Why Consultants Burn Out and Seek Stability

Keith Perhac and I are back with the 5th epsiode of the Kalzumeus podcast.

Keith and I both have experience working as consultants in software development and online marketing.  People often ask us how to transition away from the feast-or-famine nature of freelancing, where you do very well when you’re delivering engagements and getting them paid quickly, and then do very poorly when work dries up or you have invoice collection issues.  One way to improve on this is building recurring revenue for your consultancy, via products.  A lot of folks think that the only way to do this is spinning a SaaS out of your consultancy.  While I have an abiding love for SaaS, building SaaS businesses takes a metric truckload of time and largely is not a good option if you have e.g. a personal burn rate of $6,000 which you need to cover next month.

Happily, there are many ways to productize your relationships with customers or your expertise as a consultant.

[Patrick notes: The transcript below has my commentary inserted like this, as usual.]

What you’ll learn in this podcast:

• Why I wound down my consulting business recently, even though it was pretty successful
• How to sell consulting clients retainer agreements, long term support contracts, and software licenses to become less dependent on revenue from new engagements
• How “productized consulting” (it’s like infoproducts, except with a less obnoxious name) can make tapering down consulting viable for people who need predictable revenue
• Examples of non-software products that technically-oriented folks could be creating
• How Keith and I have applied content marketing (God, another word I hate) and effective use of email to sell these sorts of products
• Our advice on pricing/packaging, and a few pointers at successful implementations of it to copy liberally be inspired by

If You Want To Listen To It

MP3 Download (~75 minutes, ~68MB) : Right-click here and click Save As.

Podcast format: either subscribe to https://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store.

[powerpress]

Transcript: Quitting Consulting Via Productization

Patrick McKenzie:  Hideho everybody and thanks for tuning into, what is this, the fifth episode of the Kalzumeus Podcast. I’m Patrick McKenzie, better known as Patio11 on the Internets and I’m here with my co‑host Keith Perhac.

Keith Perhac:  Hi, I’m Keith Perhac, not known on the Internet.

Patrick:  Yeah, it’s been an absurd amount of months since we did the last version of the podcast together. What’s new and exciting with you, Keith?

Keith:  Oh my God, so much. I have a new daughter, which is fun, takes a ton of time out of my life but the main thing that I’ve been working on, non‑family related, is new productization. I’m sure you have a lot to talk about that, as well. I’ve been doing consulting about two years now, going on three. It’s gotten to the point where I want to start that whole productization thing. I think that’s what we’re going to...

For the full transcript see here.