Consulting can provide an income source, and can broaden your knowledge, and can improve technical and customer skills, and can lead you into new markets and opportunities for new products.
Consulting is not without its downsides. It doesn't scale up (well, it scales up with added in-house or out-sourced staff, and the associated project management and administration), and it tends to be price-competitive if you're working in a "mainstream" area of expertise.
Consulting can be a very effective distraction to your concentration, too.
Two or three days on customer work, and some focus on billing and proposals and related administration, and then several hours or more of spooling back up to speed on whatever part of the product or debug that you had been working on when the call came in. Then you realize your week is shot.
Put another way, TANSTAAFL.
Make sure you aggregate the financial and focus costs in your estimates. And make sure you can also efficiently encapsulate and snapshot whatever you were doing when the customer work arrives; hone your process skills around in-swapping and out-swapping projects.
Consider providing an end-project summary - not just for the customer's benefit and for the marketing, but also so that you can in-swap the project more quickly if there's additional associated work. The same approach can work for a summary and status for whatever you were doing on your project when the customer call arrives, though that can be a couple of cryptic paragraphs in a text file.
Consulting takes time and saps your focus, but it also feels incredible to work for 1 day and make enough to pay rent for a month. When you're not stressing about whether you'll be able to make rent this month, you may find your productivity increase tremendously.
I agree wholeheartedly. Consulting comprehensively took my focus off new product dev the last three months, but it underwrote a huge QOL improvement (one month of time off with family) and there is major, major stress relief about not being five figures in the hole until October. Market seasonality is a pain, by the way.
Consulting is not without its downsides. It doesn't scale up (well, it scales up with added in-house or out-sourced staff, and the associated project management and administration), and it tends to be price-competitive if you're working in a "mainstream" area of expertise.
Consulting can be a very effective distraction to your concentration, too.
Two or three days on customer work, and some focus on billing and proposals and related administration, and then several hours or more of spooling back up to speed on whatever part of the product or debug that you had been working on when the call came in. Then you realize your week is shot.
Put another way, TANSTAAFL.
Make sure you aggregate the financial and focus costs in your estimates. And make sure you can also efficiently encapsulate and snapshot whatever you were doing when the customer work arrives; hone your process skills around in-swapping and out-swapping projects.
Consider providing an end-project summary - not just for the customer's benefit and for the marketing, but also so that you can in-swap the project more quickly if there's additional associated work. The same approach can work for a summary and status for whatever you were doing on your project when the customer call arrives, though that can be a couple of cryptic paragraphs in a text file.