Daniel: So we’re here today to talk about, “How do I come up with a price for client engagements? If I’m a consultant, an individual contractor, et et cetera.” And Steve, I believe you have a story to give us some guidance on that. Steve: Well a little while back I was looking for a designer, like thousands of people do. In my case, I was looking for a high end designer, somebody that’s up there, at kind of the enterprise level of the expertise. I had two constraints, and three requests. Two constraints were, no change to the layout, and no change to the text, or the written information that we had, which was pretty severe. We were looking to change stock photos, and looking for recommendations on the color palette. And, recommendations for fonts. So, I found a designer whom I was enamored with. Loved her work, thought it was a great fit, and so I’m all excited to reach out to her, “Yes, yes, we can talk.” And, we get into the conversation, you know, the usual exchanges. And after I’d explained what we were looking for, just kind of a recap of what I said in an email, the question which came back was, “What’s your budget?” Microphone drop. I was crushed. “I don’t know what my budget is, that’s why we’re talking.” Now, let me be clear, she’s a very professional designer. She’s got a lot of experience with enterprise clients. But I didn’t … It just killed the flow of the conversation, and I was feeling the uncertainty of, “Well, you know, now I’ve got to kind of figure it out and this isn’t my expertise. I don’t know what stuff costs, that’s why we’re talking. I need advice, I need guidance.” It really stopped, full stop in the conversation. I’m thinking, “How do we do this?” ‘Cause I was still interested in her. But it told me a lot that, she doesn’t really know how to launch this kind of a project when there’s a lot of uncertainty. And so, we talked through it, and kept dancing around it for two or three more loops. And she did finally come around. We’d almost given up on each other, and she finally came around, and she did what attorneys did. And I didn’t think of this, but as soon as she said it, it made sense. What attorneys do when it’s kind of an open ended project is they’ll say, “Listen. To get started, my retainer is this much.” And hers was pretty hefty. It was a few thousand dollars. But it made sense, relative to the quality of work that she does. And that’s how she reconciled the uncertainty. She said, “Listen, if you do … We can launch with this retainer, and then from then on we can chunk it up with payments for pieces of work.” So that’s how we managed to resolve the question, but holy smokes, there for in the middle of the conversation, that was tough. Daniel: Yeah, I’ve seen this a lot actually. And I think your point is that we need to be able to lead clients. It’s us that needs to step up to lead the clients to a pricing model that matters, or that matches. Even in the face of uncertainty. I work with another company that’s recently redefined their pricing models, and they’ve kind of cracked this nut. For them, they listen to the nature of what the client needs, and they offer either a project fee for a one time project. It’s best when there’s a very defined need, and a very defined time frame. Or, they offer a subscription fee for a recurring thing when they’re defining needs. But, there is a recurring defining time frame also, like monthly. And then, when there are undefined needs, the needs are unclear. It could be a variety of different things we need over time, we’re not sure yet. And perhaps and undefined time frame, it’s sort of,

Daniel: So we’re here today to talk about how long does it take to get new clients, or if you have a couple of clients as an independent consultant, then how long to get more clients? And Steve, I think you have a story that’ll help us unpack this today. Steve: I do. I’m an ex-airline guy. Not a pilot, but was involved in just about everything else on the ground, and that included some time at airports. Now the interesting thing at airports, for those of us who have been hooked into the business and loved it, is this orchestration of roles and the way everyone works together to get the flights going out and usher them in and so forth. That’s the context in which we as airport managers would hire people in or, for example, transfer in from other airports, and I wanted to talk about that decision. When we were doing it, it was very easy to establish, this is what the role is, customer service agent. You are going to be doing primarily boarding, and it was easier for the person who was putting in for the job to understand what the expectations were. So we had clarity on both sides, and therefore, even though it’s an important job, pretty fast decision. That’s the way we did it, because everything was all clear. Not only did the day-of operations go smoothly, but those kinds of transfer in and out decisions also were pretty smooth and fast. Daniel: I actually find, yeah, that’s kind of a feature of having a regular W-2 job. You have a defined job description and everybody sort of knows what the role is, whether it’s butcher, baker, candlestick maker, pilot, ticket counter person, it’s like Legos. There’s a clearly defined job description so you can pull them out and drop them in, but Steve, when I went out into the independent consulting field, one of the first things I discovered was while I went out there to add value, and that process of adding value over and above what people could attain interacting with W-2 employees in a company, was more elaborate. It was more complex than what that company offered. My value was more difficult to explain, and so it was not so easy to treat me like a Lego, and just drop me into a spot. Oh, you need a new ticket clerk, I’m a ticket clerk. So I had to even invent job titles for myself or invent descriptions in elevator pitches that were as short as I could get them to try to convey that value and win clients. I think that may be part of what you’re touching on, is it’s really easy when, “Oh, you’re a pilot. I need a pilot.” It’s harder when you’re more like, I’m an HRIS systems consultant who specializes in X, Y and Z. Steve: Yeah. That’s really what I’m trying to say. I gave almost an unfair example of the fastest decisions happen and our basis for comparison is in the regular world of work, traditional employment. Once we’re out in the wild as an independent consultant, there’s a little less clarity at least in the eyes of a prospective client. And so yeah, it only goes up from there in the way that you described. In my case, we all do several different things, and a couple of the things that I do, on the one hand, I’m a software implementation consultant, so there’s a particular software app that I work on in time and attendance for very large clients, but that is a role that several people in our community who need this work, it’s very clear to them, and so often even though it’s advanced consulting work, often clients, once they have a need, they understand what I can do and those decisions happen, again, very fast. But the bulk of my work as a solution architect and also when I do a workforce agility assessment, some people say “What? What is that?” And so that’s a much longer discussion, and it doesn’t happen in any timeframe that is similar to the story that I gave,

Daniel: So we’re here today to talk about the side hustle, and people talk about the side hustle but if you’ve never done it, how specifically does it work? And Steve, I believe you have a story to start us off. Steve: Yes. This is a story about a guy who went from working small jobs on the side by himself to pitching corporate clients as a team and having nearly $40,000 in the bank, all the while keeping his regular job. So let’s call him George, as in George Jetson. He had a regular full time job in the IT department of a well known large company. I met him while I was working on a project there, and the thing which connected us, why we were both on the same project, is we had experience in the employee time system that we were implementing there. And it turns out, we had both worked for that software company in the past at the same time, in the past, but we didn’t realize it. We didn’t know each other until we met on this project. Well I had a problem while I was working on this particular job, and it was that I had a client on the side who needed a system administrator to implement this app. This is a smaller client than the full time project that I was on, and I knew that George had experience in this app. And the client really didn’t need somebody full time, they needed somebody part-time, and I didn’t have the system administrator skills that they needed to install the software. So one day over lunch, George starts telling me about some of his own side hustle gigs. I didn’t know he did that. He does some software development on the side, he does a little one on one training for up and coming programmers, and all of a sudden for me, bingo. George is really doing side hustles now, side hustle jobs, and he had the mindset for it. So, I tell him about my client, and my pain, what am I’m gonna do? How am I gonna find a system administrator? And so I just hit him with the question. “Would you be willing to set up server environments for this client on the side?” Here’s the rub, it would probably take a day or two initially to get the environments up, which is kind of a big hit, but everything after that is pretty easy, not urgent, one to three hours at a time, pretty flexile. Man he didn’t hesitate. He was totally up for it. Now the interesting thing is, he ended up working for this client for about three years. On and off, small requests, things like that. And he and I went on to pitch other clients doing the same thing, and I remember looking at what he had earned on the side after that three year period. I just happened to be looking one day. Turns out he had pulled in about $120,000 over a three year period, all while maintaining his day job. Daniel: Well you know it’s interesting, I listen to that story Steve, there are a few things we can kind of extract from it in the way of sort of best practices for initiating a side hustle. And so, you might say that number one is, start your consulting practice on the side before you leave your job, obviously then you’ve got a source of revenue, you’re not jumping without a net. Number two might be to get comfortable with that feeling of working on the side over time. Number three might be looking for businesses who only need you part-time, obviously don’t need 40 hours a week. And fourth is get that first small engagement and get started. But I wanna ask you if, do you think that’s right, and also what does it take to really get comfortable with the feeling of working on the side, you know, what does that mean, since that’s kind of an open ended concept? Steve: Those are all right, those steps. And to get comfortable, I think you have to have kind of a hunger. A hunger for more independence, “I’m gonna do what it takes to develop my own endeavors, my own professional freedom,

Daniel DiGriz: So we’re here today to talk about whether or not it’s unethical or at least ethically dubious to work on the side when you have an employer, especially if you don’t tell your employer. And Steve, I believe that you have a thing or two to say about that. Steve Pruneau: Since today’s all about the ethics of the side hustle or what used to be called moonlighting, brought me back to the TV show. It really got me thinking about what is it that has this lingering feeling in many of us of, we should be loyal to, we should commit to, the company. Where did it start? And I think a lot of it starts in the interview with questions that sort of probe around what kind of personal sacrifice can you make? How dedicated will you be? For example, scheduling, travel, after hours work, all the things related to, what am I going to commit? What can you do for Steve? So somehow the socialization starts early. Daniel DiGriz: Yeah, I remember when I was a younger man and I got tired of doing job interviews. They always felt like I was going somewhere with my hat in my hand, and so I started going into places and when they would ask why I’m there I would say, “I’m interviewing companies I’d like to work with, I’m here to conduct an interview.” It’s funny, actually. I got a position that way that lasted a while. They even created a job for me because they thought it was audacious and they were honored that I wanted to work there. I was like, “Yeah, this is great.” So it works. Flip the script on them. But the assumption is, no, of course we’re an impenetrable fortress and you take your hat off, come in with your application, and it starts the process. It’s the beginning when we become excessively loyal. Steve Pruneau: Yeah. In my opinion, it goes way back to the fifties. The age of the organization man, which is William White’s book written in 1956, talking about the commitment that people make of themselves to the company. But that was at a time when we had economic expansion, long product life cycles, you could have a long run of a career, and even had pensions. So yeah, it comes from that, I think, and all those things that you talked about, the impenetrable fortress, the concepts of what can you do for us? Daniel DiGriz: I like White’s book, The Organization Man. It kind of asserts that we assume that collectives make better decisions than individuals do, and therefore we tend to prioritize the advancement of the organization over the advancement of the individual and his or her own creativity. That becomes the source of loyalty. If that assumption is not true, if it’s not true that collectives make better decisions than individuals, and that certainly is being called into question today, then it’s not true. Then it’s certainly not unethical to shift the balance a little bit. I want to say that not only do we see sort of the growth of flat hierarchies in corporations, and the realization that more management and more organization doesn’t make it better, but even the military, the most hierarchal traditional organization on the planet, is finding this out. General Stanley McChrystal, during the Iraq War, he wrote this book that talks about the fact that our sort of traditional hierarchy of control actually hindered the conduct of our American operations. Al Qaeda would disrupt the organized American military and win, so the solution was decentralize the authority down to highly trained individuals and teams. Again, that’s sort of what made us effective. So again, this assumption that the collectives are better at decisions comes from the same time when, okay, we could accept that assumption just because, in fact, we do get all of the benefits and support of, like the military, of the corporate organizations supporting us. We got the pension and we got the long term forty ...

Daniel DiGriz: We’re talking today about how to be a secret agent, and we don’t mean spying on foreign governments, but rather, how to side hustle when you’re in a traditional job. So, if you’re an independent consultant or you would like to be, how do you get work, how do you get consulting, professional consulting work on the side, so that you’re not completely reliant on a single paycheck from your employer, or you’re completely reliant on your employer and their good will. Steve, you and I have both done this, but I think you have a story of when you were first starting out? Steve Pruneau: Well, I do. I’d been out in the world as an independent consultant for a while, yeah, but it was my first engagement at an apparel manufacturer. It’s winding down, getting ready to take my next big engagement. In my work, they’re often full-time projects, so it really consumes your time, and it’s hard to spin up a portfolio of work. So, all that’s looking good, but I also, as you point out, wanted to develop some other clients on the side. That’s all the intellectual side, and it was working out. There was a third client, and we were just getting ready to kick off. Now, I’m moving into this next gig, which is at a fairly well-known movie studio. One day at the apparel manufacturer, the CIO kind of could see, I was having some anguish. She was aware of the side hustle, because she had been a reference for it. “Oh, how’s it going?” “Well, how’s this all going to work out? These guys at the movie studio are pretty conservative. They really like to dictate your time and things.” And She’s, “Oh, come on. You can work this out.” Basically said, “Look, you’re not working non stop from 8:00 to 6:00 every day. You know, you’ve got lunch breaks. You can take calls in the morning, do emails on afternoon breaks, do the work at night.” That was kind of the thing that broke me free emotionally. It was a really quick conversation. After that conversation, I’m like, “Yeah, that’s right.” Then the logistics were pretty easy to work out. I could figure that part out, but I sort of needed a kick in the pants to get it all done. The embarrassing part is, you know, really, I’d been out in the world as an independent consultant for quite a while, and I was still having this hang up. Anyway, after about a month or two at the studio when I started that engagement, it was all starting to fall in place. Even the manufacturer, the apparel manufacturer, was having some ongoing work sometimes. I actually had two side hustles during my main gig, and that really got me into the rhythm of how this works. I’m really glad I got that kick in the pants. Daniel DiGriz: Well, you know, I think as we listen to that, you’re kind of saying, it’s not like juggling 40 balls in the air at once. It’s more like being a dog walker. You’ve got two or three leashes, but it’s something you can steer, and something you can easily control. You know, as I’m listening, I found that the question that comes up for a lot of people is, wait a minute. There’s a practical or tactical issue about using company equipment, telephones, computers. You know, some companies ban use of email for personal purposes, et cetera. You can kind of get in trouble for that. You might even sign a contract. For me, Steve, I found that I’ve done it both ways. When I was in an organization where that was the case, I would do 30 minutes before the commute, take some basic calls or do some basic calls, send some emails. Then lunches off site, and then simply my PM hours. It kind of worked out. When I was doing, even in the same organization, more sort of travel and remote work, you know, I might give a two hour presentation or something like tha...

Daniel DiGriz: We’re here talking about what we should put into a professional profile such as on LinkedIn or anywhere really we list our credentials as independent consultants, even a resume. Steve, I think you have a case study of something going on right now. Steve Pruneau: Well, I was on a project, my last project where one of the consultants it was her first time as an independent professional and she sent me her LinkedIn profile and her resume on the side because she knew I’ve been in this world for quite a long time and thinking about okay, how am I going to get the next engagement. I took a look and wanted to share with you the feedback that I gave to her. First of all, a little bit of a background on her. She has over 18 years with one company but it’s all consulting experience. She was perfectly positioned for her current role and she was super at the app that she’s working on which is Kronos as an Employee Time App. It’s the most widely used enterprise employee time app in the US. What I saw in her profile contrasted a lot compared to what I knew of her, which was all good. On her profile, it was mostly work history. I actually had to work to see the little nuggets that reflected what I knew of her. I called her up and spoke, shared this that okay, I’m seeing all history but I want to turn it around because I know what you can do and what you’re doing for this current client project. The rest of the conversation was all about flipping her profile and her resume to be oriented to the problems that she solves and her consulting experience, which conveys extensive consulting experience like she has conveys, “Hey, you’re getting somebody who’s going to walk into the office and know how to solve your problems.” The rest of that conversation was about that. Daniel DiGriz: It’s interesting you know so often it feels like we’re conditioned to do this, right? I mean we create a profile and almost there are these forms. If you log into LinkedIn it’s list your previous job, list the date and we go into this passive mode, almost like we’re filling out a job application. I always tease people you know it’s like you’re applying for your own job. But, as an independent consultant you already have the job. You just need the client. I think what I’m hearing you say is move from that passivity of simply listing your history and a list of your skills to an active approach of connecting the dots and telling us the story a little bit about why you and what problem and what solution you connect together. Steve Pruneau: That’s exactly it. That’s exactly why I wanted to talk about this is I think it’s unintentional that so many people basically fill out their history and then it shifts the burden to the reader to figure out well can this person solve the problem that I need to solve? So many times you hear even in regular employment, people move on. They don’t pause to read through and figure it out if it’s not clear in the first sentence, the first paragraph, first few seconds then they just move on. In the case of consulting and contracting, even more so. Really got to be straight to the point of this is what I do, this is what I solve, this is why you want to engage me and all this bit about history and what you’ve done in the past becomes almost irrelevant except for the occasional follow up, okay tell me a little bit of what you’ve done but that’s conversational, that’s not so much on your profile. So absolutely, that’s what I conveyed with her is let’s amp up everything I know about you, all the good things that you can do for people and I want to minimize eliminate a lot of your history. Daniel DiGriz: Well it’s interesting you look at the average LinkedIn profile and all of the length,

Daniel DiGriz: So we’re here talking about whether or not selling is a specialized skill for sales people, or a core skill that every independent consultant needs to develop and learn. Of course, this comes on the heels of a couple of our other episodes and Steve, I think you have a thought or two about this right at the top of the conversation. Steve Pruneau: Well I did think sales and selling were specialized skills that only certain people, certain personality types or somebody who had magically been ordained into the society of professional sales people. I bought into that whole myth for a big chunk of my career, both inside corporate life and also when I was only my own as an independent consultant. As you can imagine, believing that, I went through some petty lean years and, eventually, [inaudible 00:00:50] got lean experience, not finding clients easily or often enough that finally broke me and I said, “This has got to stop. I am going to become a professional, proficient in sales and selling.” At that point, I went to see a friend of mine who had made his entire career in corporate sales. He led corporate sales, worldwide, for a multi-national corporation, that was his last substantial corporate job. And he was able to exit the world of traditional employment early as a result of his success. So he understood my situation and heard my case and he pulled back the curtain right away and said, “Look, there is no magic to it. It’s a myth. There is no personality type.” And he went on to tell me about one of his best sales people at one point was a former engineer. Right away you had this image of a nerd, analytical, you know, all those adjectives we use for people who have spent their lives figuring things out. His point was, this person was proficient in selling because they could watch for problems and understand them and summarize them back to their prospective clients and, interestingly, that made a connection with clients more often than people who didn’t have the background that he had. And his point was, that establishes a relationship of trust and understanding and that’s the basis of selling, is trust, understanding, between each other and then the sales person understanding their problems so they can then go on to solve it. That was it. That nailed it for me. That was the emotional side for me. It basically gave me the release, the permission, I don’t know, that’s what I needed to hear. Essentially, they didn’t actually say this but, essentially, he was saying, “Okay, you can do this because you’re that kind of guy so now go forth and sell.” and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. For me, sales and selling is a lifelong journey of continuous improvement and so, basically, there is no magic to it. Just watch for problems, give the other person our full attention and listen to what’s going on with them and repeat back what we think it is and then solve it. Daniel DiGriz: It’s interesting, Steve, that I hear a couple things in that. I think we talked a little bit in the last episode about this problem solution approach being the core idea in a sales relationship, that it really isn’t the province of professional sales people. It really is anyone who solves a problem. So an engineer is a perfect example. But you talked about taking somebody’s problems and customizing a solution to them creates a relationship of trust, but that hinges on having a direct relationship. And what I find most telling is that you’re also saying that being a salesperson is merely about indicating having an authentically meaning, that there will be a direct relationship between you and the other person. And actually that hampers a lot of corporate sales guys. Am I still going to deal with you when the project takes off and the answer is often,

Daniel DiGriz: We’re talking about why it’s so hard for independent consultants to find clients for themselves. Steve, I think that was a concern of yours early on. Steve Pruneau: Yeah, I was committed to leaving traditional employment before I actually knew how I was gonna get clients. Luckily my first engagement, my first contract engagement was full-time and it was expected to run for about a year. I took it of course, cause that’s the prerequisite for leaving your job is, you have a client. Great. I figured I would figure out how to find the next engagement and clients onward sometime during that year. It didn’t work out that way. This issue of finding clients for myself, turned out to be pretty difficult for me. That was frustrating, because I know there are thousands, millions of people who can find work for themselves as independent consultants or independent this, that or the other thing. Why was it hard for me. I ended up, at the end of that engagement, kind of taking the easy way out, which is being dependent on somebody else, who can find clients. That’s because recruiters would search online. They’d find a resume and they’d say, “Oh, you have a skill that I know somebody who needs it.” For the next couple of engagements, I was still in a dependency on recruiters instead of an employer. Well, it’s a little bit better, but not a lot. It’s basically … You’re both admitting that there’s no career path. Good. Now, there’s not much care about when they release you and benefits and all that. For me, the whole quest to be independent required that I’d be able to find clients. The upshot was, this is the real obvious thing. Well, you have to be able to develop selling skills. That was something that I hadn’t really thought a lot about, which is kind of strange, right? You leave your job. You start out there, as independent consultants. Really? You didn’t think … No. That was me. I hadn’t figured out that I have to be able to do both. It’s not just my trade skill. I have to be able to find and attract clients, who wanna hire me. That was a big deal. Daniel DiGriz: It’s really funny Steve. It’s a little bit like, I think, when Wiley Coyote’s chasing the roadrunner over the edge of the cliff. Then he looks down and he’s like, “All right, well now what do I do?” I didn’t think about this. You’ve chased that one client that led you into independence and out of the business. Now, where’s your next client come from? Of course, then you’re back, you’re out of the frying pan and into the fire. You’re back into a kind of dependency, but without some of the benefits you had as an employee. Steve Pruneau: Well, I mean the direct line is, independence requires that you be able to find an acquire clients. That either means you’re gonna sell yourself or you’re gonna work with somebody else who does the selling, or somehow brings clients to you. The bringing clients to you, if it’s a collaborative relationship, great. In most cases, it’s a little bit of dependency and exploitative, certainly is in traditional employment. When you’re working with most recruiters and so forth. Yeah, for me it was, all right, the direct answer is, gotta be able to do this myself. Therefore, I gotta learn how to do this. Daniel DiGriz: So, you taught yourself how to sell, and you’re selling now? You got help? It’s a combination of both. I develop, took sales training, read about it, listened to it, and developed some fundamentals. I wouldn’t call myself proficient and outstanding, otherwise I’d be a professional sales person. That’s not what I want to do. I wanna practice the work that I love, but be able to find clients for it. Then,

Steve: The reason you and I have talked about this subject so much, or at least the reason I’ve introduced this or raised this with you, is because this is probably the biggest conundrum, the biggest problem I’ve wanted to crack through my entire professional life. I didn’t understand what the problem was for most of the time, but almost from the beginning I anticipated that I might exit my corporate career. I was going to run a traditional corporate career for as long as it could go, but if things didn’t work out, I’d exit and always thought, oh, wouldn’t it be great to have all the freedom of a freelancer, and then all the luxuries of corporate life. So, I believe that striking out on my own was the way to get that done. The mistake was I didn’t give a lot of attention to how to attract clients and engagements, and I only knew my trade skills, how to do my work. And so that’s how years, and I almost don’t want to admit, decades clicked by, life just happening, but not knowing how does this work. How are other people out there surviving, and I’m still here on the sidelines in my regular job. I would also like between sort of self-criticism to well this is just something that needs to be solved. Now, weirdly enough there’s got to be a lot of people out there that are really laughing now who, like come on man this is obvious. Everybody is out there thriving. This has got to be kind of second nature to them and not even under consideration, but I wanted to get this out there cause I have a hunch that I’m not the only one. That there’s probably other people who either want to jump or have already jumped and but yet still haven’t totally got it down to a rhythm where it’s relatively straight forward to attract engagements into their professional life. And so yeah for me this is the key. This is for me this is everything. I can talk about this forever on all the different ways to solve this. We have solved a lot of it. So yeah, for me, that’s my story it’s been the big limiter of my professional life. Daniel: So on the one hand, it seems obvious, if you want to be self-employed you need clients. Although, I want to excuse a little bit of that because there’s a distinction between being self-employed and running a business. They are often treated as synonymous. There are so many people that will say that if you’re self-employed you’re running a business you have to think like you’re running a business. Well they’re saying the same thing we are. You have to think about all the consideration that are necessary in running a business like attracting clients and maintaining your taxes, and building a brand and all of that. But not everybody that wants to work for themselves really wants to create the entity, maintain the corporate minutes, and all the nonsensical paperwork and accounting jazz. But they want to go to work where it’s on a 1099 basis or what have you. And in that sense increasingly the business has become symbolic. I see all these people that say well I’m John Smith and I’ve started John Smith LLC. I’m like okay great so you’ve basically done is saddled yourself with all of the headaches of running an entity but has your business grown as a result of naming yourself John Smith LLC verses John Smith? There is a point to be made there, which is skills aren’t enough. The skill to being brilliant at trade skill is important but skills aren’t enough for two reasons. Number one is you have to prioritize attracting clients. When somebody says everybody is a business that’s really what they mean is it’s not make sure you do your accounting it’s to take yourself seriously as a self-employed individual or somebody that gets work on the side if you side hustle while you maintain your job.