The Consulting Premium is Insurance

I have been hard pressed to find good blogs or literature about how to handle the day to day issues as a consultant. There is no support network to confer to or a mentor to ask support from.

When you are on your own, you are truly left to your own devices. This, however, makes the independent consulting route all the more interesting.

In many of many of my engagements, I have always been hired as a subject matter expert in my particular craft (I’m an independent buy side and Front office consultant, but more on that in later posts).

My most recent engagement had me in an unusual situation where my client had me reporting to their offices every day but my involvement in the project had waned to almost zero.

At first, I dreaded coming to the client location. Each day was like getting through 10 hours of water torture. The agony of this project caused me to pause and wonder whether the payment each day was actually worth the idle time. Upon further reflection, what I discovered is that often times a consultant is an insurance contract.

My client (the CTO in this instance), in a very strange twist, was taking on the bulk of the project effort. At first, I interpreted this strictly as his personal interest in hacking systems. He seemed to have this reputation of wanting to be hands on a system and not delegating tasks as one would imagine of a CTO. From my perspective, if I serve in advisory role only, this was OK by me. I’ve been in many situations where the bulk of the work falls on the shoulders of the consultant so if he wanted to assume the role of the consultant, he would get no argument from me.

In my situation, smaller clients want to be independent and self sufficient but the risk of going it alone could be catastrophic and expensive when using a new software solution.

What I discovered later in the project life cycle was that I was not hired for my subject matter expertise but hired as a stop gap insurance premium. I was a resource to tap when production problems arose or a work-flow not fully ironed out and caused problems. A consultant, in this instance, can also serve to be a stop gap between the vendor and the client.

As this project wound down and important take away from the lesson is that sometimes you can add value by not doing anything at all other than the consultant knowing that he has someone to turn to when things go awry.

Non Compete Clauses

As an independent consultant I think we really need to be careful about the non-competes. I understand their intent but they really a hinderance on progress in our society on top of which who is going to challenge the non-compete when it comes time to getting the job. If you don’t sign it, you don’t get the job.

Here is a link to a great article about it:

http://ckwebb.com/books/author-advice-the-non-compete-clause/

Independent Consultant’s Corner

I recently embarked on the full time IC path. I must have read a ton of books, blogs, etc on the subject. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t able to find the articles that would be helpful in the day to day dealings.

Like when you get a written contract, how do you deal with the language? Should you use an attorney? How do you negotiate?

Or take for example the problem client. What do you do with him? How do you deal with him? What are the signs of one?

Some of these things I found out the hard way and perhaps there is a reason that this information isn’t on the web. In any event, this is a start of trying to categorize of that information.

So let me start wit a few. In my links are two blogs that I found were the best. Steve’s blog is probably the best for a techie because it’s not technical. Any management consultant would tell you the same thing but saying it from the perspective of real life is another. The second article is one I found that had a lot of true insight as well. Take a read.

 

http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/be-consultant.html

http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/careers-hr/my-career/how-to/index.cfm?articleid=869&pn=1

 

 

A few books to read:

Making Rain: The Secrets of Building Lifelong Client Loyalty by Andrew Sobel

The Art of Client Service by Robert Solomon

Hug your Customer by Jack Mitchell

All of these books have nothing to do with consulting, per se, but the information is applicable to all people in the consulting field. What I love about Sobel’s book is that he doesn’t use complex language and fluff Management consulting speak. He uses interesting analogies dating back to history such as his use of the Jesuits and how they are like deep experts.

He also explains how he handles certain client issues like billing and rates, the things that makes life as a consultant really difficult.

In the future, I’m going to produce more tidbits that will be useful to other consultants but you can se the above as a start.

Terrible Strategy

I just finished reading a blog on Trading Goddess Stock blog. Although a nice idea, it’s a total random play. You will end up losing money if you follow the one month strategy unless you make a portfolio of the dividend paying stocks.

I did an analysis of the semi annual paying stocks on her blog link. Enclosed is the analysis. Unless you pick the right ones, you would have a 40% chance of picking one of the stocks that gives you a negative return.

The following are the stocks that pay semi-annually.

 
Here is the performance of those stocks:

Database Connection

You may find this code handy for connection to databases in Excel VBA:

Public Function connection() As ADODB.connection

Dim cn As String
Dim path As String
Dim ado As ADODB.connection

Set ado = New ADODB.connection

path = ThisWorkbook.path & “\[ACCESSDB].mdb”

cn = “Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source= ” & path & _
“;Persist Security Info=False;”
‘cn = “Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source= ” & path & _
“;Persist Security Info=False;”

ado.Open cn

Set connection = ado

Set ado = Nothing

End Function

Excel and Finance Expertise

I have started a new service. If you are in need of Excel VBA and Financial Programming please call me at my new service at www.ether.com. Press on the button below to direct you to my site.

Accumulated Depreciation in Quicken 2007

Quicken is a great product for money management. However, being a power user and a relatively good programmer, I need more control over my reports and categorizations.

There are certain things that are great about Quicken but one thing that it’s a little light is in the area of more tax-driven financial capture.

Case in point, I have rental property and want to be able to determine the amount of accumulated depreciation for items that have to be capitalized. My set of new appliances came under that category. There is no contra-account in Quicken to capture non-cash accruals.

I tried making a liability but when I tried reporting it wouldn’t show up in my reports because there would be a corresponding asset entry.

So to deal with this I made an Hidden Asset.

I was able to determine the amortization schedule using the tax code limits on the property. Property can be depreciated over 27.5 years and appliances over 5.

When you want to see your expenses for depreciation you can use classes to create a report. Here is a sample of my classes report.