It's not my argument that it's hard to talk a good game about business and tech at the same time. Lots of people can do that.
Rather, when I wrote that, I was reacting to a long string of own-goals people were reporting about their consulting practices on HN. I saw people freaking out about scope changes, about advanced payment, about counting billable hours, about acceptance criteria, and about payment terms. I was reading people complaining about working conditions issues that are totally appropriate for full-timers to bring up, but not generally at-the-market issues for businesses relating to each other, which is what consultancies are.
Most people who write a lot of comments on HN are self-evidently equipped to represent themselves well to businesses, at least in writing. That's not a concern of mine.
Instead, I'm more interested in seeing people take full ownership of the services they want to be offering their clients. Companies hire consultants to solve problems. The more completely and decisively you can solve those problems, and the less drama you inject in solving them, the more valuable your consultancy is.
So, patterns I see among high-value consultancies --- not just the ones I've helped manage but also those run by friends and peers --- include not pushing back on scope changes, accepting industry norms on payments, not demanding up-front payment, not trying to bill for ticky-tacky stuff like individual phone calls, not being afraid to provide a reasonable estimate up front, not charging for proposals, and not pushing the (probably totally reasonable for graphic designers!) graphic design field's orthodoxy about spec work.
Not for nothing, but I see similar patterns among other professions; I get the same professional courtesies from my accountant, for instance, and from our legal (Grellas Shah, highly recommend). I've gotten similar courtesies from BigLaw firms as well, and it's no surprise: the invoices we generated selling Matasano would have paid for 10x as many random phone calls as we possibly could have generated.
The most common reaction to these observation comes from fledgeling consultancies that work with small customers on small projects. If that's where you have to be, I understand and I'm not trying to condescend. But if those are your clients and you expect to grow your business, one of two things is going to happen:
(1) You are going to stop serving clients that require you to bill hourly, account for phone calls, demand up-front payment, and charge for proposals.
(2) You are going to find a way to scale SMB clients so that you're delivering them mechanically and without a lot of interpersonal interaction, in the same manner as, say, the big PDF-to-HTML shops do.
In the meantime, do what you gotta do to keep afloat! That was the point of the original post I wrote there (I'm a bit mystified about why that post is the one everyone points to for my consulting advice; I've written what I think are more important things about consulting here). You start somewhere, and then you progress towards operating like a more mature, larger business.
