Consulting companies, like Falafel Software, during their start up years do everything they can to get as many accounts as possible and fill the pipeline with work for all their developers and architects.  It is a matter of stability and security to know that the pipe is full and work is available and secure for at least 6 months into the future. To ask for more than 6 months of security I always thought is crazy especially in our beloved Software industry in the USA and especially in the Silicon Valley.  We, at Falafel, on the other hand have been very fortunate for the last 5 years.  The company has grown substantially every year while we’re having fun and enjoying the latest and greatest of technologies.
Once a small company reaches a level of maturity and decent number of accounts, I find a lot of them prefer to only handle bigger companies for business.  So you start with the Mom & Pop shops, then you get a couple of SMBs, transition to medium size, and all of a sudden find yourself contracting to Fortune 500 then Fortune 100 with some luck, personality, connections, hard work and quality people.
I remember the days when people used to call and say “Hi Lino, I am Mr. Foo and looking for someone to help me with a bug in my Delphi code, can you help? How much do you charge? How long will t take you to fix it?
I usually replied “I need to know the nature of the problem first”.  Then they said “Sure I will send you everything, I just wanted to know how much and how long it will take to fix it before I send you anything”
I know it might sound funny but it is the truth about consulting with individuals or very small companies. Budget and resources do not come easy and everyone has to watch their pennies.You end up fixing code, cleaning up code, recommending better architecture and all of a sudden the customer is sweating.  “Why did you fix line # 14, I only asked you to look in the first 10 lines of code only?”

Anyway, you get the picture. Life goes on and you find yourself bidding on multi-million dollar projects for fortune 500 companies where you control the project as long as you deliver on milestones and everyone is happy. You end up making a lot of money and the customer is a huge reference for other major projects to other fortune 500 companies.
Soon after getting the company completely saturated with major projects and employees are working on multi projects at the same time because we can’t find enough quality people to hire in time, you get the call from another Mr. Foo, “Hi Lino, can you look into my ASP.NET code and tell me why it is not working?” How much do you charge? How long will it take you to make the code work? :)

My blog here is about a very dangerous and subtle change in any small company that can cause serious consequences:
To Small Business or not to Small Business?
Some senior and very respected members of my team would vote NO on taking this kind of projects and I would totally respect their call on that as we are faced with several dilemmas, first, we have no resources to place on that kind of projects, second, it is not worth the headache, for $1000 probably, this customer will take most of your time for several days by asking for status every 2 hours and questioning why did issue 2 take 1 hour more than issue 1 and stuff like that where it will cost the company more time to reply to these issues than the revenue generated.

Ok, if you read this blog till here you probably already know what my recommendation is about the subject, well, you are wrong! :)

Most of my multi-million dollar deals all started years ago with 2 to 5 hours of consulting authorized via a very small PO.  I did my job right, the customer was happy and thenext project was on its way from same customer. 6 months later we have 2 people full time working with the customer.  5 years later, we have 7 people working full time at customer site that went from start up to a half a billion dollar company.
I remember sitting in the cafeteria in Frankfurt, Germany after a session I gave at the Borland conference in late 90s when a gentleman approached me asking if he can “pick my brain” about a COM+ issue he was having. I accepted of course and ended up having a 2 hour chit-chat and coding fest.  We got the problem solved, he bought me a drink and was very happy. I was happy to help as well.Later that week   I was hired by his company (one of the biggest financial companies in Europe) to help with the architecture of their new .NET based systems.

What I am trying to say, don’t forget how you got to where you are today!
One of the main reasons I have so many of these great accounts today is because when these accounts were small, none of the major consulting firms (big names) would even bother taking the time.
So I say “YES” if you are Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, EarthBound Farms, Accenture, etc… welcome to Falafel Software (All these are customers already :) ) but if you are Mr. Foo and need help making your company the next Microsoft or the next Hewlett Packard, I say “YES” as well, we would love to help you out. Just, please don’t ask me “how much and how long?” before I see your problem :)

Cheers
Lino