Consulting maxim: You must give the customer The Warm Fuzzy Feeling (tm). Consulting maxim: You are primarily in the customer service business, not the technical business.

Here's the most counter-intuitive part of it -- or at least it took me the longest to figure out. The "aha" moment came after two or three years of full time consulting.

So, you're missing the final deadline on the project. You're missing it bad, your customer needs it done like a week ago. No matter how hard you try, you'll need another week or two to complete the project.

Now, your options are:

1) get a metric ton of coffee, disconnect the phone, lock the door, go completely into death march crunch mode, work till you start seeing things and hearing voices from sleep deprivation, and deliver the product in 5 days, or

2) visit your customer every day in person, looking normal, spend 2 hours with them discussing what is done, what problems slow you down, what will be done next, etc, and deliver the product in 10 days, probably cutting features like there is no tomorrow.

Now, if I am the customer in this scenario, I totally prefer (1) -- especially since I need it a week ago. The thing is, some of my customers look much happier if they get (2). In fact, they are nervous, unhappy and angry when they get (1), and they look calm, satisfied and friendly when they get (2).

>When I go into the bank and find a long line to reach a teller, it's of course frustrating. Mentally, I start a timer in my head, and the longer the timer goes the worse of an experience it is. What stops the timer? Leaving the bank?

>No. — It's "reaching the teller".

This is the hardest customer service lesson to learn for many, many technical people, including myself and many of the people I've hired.

the thing is, for me, that clock stops when I leave the bank. I don't see how waiting for the teller is any better than waiting in line.

But it's very clear to me that Steve's article is correct for most people. The thing is, if a task is going to take from 2-48 hours, and you email them and say "I got your order, you will be up in two to 48 hours" and you convince them it's not an autoresponder, for some reason, they will be quite a bit happier than if you write the exact text on the order page, or send them an autoresponse with the same text.

I don't know /why/ this is... I mean, it's not that way for me. But it is, and it's been hard for me and my people to learn and implement this. But we need to do it if we want to branch out into the higher margin, higher support markets.

When people say consulting, they seem to mostly be referring to web development it seems. I'm more of a software guy. With web development I'm guessing that finding customers is a bit easier because people tend to know that they need a new website and go looking for someone to build it.

Software is usually solving a more difficult to define problem and the customer might not even realise they need a software solution or what it should look like.

Does anyone have any experiences and advice for how they find customers for work other than web dev?

There's another good guide here by HN user jacquesm: http://jacquesmattheij.com/be-consultant

This was posted a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411994

I found this article very interesting.

I reminded me of Gerald Weinbergs three rules of consulting: 1) Its always a people problem 2) Its always a people problem 3) you get paid by the hour and not by the result

His point is that it is often hard to fix a problem quickly because the 'problem' is often a side effect of a bigger 'people problem'.

Some very good points FTA:

1: Provide time-billing transparency 2: Give away some free time, but make it visible

#2 was a very obvious point, but one that I hadn't really thought about until reading it. Qualifying the value you're providing can definitely improve the relationship you have with your customer.

How to succeed as a lawyer?