On Fri, 6 Dec 2013, Rachel Polanskis wrote: > Hi Linkers, > I have finally accepted a redundancy from my job at <some uni> and my last > day is just on the new year. > > I have put together a little business plan, getting an ABN and putting > together > a little website we will host on our NBN FTTH connection, hopefully making > a small business out of it.
Hi Rachel. I tried this few years ago in Canada. I learnt a lot about business (and tax law). Here are a few thoughts: (1) A lot of small businesses would try to save money by designing the solution themselves (badly usually) and then bring in a specialist to implement. Try to encourage them to involve you in the design stage. You can probably save them implementation costs. A happy client will use you again - there is always stuff to do. (2) Late payment was a real problem. I ended up offering significant discounts (up to 25%) for pre-purchasing large blocks of billable time. Of course you work out your base rate taking this in to account. Even for post-paid work I offered a discount for early payment. These strategies did help with the late payment problem. (3) I spent a lot of time writing quotes. You need to factor that in to your rate. Only a proportion of quotes will turn in to billable work. (4) General IT consulting like this can be problematic. Without specialising, a lot of jobs are effectively 'one off' so there is generally more over-head. Quotes, Statements of work (SOWs), and set up for example. (5) Outsource your accounting. Really. It is a time sink. You would be better off spending the time writing quotes or doing just about anything else. (6) I used the 'accrual method' of accounting. I consider this to have been a mistake. When it comes to late payments you may find yourself paying tax on money you haven't received yet. I did. The alternative is called 'cash accounting'. Obviously there are pros and cons. Talk to your accountant about which system is right for you. As for the rate. I'm not up with current T&M (time and materials) consulting rates in Australia but $70 is definitely too low. $100-150 wasn't unusual many years ago. Remember you can entice with discounts off the base rate. Good luck and remember, work smarter not harder. Cheers, Rob -- Email: rob...@timetraveller.org Linux counter ID #16440 IRC: Solver (OFTC & Freenode) Web: http://www.pracops.com Director, Software in the Public Interest (http://spi-inc.org/) Information behaves like a gas _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
