267: Handling Consulting Businesses and Client Loads Greater Than Code

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 workin