The Deal that Defined 2011

After some consulting for a former company dried up, the end of 2010 was looking a little worrisome.  Without a long runway of funds, I needed to find paying work quickly.  When you're plugging along on a hourly contract, it's easy to slip back into the salary mentality:  "Focus on what you need to do today."  Problem is, you can suddenly find yourself without income.

Earlier in the year, I happened to make a connection with an old coworker of mine.  Turns out his firm needed a guy like me to help them out.  I made a pitch back in May and we had off and on conversations over email for months with little results.  Time was bleeding into December, and things were getting desperate.  At this point I was even contacted to do "generic" java development on web stuff.  None of that is my forte.  It also paid about 1/3 of what I was used to making.  It was a very sad time.  I didn't want to end up being an average tech contractor for average pay, working on any application in any business vertical.  I worked way too hard to become somewhat of an expert in the financial space to toss that knowledge away.  But I was going to be broke, which can easily trump pride in my world.

Then it happened.  A call any entrepreneur would welcome.  Something like this "Listen, we need you and your product as soon as possible.  We have a budget for this.  Can you start immediately?"  Turns out keeping in touch with the lead from May finally paid off.  Suddenly it was a race to write up contracts and protect my I.P.  I sold a product & services.  I've never done this before.  It was a crazy time, but finally, my company had a true customer.

So agreeing to a hourly rate for consulting is not terribly difficult.  Pricing a product for monthly use is far more complicated.  In the end I negotiated a variable rate monthly fee, which on it's own wouldn't feed the family, but it started my firm out with REAL product revenue.  Looking back, I'm sure it's worth more than I charge, but that's for the next client!

So the Holiday season of 2010 was begun with cheery outlook.  I learned a lesson that I suspected, but got to experience it first hand:  Enterprise software has a very long sales cycle!!  Taking that knowledge, 2011 started with making a handful of new leads, with the thought that any work coming from them can be at least 12 months.  In the meantime, I was off building up my product while implementing it at a client.  Things were on the right path.