Consulting

Tutoring rate ranges vary from city to city. Establishing your tutoring rate can seem somewhat daunting if you’ve never had to set a rate before. Check out how to set consulting fees as a more formal guide to establishing a rate. In the meantime, here are some ways to figure out what to charge for […]

After my post on choosing a CRM, Tony asked what I use to manage my contacts. To be honest, I’m not using a formal CRM system. I actually use a combination of Outlook, Excel and Campaign Monitor (an online subscription tool). I use those tools, even though I’ve worked with really expensive CRM packages and

While poking around this site, I discovered that my "test post" has a Google PageRank of 3. That’s higher than my posts on the top 10 consulting myths, "Do I need a lawyer?", and 1099 workers. Google seems to think my test post has great importance. The web works in mysterious ways.

If you’re just in the process of becoming a consultant, you may be looking to bootstrap your business. However, to get going, you’ll probably need some sort of office productivity suite, like Microsoft Office. Despite what you might think, you don’t need to shell out hundreds of dollars for a package. You can use OpenOffice.

In the 90s, people went on and on about the paperless office. Well, I don’t know about you, but my office is far from paperless. Keeping client files, seven years of tax returns, current year receipts and the like — I’ve got a huge amount of paper. A few years ago, I bought a personal

Over at UserScape, Ian Landsman has a post about moving from being a worker to being an entrepreneur. He specifically deals with his experience as a programmer, but some of the lessons are worth hearing, no matter what your background: …the best code in the world is meaningless if nobody knows about your product. Code

Wondering how to keep on top of your online presence? You can easily find out whether you, your competitors or your favourite subjects have found their way into Google. By setting up a Google Alert, you can receive free emails that note news, blog and website mentions of anything you desire. You can limit how

If you want to send commercial email, you need to comply with CAN-SPAM. By commercial email, I mean email that involves more than a response to a previous message from a contact, prospect or client. Be careful not to send unwanted commercial email or you could end up in big trouble.   Under CAN-SPAM, you

I recently stumbled on a guide to becoming a better negotiator. Although it’s actually targeted at people seeking financial capital, it’s got some interesting information about conflict, conflict resolution, negotiation styles and negotiation goals. I can see that it would help with negotiating consulting fees. Posts related to negotiation: Consulting Fee Guide.

Fee negotiation remains a hot topic. Once you’ve gone through the process of setting your consulting fees, you may still run into prospective or existing clients who want to haggle over price. A client recently asked me to cut my fee by about 20 percent. Rather than refusing, I said that I’d be happy to