EP 91: Day 613 of Independent Acumatica Consulting (Podcast)

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Transcript

This is a follow-up to Episode #33: Day 1 of Independent Acumatica Consulting back on November 30, 2020.

I’ve been doing independent consulting for almost 2 years now.

Wow, time flies.

And, this school year, I’ve decided to make a change to the way that I schedule my work.

Why “school year”? I know, even though I haven’t been in school for a very long time, I still think in “school years” rather than in “calendar years”.

Also, since I started independent consulting in the Fall of 2020, counting years is the same thing as counting school years.

So, for the rest of this Podcast episode, every time you hear the word “year”, I actually mean “school year”.

Last year was my first year doing independent consulting full-time. For the first year, I was part-time as I was helping my kids with their online school during the pandemic.

So, even though I’ve been doing independent consulting for almost two years, I only have one year of full-time experience to reflect on. This Summer I reflected on how things went this past year and I came up with three main points.

Point number one: This past year, I continued to do everything on a prepaid hourly basis. I really like doing things this way because I don’t have to deal with the overhead of invoicing and chasing down unpaid bills. Also, clients get to make all of their payments with a credit card and, so far, everyone has been happy to pay with credit card. As far as consuming hours goes, I’ve received a lot of positive feedback about the My Sherpa portal where I document my work, including the number of hours consumed by task and by day, screenshots, write-ups, and screen recordings of any meetings that we have. All of this has worked out really well so I plan to continue doing things on a prepaid hourly basis this next year.

Point number two: I continue to enjoy focusing on reporting in Acumatica. Many people might have become bored by now with such a narrow focus, but I must really like reporting because I still really enjoy focusing on reporting in Acumatica. So no changes there either.

Point number three: This is where I’m going to make a change. This past year, I scheduled all meetings using my Calendly link. This was nice because Calendly automatically sends meeting invites with Zoom links which made scheduling easy from a technical standpoint. But, from a workflow standpoint, it was challenging because I wound up with too many clients that wanted to do recurring work.

So, for this next year, I’ve decided to schedule days instead of hours. This will favor clients who want more than just a random one hour phone call every now and then.

I keep one day each week reserved for overhead tasks and working on my online video training course. That leaves four days per week available for consulting work.

In order to schedule a day, I’ll now be requiring a minimum commitment of 4 hours. I’ll still be charging on an hourly basis like I’ve been doing, but the minimum commitment for a day is now 4 hours.

If you don’t have enough work for 4 hours on a day, I can still work on something for you, but I’ll need to charge a minimum of 4 hours. So, let’s say I work on something for you and it only takes me 2 hours and you don’t have anything else for me to work on that day. Even though I only worked 2 hours, I’ll need to charge 4 hours.

On a day, I’ll have capacity for 4-6 hours of billable work. So, if I work less than 4 hours on a day, I’ll charge 4 hours. If I work 4 hours on a day, I’ll charge 4 hours. If I work 5 hours on a day, I’ll charge 5 hours. If I work 6 hours on a day, I’ll charge 6 hours.

So I’m charging by the hour, but requiring a minimum of 4 hours per day.

Since I’m in Ohio, on Eastern Time in the United States, I’m going to kick-off each consulting day with a Zoom call between 3pm and 5pm Eastern Time. Hopefully that’s a good window of time for people in the United States since the other US time zones are all behind Eastern Time. That will allow us to work on something together on the Zoom call and allow you to outline other things for me to work on the following day. Then I’ll work on your stuff the following day until my next Zoom call between 3pm and 5pm Eastern Time the next day. Our Zoom call counts toward the 4 hour minimum since it’s within the 24 hour period that I consider to be a day.

Alright, hopefully that makes sense and hopefully this change will work for you.

Since I’m now scheduling days instead of hours, I’m not going to rely on Calendly as heavily as I did in the past. My availability will be listed at AUGForums.com/Availability and you can email me if you’d like to book a day, with the 4 hour minimum that we discussed earlier.

Selfishly, I’d like to be able to book myself for this entire upcoming year, but I realize that’s not practical because there is no way that you’d want to schedule a day with me 4 months from now or 8 months from now. So, AUGForums.com/Availability will only show something like the next 4 upcoming weeks.

I’m going to prioritize clients who want to commit to recurring days, something like two days a week, one day a week, or one day every other week. But, the minimum requirement is just one day with a minimum of 4 hours on that day.

I want to point out that I do understand that you don’t really care about hours. You want tasks to get done. You aren’t buying hours, you are buying results. You want to know how much it will cost to create that Report or that Dashboard.

But I find that reporting is always a back-and-forth process. In my experience, when it comes to reporting, it doesn’t work well to take requirements, give an estimate, get the estimate approved, go into a dark cave for a while, then emerge with the finished product. Once you see the “finished product”, 95% of the time you’ll want me to make changes to it once you see what it looks like with actual numbers. That’s normal because that’s the nature of reporting.

Because of the back-and-forth nature of reporting, I don’t like to spend more than a handful of hours working on something independently before showing you my progress because I know that showing you my progress will likely alter what you’d like me to do as next steps.

So, that’s another reason why I’m moving to days rather than hours. For recurring work, we can use the Zoom call at the beginning of the day, between 3pm and 5pm, to recap what I’ve completed so far, then you give me a potentially modified list of priorities that you want me to work on for the rest of the 24 hour period.

I’m also making this change based on my experience working with clients full-time this past year and I have some data to back this up. I worked with 63 total clients this past year, that’s 63 different companies that use Acumatica. But I only did more than 10 hours of work for 17 of those clients.

This is interesting to me for two reasons:

First, when I look at the list of clients that I did less than 10 hours of work for, I don’t think that I had a measurable impact on their business. I created a report, provided some training, etc., but I wasn’t able to have a measurable impact on their business in such a short amount of time. When I look at the first client that I did more than 10 hours of work for, that just happens to be the first client where I think that I was able to have a measurable impact on that client’s business. That client was also a client that I worked with on a recurring basis.

The second reason why this is interesting to me is that 17 divided 63 equals about 27% which is not too far off from 20%. This is always fascinating to me because of something called the Pareto Principle which is also known as the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule says that roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. When applied to businesses, it says that typically 80% of sales come from 20% of clients. Applying this to the list of 17 clients that I feel I had a measurable impact on their business, that’s about 20% of my client list. It’s always interesting to see the Pareto Principle appear in the real world.

So, by scheduling days rather than hours this next year, I’ll be working with less total clients, but a greater percentage of my time will have a measurable impact on client’s businesses.

Also, I’m hoping that this change will lead to more recurring work. As I look at the list of 17 clients that I did more than 10 hours of work with this past year, most of them worked with me on a recurring basis: once a week, once every couple of weeks, etc. Even though my minimum is only 4 hours on a day, I’m hoping that most clients will want to work with me on a recurring number of days every month.

In order to encourage recurring work, I’m going to prioritize clients who commit to recurring days every month. You won’t lose your recurring slot as long as you stay committed to it and I’ll find a way to keep your slot booked on the AUGForums.com/Availiability page until you no longer need it.

The last point I’d like to make is about when this will start. There are still a number of clients that have prepaid hours and they are used to working with me on an hourly basis. So I want to give those clients time to use their hours on an hourly basis. For that reason, I’m looking to start this new method of scheduling days rather than hours on November 01, 2022. That gives existing clients a few months to adjust.

I’m sure that there are things that I haven’t thought of yet. If you have questions about any of this, please feel free to send me an email.

And thank you to all 63 of you clients that I worked with this past year. I look forward to continuing to work with many of you this coming year and beyond.