Navigating the Consulting Roller Coaster

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are cruising along. We are now a couple of episodes into season 21 of the podcast, if you're listening. If you're on the YouTube site, then forget that whole season thing. We're just like continuing to crank on after the hundreds of, I think it's literally now hundreds of episodes that we put out here. This time, and just to sort of like circle back a little bit, I'm Rob Brodhead. RB Consulting is my main place, rb-sns.com. Speaking with Michael Milosz and EnvisionQA, EnvisionQA.com is his main place. We're just really like working our way through the struggles and the problems that we have as entrepreneurs, as technologists. This episode, I want to talk a little bit about the consulting roller coaster, I think is what I'm going to look at it as. Because this is a challenge that Michael is at the beginning of the ride where it's like that slow, if you think about a roller coaster, it's like slow, everything's cranking, you're about to go over the hill, but it's like it just waits and waits. Eventually, you go over the first hill and you're gone. Unless it's one of these modern slingshot ones, and that's very rare. Think more old school, it's probably somebody hand cranking your way up over the hill, but then you go really fast, but then now you slow down again. That's the roller coaster. It's that constant challenge of being busy, but then not being able to work, like being busy in your business, not being able to work on your business, or vice-versa, where you're not busy enough in your business and you're in and working on your business, but the revenue is not where you want it to be to be able to really address the working on your business. So it's that finding that balance and some of those challenges. I think that's one of those things that's always good to swing back to that every so often and talk about how to ideally flatten that roller coaster out a little bit. You're still going to have like a not quite feast and family, but definitely you're going to have some rises and some falls. You're going to have, depending on what you do and who your customers are, there may be seasonal kinds of stuff where it's like, maybe your customers are such that more often at the end of the year, they're going to shut down and you're just not going to have projects. Or at the end of the year, their project is going to be all over the place. It's things like that that you will run into and it's how do we find ways to level that out a little bit and make sure that we are working in the business when we need to work in the business or working on the business when we need to work on the business. And so I think to start, before I go into a little bit of mine is talk a little bit, because I know you we've mentioned the other day is let's talk about your struggles getting started. I've got Envision QA is out there. You've spent some time and some money and you've built the site. You've got some some level of materials that you've built out already. Let's talk about that struggle about it's effectively, even though you've been doing this for years, it's effectively getting your first customer and some of the headaches and challenges there. Yeah, so that that is one of the biggest hurdles I'm working through right now. And it's interesting, you know, the whole roller coaster thing. I feel like right now I'm in a Winnebago trying to drive up, you know, in Grand Canyon, one of those high prices to get over to the next is like, OK, well, the car make it. It is it's very challenging, especially for me, because this particular passion of mine doing this QA assessment, doing this QA company is, you know, we both have been in software for over 20 years. We've kind of worked all the different angles and being a software developer, you typically know who to talk to within a company to sell software to kind of it's like, oh, hey, you need this solution. So you go build them a solution. QA is a different animal where they don't a lot of companies don't understand QA or they don't think it's necessary. It's like, why do we need testing? We need a product. Product makes us money. And so the biggest challenge I'm running into is who do I talk to within an organization to get my foot in the door? You know, do I talk to the developers? Do I talk to the software managers? Do I try to find QA managers, which a lot of companies don't have? Do I try to find the project managers? Do I find the business owners? Do I need to talk to the CEOs? Interestingly enough, I actually just spent the last few days going through a software org chart, trying to pinpoint small, medium and large companies to figure out where within the organization this conversation needs to be had with QA. You know, if you're talking to sales, you're going to be talking not at the software level, but you're going to be talking to them as to what to ask their customers for, not just sell them the product, but ask them, what is your need? You know, will this fit your need? How do you talk to the customer to make sure that you're going to give them the best benefit? Will this product I'm selling them be something they want or are they going to turn around and return it the next step? And that's kind of where I'm at right now. And I've gone out to Upwork. I've looked at a couple of things out there which tend to be more service side where businesses look at QA and they are like, oh, I need test scripts. I need test plans. They look at the implementation of QA as typically being Selenium scripts or some type of testing, manual testing, regression testing. And that's the struggle I'm dealing with. It's who do you talk to and at what level do you talk to to get your foot in the door? Yeah. And I think that's where, you know, that is the challenge that in particular when we are, QA is a little bit, is as you mentioned, sort of a little bit unique because I think you, I think it's, it's, it's almost split. It's really to get a QA program going, you have to have somebody high enough up to sort of push that down, you know, into the organization and say, this is an organizational standard that we're going to do. You have to have that backing. And that means that's usually the person like, you know, as a high level manager, director, depends on what your labels are in your company, but it could even be like a CIO, CTO type of conversation. However, you also need to be down at the sort of at the ground level of the developers and getting them talking about that because there's often, depending on what your, the corporate size is, which is why it's interesting. You said that you're sort of looking at small, medium and large, because I think it's a different, it's a different equation depending on which organization you're in, because it may be something where it's like a CEO and a developer. And that's like, there's really no spot there. And so it's really at that point, like you can try to, you probably have to convince the CEO to, because they're going to sign the check, but you probably have to get your foot in the door with the developer for them to say to the CEO, hey, this is something we need to do. If you get into a bigger organization, then it's like figuring out where is that technology ladder point, basically within the organization to say, this is a person that is going to be able to write the, you know, sign the check and push it and provide enough leverage for it to be useful to them. Because you could just go up to a, you could just say across the board, all right, I'm just going to talk to the CEO. I'm going to sell them on it. And that's all I'm going to do. And you could convince CEOs that this is what we need to do. But this goes to like, you want to serve the organization. You don't want to just be a talking head or a figurehead or somebody just coming in and sucking up consulting dollars and not providing value to the customer. So that means that you're going to have to, like you have to fight sort of those political battles a little bit of, all right, the CEO loves it. Awesome. Now I need the CEO to help me talk to whoever, you know, the next level down so I can make sure that they're on board and that they're going to fall. And then they're going to have to go down to the next level and make sure that they're on board. And so it does make for, it is a challenging, you know, first step to go into is winning that first, that first client. But I think that's actually something that is key to the longer term as well. Is sometimes we get the first client too easy because we know somebody we, you know, it's a prior, which is always a recommendation, you know, a prior company we worked with, a prior employer, something like that, where it's almost too easy because now we, we already had a connection. We already had like a history with them. So we don't have to sell ourselves really with that piece is I think the challenge is looking at who should we be talking to on a regular basis? Where is our, you know, our niche essentially? And how do we communicate that? Who do we communicate to? And then how do we build a persona or a like a social presence or a web presence or a marketing presence in order to be talking to those people on a regular enough basis that we are building those relationships so that, you know, something's going to hit and we have a project, but then that project is going to complete. And we want to make sure that we've been building those. We've been touching those bases that we have been essentially feeding those relationships as we're moving forward so that when one rolls off, ideally before we complete one, another one is kicking in. And that's actually something that sort of prompted this discussion was you asked earlier, like, hey, you know, how's the week been? I'm like, it's been very busy. And I'm like, that's good. And I'm like, yes and no. It's like there's there's a good side of and this is just, I guess, to peel back a little bit. It's like it's me and then I've got developers at work for me. Three, four weeks ago, had a whole bunch of new projects hit at the same time. That just I was able to because of the way those hit, I was able to basically take those on and start working each of them and giving them enough time and focus to make sure that they're moving forward. But then also within that, I'm trying to figure out how to delegate those out to developers. Where does that go? And my developers were already sort of wrapping some things up. So you get into a little bit of this, like, how do I ramp down one project while ramping up another? And then that's sort of been what I've been in is it's the extra administrative overhead besides doing a project. It's the extra stuff that you have to put the time in to figure out, OK, how do I how do I create like a roadmap for this? How do I create milestones? How do I put together estimates? How do I take those pieces and document them or define them in a way that I can hand them off to the team and have them start working through stuff? So it's been it's rather it's very busy. There's been a lot going on and billable hours that I think we all love to have. You know, that revenue stream is OK. But these are there's a couple of projects that I know are going to wrap up. Ideally, you're going to wrap up in two to three weeks or something like that. And so now it's already having to have those wheels in motion to have the conversations to be able to be ready with somebody that we've like gone through the sales cycle enough so that we can have another project that's going to pop up or be starting in the next couple of weeks as well. So there's one rolls down, the other one rolls up. And it's that frustration of shifting gears when you've got a whole bunch of stuff and you're having to touch everything there, it's just exhausting because you're constantly having to change. And there's that that loss of time that adds up, especially over a week. You know, if you've got you're losing a half an hour a day on just that, which would be actually pretty small, I think in most cases, if you're doing a lot of gear switching, then half our day is still that's like almost three hours by the time you get to the end of the week. And then the other thing is, which is a key that goes back to the the simplifying that roller coaster is even in this busy time, setting aside time and say, I have to have some time that is working on the business instead of in the business. I have to keep like sales. You know, I know we're all technologists, but I have to keep like doing some of those sales and marketing and branding pieces and conversations. And even though this is something I'll talk about at another time, it's like I've got a little group now that is like my cold calling lead generation people that are out there. And I don't have to spend much time. I spend a half hour a week maybe talking to them, working through sales scripts and things like that. And then they just direct me to people. But then the people they direct me to, that's usually a half hour or an hour call, depending on how it goes. And then there's and that's just the introductory. You know, usually it's like this goes back to one of our prior episodes we were talking about, like even before people will sign on, often you have to have the conversation like, why are you doing this? What is the problem you're solving? Where are you at? Are you even at a position in your organization, in your where you're at? This is something that makes sense right now. Does it like, yeah, it may make sense. QA in particular, it's like this may make real sense for you to have a full fledged, you know, CI, CD, in regression testing, integrated testing and all of those pieces in there at some point, but you can't you're not there yet. And so it may be something you have to say, hey, here's that partial solution. Or how about we talk in six months or a year from now when you guys have progressed further along to where you're at? Now, I want to ask you this, but I'm going to kind of lead it with what I'm going through right now. So because you mentioned you have highs and lows, you know, and you're trying to keep that pipeline going. So you always roll off one project to another project when you hit those droughts, which is kind of like where I'm at starting out with this is there's no income coming in. There's expenses going out. You know, we can bootstrap 90 percent of what we do. But at the end of the day, we still have to spend a little bit of money to get a business up and running. You know, you know, like website costs, hosting costs, things like that. Still minimal. But, you know, there's times where you think, well, I can just go grab a something easy to do or something quick to do that's maybe outside of your brand, right outside of your market. And you were like, well, you know, your first job might be someone you know. It's like, you know, the company I rolled off last year, Milosk Consulting, was kind of an Internet thing. I kind of did everything, which meant I serviced everyone in service, no one. And now I'm in I'm trying to focus. I'm trying to stay on brand and just do QA. But, you know, I just got a call from my daughter yesterday. She's got a friend that has a photography business, wants a photography website. All right. Do I pivot and do that for a little bit of money to get that up and running? Or do I stay on brand and keep working the business, trying to get that relationships going? You know, how do you deal with that during your down periods? This that is actually an excellent question, and particularly when you're starting out, because we always even if we really well define our organization and our vision and our focus, we still have to we have to have customers. And when you have zero customers and somebody comes to you and it totally off topic out of your brand range, it's still like, hey, I can do this and I can generate revenue myself. There are some people that would say never do that. Don't don't go off brand. Don't do that. And there are arguments against that. And I have had situations where I've done that and I've essentially regretted it. I've got a couple of customers that I've got one in particular. I just did. I was like, I just wanted to help them. It wasn't really like it was it would have been it could have been like a really good fit. But it was one of those as I talked to their budget and what they wanted to do and what they really were open to doing was not enough. And it's essentially in short, their technology stuff is a mess. It's just like there's all these they've had countless developers. Every developer is a little different. They try to just they're at a point right now where they're just trying to just like if there's a new feature, it's literally like do not touch any code except for the lines you change. They have a very strict pull request process where like they have we've spent an hour going back and trying to like clean up white space so that the diff on GitHub is literally just like the three lines of code that we had to change or something like that. And it's just it's stuff that's very painful that I hadn't really had to deal with because we just like a lot of that stuff, it's like there's some things you can do so you can easily like diff what you need to dip. They didn't want to do that. And so it's been a pain. And I, you know, it was somebody that I took because like, hey, we've got some time. And now we almost dread when I get a request from it's like, hey, can you do this? Because it's not it's not a great rate. It's usually a pain in the butt. We've we've sort of written off, I don't know how many hours working with this customer. But you also, you know, now it's like, but we've provided them some stuff. Want to leave them hanging out to dry. But you're going to it's actually great that you mentioned that, because that's one of the things I had a conversation yesterday with somebody that they want to do. They've done all these little individual for each of their customers. They spin up a website, a WordPress site that's their site. And then the customer can go in and customize it. But they've also got some plug ins and I think a couple of widgets and stuff that they've built. So they have like their core customized WordPress starter kit, essentially. And then they go to a customer. They they go in and they basically got a designer that just, you know, changes it up, makes it branded to that site. And then the customer spins it up. They want to add to it. One of the things they want to do is I was talking to them. It's like they initially were going to build like this whole separate dashboard site for statistics. And as I looked at it and got a little further into it, I was like, you could probably very easily grab a couple of plug ins that already exist as far as the like the the analytics, like Google Analytics and some of that kind of stuff that they want to have. And they also want to do some of their sales. And it's basically a product site catalog kind of site. So they want a couple of things to show, like sales statistics and lead statistics and some of those reports. So it's I look at it like you're probably better off building a plug in. And then just sending that plug in out to the because they have access to all those servers. It's like just put that plug on a plug into each of the servers, turn it on within Web WordPress and then boom, now they've got to customize. Dashboard and maybe a couple of custom widgets, which leads me, you know, long story short or too long because it's already short story long. That's one of the things I think I'm going to I'm going to pitch to you is because I know you've done custom plug in development stuff when you did the catalog site way back when I've got a rough idea of what they need. It's not going to be I don't think it's going to be that complicated. But I was just thinking like, here's an opportunity to send you some work and say, hey, here's some stuff to help essentially help pay the bills and offset some of your some of what you've done. And so thinking about that is, all right, how do we take that as an actual example and convert that? And so I would what I've done in this may be something, this is something that will be, I guess, a challenge to you. And we'll probably talk about this, assuming this thing comes real. I think we'll talk about this as we we do massage it into something that makes sense. And that's what I do is I usually look at it and say, OK, here's this project that is off brand, but I will find some places in there where I can tie it back to a project that would be on brand. Where and so, for example, we've talked about situations where a customer comes in and they really aren't in a position. It's like a triage. It's just like there's something on fire. They need us to put a fire out. We can do that. We can generate some revenue. And as part of that, maybe what we do is instead of just that, since we're going to leave it in a better situation than they were, we could talk about what we did that would be more on brand that or what we offered or what we counseled them with in the consulting side that is on brand. So then we can at least pull those tasks out and say, hey, this is experience doing it in your case. I think that helps quite a bit because you can say, hey, I built this thing. You know, I did that like or on the photo site, I built this site. But along the way, here's the things I did to allow for testing of that site. So I think like you've got your testing product. Maybe you like you build a site out for me and you just pointed at that and just sort of be like, hey, here's like a real or just create a, you know, something just creates a bunch of Lenten tests. It's just basically like, hey, we went through this. And here's where I did an automated test so that from, you know, going forward, I could just validate that the pages came up or, you know, whatever the level of testing is, they they need. So I think that's sort of what you do is you massage a little bit. So thoughts on that. Yeah, so that's an interesting perspective on that, because that leads to one of the conversations we've had a lot of where we're constantly doing multiple tasks, right? We're never always just working on one thing. And what as developers we tend to do is we try to do things in parallel or things that we can overlap with other work or other technologies. It's like, oh, I go do this project. I can apply it to this. So that's an interesting take on that with the WordPress site. You know, I could go spin that up and then add some testing tools to that and say, hey, with this, this is how you can apply testing to something like this. It's just interesting, though, within and which kind of led me to this question was because like developer. We started out with an idea, but then it's like, we went kind of down the rabbit hole, many rabbit holes for many different things, because it's like it's so easy to go do something else that we're comfortable with that we know versus staying on point and doing, you know, building what we're trying to build. And that's one of the challenges that we have, right? We don't want to be ambulance, the ambulance chasers of software development where we're just chasing any type of tech job. But in the same token, we do need to keep the keep the lights on. We got to pay the bills. So finding any type of job or jobs that we can do, but still work them in such a way that applies to our goal, our vision, I think is key, right? Yeah, and I think that that actually brought up a thought is the one of the things that I've we've talked about before and I do every so often is essentially sort of like calling my resume is there'll be things I will pull off of a resume if it's out there somewhere, because I don't want to. I don't want to go down that path. So, for example, like I have in my past, I did a lot of Fox Pro and visual Fox Pro stuff for a while. I had a couple of years, right? I did like entire systems were built like that. I don't want to go back to that. I don't want to do that. I don't want anything to deal with it. And the challenge is there there may be a migration of somebody. It's like, hey, we have a Fox Pro site and now we want to finally bring it into this century and we want to, you know, do whatever it is, however they want to do it. Maybe we want to take that and convert it into the React Native app or whatever it is, they whatever their path is and that you want to be able to have somewhere. And it's usually it's just like maybe just like the phrase that, hey, I've worked on this before. And that way they can say, oh, they know Fox Pro and they know React. Let's say that's where they're going. You want to have that, but you want to make sure that you like you're downplaying the things that aren't your brand and that you're upplaying the things that are. In particular, like I've shown you is I've got essentially like flyers will say, or like it's marketing material that I've got that is based on certain products or projects. And I make sure if I'm selling to that kind of a project that I'm highlighting the things that apply to that kind of project only. And there's other things that I'm just I'm not going to worry about. And when I'm looking at jobs, that's where I'm also going to there's going to be that stuff that's like halfway there where it's like, it's sort of, but it's sort of not. And I'm not sure where I'm going to get drawn with it. And those are the ones where those are the hardest ones when you're in a when you're like in a down period and you're like, I just I really need some revenue, which usually means I'm going to try to like, I'm going to go take a stab at that, even if it is a little bit off brand. But the further it is off of it, the more likely I am to like push back against that and say, no, I really don't want to get into that. Because that's what you don't want to do is you don't want to suddenly have and I've run in before we have to clean it up. We've got like the last two years, you've been doing this kind of thing. And yeah, you can be trying to point it to your brand. But if you point to any of those other stuff, suddenly you realize like, wow, you look like a you look like a C developer because you've been doing C for two years. Even though you've done other stuff, you'll see that thread. And then that's where it becomes harder and harder for people to understand. Where your vision is. I think you have to you have to be very choosy about that. And I think I almost think if you do pick something off brand or off. Yeah, I say off brand is one. Maybe that's where since you picked that to generate revenue, maybe you put a little extra time on that and you provide something that's not directly from the project, but that is you doing that kind of work. So in your case, it would be like, hey, if I'm going to do that, I'm going to do that. And I'm going to generate some revenue. It's like, hey, I'm going to generate some revenue. But I would normally be doing some business development stuff anyways. So what I'm going to do is take a little bit of that business development time I would be doing and I'm going to build something additional for that customer. And just as a brief one, like I had a customer during COVID where there wasn't a lot of stuff, like things had just sort of like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, during COVID where there wasn't a lot of stuff, like things had just sort of like died down. It was, I was like, I just had a lot of free hours basically. And I ended up giving them an insane credit. They got like a, you know, from, they got like a 200 hour project for the cost of like 10 hours or something like that because it was just, it was, I was like working with them. I liked what I was doing. It was some work that I could use and market moving forward. And it's just like, you know what? I'm just going to do this for them for free because he was a nice guy. I liked what he was doing. I sort of like, I wanted to help them out. And I just threw a lot of hours at it because it's like, I don't have other options. So I'm going to use that and I'm going to at least direct those. So they're useful to me. So I know we're getting close to time, but I want to kind of piggyback on that a little bit. So I liked how you mentioned that, you know, doing, going above and beyond, like picking, if you do something, you go above and beyond and you can still kind of turn it into your brand. Right. So like with the QA assessment, I could essentially do like a mini assessment or provide a mini assessment at the end of here's what you need. And even apply it to the photography, you know, you know, what type of things should you be thinking about with the photography side of things that they might not be thinking about? So yeah, I really liked that. That actually I'll piggyback on your piggyback there. The nice thing about that is what you could do for something like the photography site is it gives you a real case study that you can work with. So you can build out your materials. You can build out your templates for doing that. And you can have some of this an example, particularly if you work with that customer and you say, Hey, can I use you as a reference? Can I use your story? And now I'm going to put it on my site and say, here's an example of what it looks like. And it's in that case, it's like a very simple case. So you don't have to, you know, and that's sometimes what people get almost like scared of is because I've done IT assessments that are there's hundreds of pages in the final assessment. And if it's just a little company, they freak out. They're like, no, I'm not. This looks like it was done by high end consultants because it was at the time it was done for a huge organization. But this gives you something that maybe you say, Hey, I'm going to essentially use you as a reference. So for free, I want to just do this for you. I'll take, I'll walk you through it. We'll go through all the, you know, the, the steps of it. If you can give me a reference afterwards or a quote or something, that's awesome. If not, I just want, if I can have your permission to like, you know, display this. And maybe it is where you could just take that and you wipe out the company name everywhere. But then you have an example and something that's now some material that you can use moving forward for your business. Exactly. And that's a great point because from a startup or starting out perspective, you don't have those references. You don't have those testimonials. So these are great things to consider when you have no customers or you're needing work or looking for work, maybe take on a smaller project or something outside of your main brand, take it on, but also maybe give them, um, like an additional, um, um, agreement that, Hey, the work I'm going to do for you isn't necessarily pro bono, but I'm expecting, you know, to be able to use the materials I use for you for marketing or get a testimonial from you, get maybe word of mouth or something out of that, but just make sure that you do the job well. And you basically knock it out of the park. You don't do a half ass job. If you are going to do something like that, make sure that one, you know, you can do it to you do it the best job you can ever do, you know, be your gold star standard, and then three, make sure you get their sign off to be able to use them for testimonials and marketing. I think that is a perfect place for us to wrap this episode up. Uh, we did get a little bit off topic, but Hey, that's what happens sometimes. Uh, but hopefully I think this, and I think this is just one of those that it's us. I know I've learned a little bit and changes a little bit. What I'm thinking about is I'm working through some of my projects in the, in the week ahead. Hopefully you guys do the same. As always, you have any questions or comments, shoot us an email at info at developinord.com. Leave something on the out in the comments for this. Feel free to share to subscribe. All those fun things, podcasts, wherever you subscribe to podcasts, you will find us there. We're just continuing along. And, uh, I don't know what the season is going to look like. It's probably going to be our normal. We'll go to about 30 some odd episodes. We'll see what our, our overall theme is. We're still figuring that one out, but Hey, if you continue to listen, maybe you'll get to learn as we do what the theme is going to be for this season. That being said, we'll wrap this one up. So go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers to develop a new podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.