Archive for the 'work' category

Setting your rates II

Posted on June 11, 2009

I Meant to post this yesterday and just plain forgot, so I’ll try to get two out today to make up for it.

I got some feed back on my post the other day about setting rates. It’s an interesting topic to a lot of people. One of the questions it did bring up was how to deal with negotiating on rates, or specifically dealing with a customer that doesn’t want to pay what you’re asking.

I for one set out my rate at the start in a quote, explain that it’s competitive and that’s what it costs.

I’m open to negotiation if for example you’re offering me a couple of days a week for a month, few months or a year. It costs less to develop and maintain one relationship like that than the equivalent in smaller customers – even if it is putting more eggs than I may like into one basket.

If on the other hand it’s a couple of days then I’m going to be much more firm about my rates.

One strategy for getting paid what you should, and giving a customer a price they want is to determine the budget from the outset then structure a proposal around that. Once you’ve got a number, make sure you can deliver what they want, or negotiate on a cut down version, which you can deliver within their budget. If it’s design work, cut some of the revisions, base the design on a template of their choosing. For coding work cut some of the scope, remove one or two of the lest important requirements.

A lot of times you may just find “you’re too expensive” really means, “we can’t afford it” and there are a lot of great companies out there that aren’t just being cheap, even if that’s the way it may seem on the surface and they’d be more than willing to compromise on the scope to get it done properly within their budget. Then who knows, revisit the rest in a few months time.

Other times you just can’t meet in the middle, you can’t do the work in the time allowed by the budget but don’t give up – there might still be a deal you can both cut. Maybe they offer a service you’re currently paying for, or have staff that aren’t being fully utilised you can borrow. Trading your services for theirs isn’t a bad thing, you still get a client, word of mouth referrals, case studies, testimonials and add to your portfolio and you still get something in return for it. I’ve done this in the past and it’s always worked out well for me, in fact it’s probably lead to more work from and through that client than we could otherwise expect.

If all else fails, my advice is to walk away. It’s hard but the brutal truth is that you’re risking getting stuck in a working relationship where the other side doesn’t value your skills. In my experience that attitude extends right through into how they value your opinions and the result of your labours. To them what you produce is a commodity and they’re probably going for the cheapest quote they can find. Everyone has worked with people like this, it’s not fun and it’s almost never worth the money. In fact, my advice is run – don’t walk.

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What to charge

Posted on June 9, 2009

Lloyds TSB just announced they’re shutting down all C&G branches with loads of job losses. Though they said they were hoping to avoid compulsory redundancies with early retirement and by hiring less contractors.

So they’re not cutting jobs, except for contractors. Which is too bad for the contractors but brings up an important point if you are a contractor and you’re setting your rates.

You are responsible for your own job security and you have to charge for it. You don’t get holiday pay, you need to spend some of your time on the non billables that need to be done to operate, you won’t get a redundancy payment if through no fault of your own the company cuts your role in a cost savings exercise. You just don’t have a job.

There are various ways to mitigate the disaster and the best is probably to have as many customers as possible. The more you have the less the loss of one matters.

But you also need to be aware of the reality that you may lose customers when you set your rates. You need to bill for your desired salary + operating costs + expenses + some headroom for the time you aren’t doing billable work.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you want a £30,000 salary. You have operating costs for equipment, software, travel, expenses, taxes, accountants, rent, phones, internet etc; say £15,000/ year. Given 45 working weeks in a year, because you deserve holidays like everyone else and you’ll no doubt catch a cold or two at some point.

30,000 + 15,000 = £45,000/year MINIMUM turnover.
45,000/45 working weeks / 5 working days = £200/day

So if you want to earn a £30,000/year salary and you have enough work to keep you occupied every single day – you can afford to do it for about £200/day.

Let’s for a moment say you spend just one day a week on things you need to do, but you can’t bill a customer for directly - your accounts, taxes, your website, finding new customers, writing proposals, travelling to and from meetings, meetings, professional development.

That’s a rate £250/day and you still have absolutely no cushion. Lose a customer and even if it’s one day a month you’re not at capacity and you lose £3000 from your salary. If you lose a few or a big one and you’re idle a day a week – you’re out over £11,000!

Now if you want to build yourself in a cushion so that if you lose some work you’ve got money to eat while you spend time trying to get more customers, you need to up the rate. For the sake of argument let’s say you want to be able to eat working at 75% capacity if the times get lean and stay that way for a while. That means you need to be able to survive billing for 3 working days every week, so with the numbers above we get.

£45,000 / 45 working weeks / 3 working days = £333.33/day

Now in theory, working at capacity that would give you enough to pay yourself almost £45,000/year – but if you were smart and like the C&G contractors a major client suddenly pulled the rug out from under your feet, you’ve saved that and now have a good cushion going forward to find new customers. If they were 100% of your work, it could take sometime to build up that client base from scratch so the £15,000 really isn’t that much when you start to eat through it – literally.

Open Source for Business

Posted on June 8, 2009

I didn’t get this posted yesterday because the Internet crapped out in our area. Nothing but excuses, I know.

I’ve been working beyond the bleeding edge, using a version of the Nutch code that’s not even made it into the Apache SVN for the project yet. To celebrate the fact that my contributions will make it in I figure its a good time to get into open source and business.

To put it briefly, and as you can probably guess, I’m pro open source. I use it extensively and I push back as much as I can. When it comes to the most of the code I write there really isn’t much commercial benefit in keeping it hidden so it just makes sense to give back.

There are two types of business on the web, one where you provide a software service and that is the product and others where you provide access to data. It’s pretty easy to tell which camp you’re in.

37 Signals for example, they’re in the first and their software probably isn’t something they just want to let people download – unless they’re incredibly brave. Doing that would mean that they’d be competing on margins for the cheapest hosting, users would flock to the cheaper services, have a poor experience and blame the software.

Sproozi on the other hand is the second type, our data is what users mostly care about and we’re not planning to be precious about our code. I’ve already been pushing some of the changes I’ve made to Nutch back into the project and we’re planning open source projects of our own in the coming months.

One of our plans we have is to build iPhone, Andriod and other phone based applications for our service and release them as open source projects. We’re planning to write them (or have them written for us) and release ‘official’ versions. Then release that code as open source project to provide a framework for developers so that they can build great things from it and on our API.

If there are any experienced iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian or Pre developers out there that want to get involved, drop me a line were a ways off yet but would love to chat about it and get some very early feedback.

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GoRoam Realaunch

Posted on June 7, 2009

As some of you know already one day, real soon, we’re going to get around to relaunching goroam. We’re still doing most of the same consulting work we’ve been doing for a while but we want to focus the site and face of the company more on what we actually do.

We’re not web-designers, we’re not an advertising agency – We develop and research social strategies and products to improve engagement.

It sounds like a lot of marketing and buzz word bullshit but it boils down to the fact that people, companies and brands are realising that the web is so much more than a multimedia brochure. The simplistic metaphor you hear all the time is that it’s a conversation, it’s true. It’s just like a conversation. You have to give and take and you have to speak in a way that doesn’t make someone just want to walk away and avoid you in the future. Talking at someone doesn’t work in real life and it’s becoming less and less effective on the Internet.

I saw an interesting presentation by @mattseward from Kilo75 last weekend about conversations with customers and more generally how they try to develop relationships between brands and their customers. One of the questions that came out of the audience was whether people wanted to have conversations with all these brands. It’s a good question, but one that I think is slightly wide of the mark.

The thing is what most brands have to say isn’t terribly interesting to me, so I’m just not listening. Some though have a message which I find engaging and I do listen. 37 Signals is a good example – I use their products, I read their blog and I agree with their message and even pass it on.

How do you use the Internet to improve engagement? What tools work best and how do you use them? Get in touch, I’ll have more to say on this soon as we get closer and actually relaunch.

I did it again! I wrote this on the day I wanted to publish is, then just left it as a draft. I need to try harder, it’s only Day 7!

Submitted our 4IP application

Posted on June 5, 2009

We’ve submitted our 4IP application for sproozi, we finally decided that no matter how many hours, days or weeks we though about it and changed it, it was just changing- not getting better. So we sat down today and spent some time with it and sent it in.

Was it perfect? No. Was it good enough? Yes, I think so. It might not get us funding, but we can take it and build on it and send it to anyone else that will listen.

In the plan we said that we’re going to have a functional tech demo live for 1st July – so 1st of July check it out, it should work.

Javascript mapping abstraction

Posted on

One thing that occurred to me while I’ve been writing Sproozi is how tied to a mapping implementation I am and it’s something I’ve been thinking of starting a project to abstract the details away so that I could swap implementations whenever I liked.

A couple of things I wanted out of the API, the most important was to be able to do were switch from one implementation to another without loosing my markers or having to reload them. I really like that foot paths show up on the OSM maps.

Then I came across mapstraction – which looks very good. I’m checking it out to see if it meets my needs. I’ll let you know.

Whoops, for some reason this didn’t get posted yesterday. Must try harder.

Some more thoughts on coworking in Hebden Bridge

Posted on May 31, 2009

Spent this weekend at Bar Camp Leeds 2009, it was great. There were some good presentations and talks and I really enjoyed getting out and talking to other people in the digital and creative industries.

I’ve been working from home now for a couple of years and it’s sometimes easy to get caught up in a routine and to forget that part of things. It’s easy, despite all the blogs and twitter messages we – or at least I, constantly read- to forget that there are people nearby doing very similar things. In the case of Hebden Bridge, quite a few.

Getting out there and meeting people has really hit home the idea that I would find a coworking space in Hebden Bridge  immensely useful. I’ve been in touch with some of the people involved with the Town Hall project and the whole idea for the creative quarter they’ve got planned looks great. It’s probably a couple of years off though and what interests me most isn’t the building; it’s the community, collaboration and sharing of ideas.That’s something that can start without any funding, so I’ve been wondering what can be accomplished in the meantime.  Starting now also gives the Town Hall project the best social proof and traction for the concept possible.

So what’s next? I’m going to try and organise an open coffee, try to guage interest in making it regular, coworking and maybe even somewhere down the line try to start our own Hebden Bridge BarCamp or unconference, with it’s diverse make up I bet it would be something unique.

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Coworking in Heben Bridge or my office is soon going to be a bedroom!

Posted on May 17, 2009

My partner is mid way through her pregnancy, we’re expecting number two, so within the next year I’m going to need to find somewhere else to work. Even if we end up with two girls and they can share a room, I’m just not not sure it’s going to be practical to work from home with two young children. Even with just one I’ve been finding myself in the library more and more for the piece and quiet. Which got me to thinking about coworking and reaching out to see if there is anything in town or any interest in setting something up.

For a town of it’s size Hebden Bridge has a great artistic and creative community and more than it’s fair share of creative professionals; creatives, technologists, artists, designers, writer, journalists and programmers like me. It’s a great family town but a lot of the houses are fairly small. Perfect it would seem for a co-working setup.

I’ve sent some emails and posted on the HebWeb forums and so far there has been enough positive feedback that I’ll pursue it some more.

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Local business advertising

Posted on January 15, 2009

A large part of the assumptions we’re making with goroam are based around the idea that local business wants to capitalise on the Internet to bring in business. But it’s not easy. How do promote a book store, toy shop, cafe or plumber in your local area online, now imagine you have a books and toys to sell, coffees and tea to make or houses without hot water to help – in short, a full time job that doesn’t leave much time for SEO, SEM, analytics and tweaking a website and search advertising strategy.   

We’re not just pulling the assumption out of thin air though- helping local business market online is big business, Yodle’s 700% growth last year and $10M C round is a great example of this trend and from the techcrunch article, they’re not the only ones in the game. 

Yodle competes against a number of similar, venture-backed companies such as ReachLocal(which raised a substantial $65 million in funding to date), MerchantCircle (which raised its $10 million in Series B funding round in November 2007), Ingenio (acquired by AT&T, also in November 2007), WebVisible (total funding: $17 million) and a plethora of smaller companies trying to get their piece of the pie.

So we’ve got the social proof, now we just have to capitalise on it and bring something to market that makes it easy for small businesses to target their services at the people in their area who are interested. 

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What am I doing here?

Posted on December 23, 2008

I’m going to need to act with a little more purpose in the new year, I’ve been at the crossroads for a number of weeks and been distracted. Job loss, Christmas and all the fall out of the two kind of had me standing still. I wasn’t actually standing still, but I wasn’t anywhere near as productive as I should have been or as I’m used to being. Other things just got in they way, not the least of which was my the pursuit of more than just “see-ya, best of luck!” from my previous employer; an ongoing process, but now out of my hands so I can refocus on what is actually important.  

As a family we’re in a position to stave off the wolves until at least March. It won’t be necessarily the most comfortable standard of living, but we won’t have to move and we certainly wont starve – we’ll just have to cut out some luxuries. I’m actively looking for any bits of work we might get to quote for in the new year.

I’m also polishing up my CV over the holidays and I’ll be sending that out anywhere that looks like a good opportunity. I’m not sure how easy it’s going to be to replace the 2 1/2 days a week I worked for my previous employer though. So full time offers might be a tough call, and they’d depend on the progress we’re making with goroam and the position and the opportunity it offers. I wouldn’t expect a prospective employer  to back me any less than 100%, so I couldn’t in good faith take a job unless I could give them the same. 

In the meantime I’m working on goroam’s newest project. A local search and exploration application, we’ve been working on the goals for a few months now (as I said above, I’ve been a bit distracted, so it’s been a lot of talk), and I think we’ve got a pretty good idea of where we’re going. I’ve enlisted the help of a friend a fellow coder to give me a hand getting it out the door with some evening and weekend work in his spare time. I’ve finished most of the user management stuff and started wireframimg up the core pages and they’re really coming together well.  I think I’m going to start posting details as they emerge and we’ll be running an open beta as soon as enough features come together for a release. 

Basically I’m doing everything I can to make sure I don’t run out of money in the new year, and everything I can to protect myself against the loss of earnings from loosing the major part of my income. If anyone out there knows of any work going, drop me a line: andrew[dot]mccall[at]goraom[dot]net – we do bespoke coding, maintenance and web projects in a number of languages from PHP, ASP to Java. 

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