the time, and for countless hours? Sometimes clients want to meet daily or will call you with no particular agenda in mind. How can you reduce these interruptions?

Places to Find Work Besides Upwork and Freelancer.com

How to you find quality clients on freelance marketplaces like Upwork and Freelancer.com? Getting quality client work on these sites is nearly impossible. When an average Day Job in India pays as little as $0.65/hour, then doing web development online from the comfort of their home is a dream job. How can you compete?

Why You Should Charge Flat Project Rates

There are two modes of billing you have probably used or considered using as a freelancer: Billing by the hour, or billing with flat project rates. There are other options, such as billing by the day, the week, or setting up recurring monthly retainer arrangements. It’s my opinion that you should most definitely not be […]

13 Lessons Learned From Consulting In 2015

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to create more valuable content in the coming year. In addition to my annual post-mortem, I wanted to share some of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned throughout the year so that you can apply them to your own bootstrapped or creative service business.

A Guaranteed Strategy to Get Your First Clients

Getting clients as a freelancer is like a catch-22 problem. If you ask other freelancers how they find clients, they typically say “word of mouth” or “referrals.” How are you supposed to get referrals without previous work? Getting started seems impossible. If you are thinking about starting a freelance business, you need to be proactive […]

How to Survive Feast or Famine Cash Flow

One part of the freelancing puzzle I haven’t solved yet is keeping cash flow stable. Here’s a lifetime graph of my revenue, month, by month: There’s a lot of peaks and valleys. Good clients, bad clients, late payments, upfront payments. Sales slumps. Family emergencies. It’s all there. About a year after I became a freelancer, […]

What I Learned at the Double Your Freelancing Conference

I just got back from the first annual Double Your Freelancing Conference, and I haven’t felt this exhausted and excited in some time. I met so many great people and listened to informative talks by some brilliant speakers. Instead of getting into individual tactics and strategies, I thought it’d be more beneficial to you to […]

A 9-Step Content Process That Will Grow Your Business

People have probably told you that two things every business should be doing is generating content and building a list. The problem with this advice is that it usually comes wit no “how” or a “why”. Writing content as a marketing strategy is a slow burn with abstract benefits. But a solid strategy can bring […]

2014 Post Mortem

Every Year I take a look back at my business, and do the same exercise I do with every client project: a postmortem. I ask myself 3 questions: What went well? What went wrong? What steps should I take in the future? This is a valuable writing exercise, and I’d strongly encourage you to do […]

The Only 3 Numbers That Matter to a Freelancer’s Bottom Line

And 5 Tips to Improve Each One The end of the year will be here soon. It’s a time to reflect on how the past year went, and plan for the next year. Three numbers determine your bottom line. By understanding these numbers, you will know what metrics you need to move to get the […]

5 Ways to Build a $200,000 Consultancy

I recently read an article entitled five ways to build a $100 million dollar business. It discusses different business models that vary in the number and size of your customer base. Some businesses work with a few enterprise scale clients while others work with a larger number of smaller customers. Patrick Mackenzie mentioned on Twitter […]

Why Multiple Packages in Your Proposals Instantly Increase Conversions

The 3 Tiered Approach That Closes More Sales When a freelancer submits a proposal, they will often only include one offer. They will set the deliverable, and the price, and throw their proposal over the wall. When you do this, you give the client a binary option: Hire you or don’t. By giving the client […]

How I Used Writing to Double My Freelancing Rate As a Programmer

When I left my job to become a freelance programmer, I was charging $50/hr in the beginning. I met other freelancers, consultants, and agencies in town, and a few of them charged $150/hr. Even the agency that I had worked at previously billed my time at $120/hr, which means that my level of programming […]

10 Resources That Shaped My Career

There is amazing amount of resource available on the internet if you know where to look. I’ve realized that over the past year, there are some articles, pod casts, books, or videos that have had a huge impact on my view and approach to my business. I’ve had several people ask me how I came […]