Besaged

Lead with your strongest suit. Clients hire consultants for their expertise, so develop a niche in which you can excel and focus on it. When you take on work in too many areas, you dilute your expertise in any one.
You have not arrived, and you never will. Always keep learning new things. The industry evolves rapidly, so as soon as you stop learning, you’re obsolete. Experts don’t know everything, but they know what they don’t know and where they need to improve.
It’s not the theory, it’s the execution. Every methodology can be implemented badly, but the right people can make any system work to their advantage. The key is knowing when to follow the rules and when to break them.
Don’t implement technology — solve problems. When the question is “how do we get to this technology?” the question is wrong. A new technology may provide a solution to a specific problem, but it should never be an end in itself, and it must be suitable to the client’s business.
Every tool has its purpose, but no tool should be used for everything. No technology is “better” or “worse” unless you answer the question “for what purpose?”
Your clients aren’t important to your business; they are your only business. Always do right by clients because making them successful is what will make you successful.
Not every client is worth keeping. Not all business is good business. You need to be careful about with whom you get in bed.
Cast your bread upon the waters. Give away some work, and much more business will return to you.
Skill performs the job, but reputation gets the job. Give just as much attention to building your reputation as you do to improving your abilities.
Be tough on yourself, so your clients won’t have to be. Own up to your mistakes. Organize yourself for productivity. Fight procrastination.
Cut yourself some slack. You will screw up. You can never choose or create the perfect solution. Sometimes, you will be late. You cannot work every waking hour. Give yourself permission to be wrong, so you can admit it when it happens. And give yourself a life, so you’ll have something worth working for.
Success requires trust in both directions. Trust requires working on the relationship with your client. It’s like a marriage, except that either party can leave when they want to — so okay, it is like a marriage.
Honesty rocks because it builds trust. Even when your client wants you to be dishonest, tell the truth. If you’re always truthful when it hurts, your client will never doubt your truthfulness.
Take care of your business — nobody else will. Do not let your clients slip into the habit of paying late. Make sure your rates are high enough to keep you afloat yet reasonable enough for the value you provide. Don’t ignore all the little details of running a business, which include tracking and reporting hours, choosing insurance policies, and managing invoices and receivables.
If you’re doing this for the money, you’re psychotic — or you will be soon. Money is important, but its flow is highly unpredictable. Consulting is hard work, so you’d better be getting more out of it than a few pesos.
Working without a contract is like skydiving without a parachute. You may be flying now, but it will not end well. If you don’t have a contract, start putting one together now.
Consult thyself. We often get so focused on our clients’ problems that we forget to take our own advice. Periodically, step back from your work and look at yourself and your business as if you were one of your clients. What would you tell them?
Every consulting maxim is wrong, even this one. “Wrong” is too strong a word, but it helps to make the point. More accurately, no consulting maxim is always right. Every situation differs — use your head when applying rules.

Steve Friedl’s So you want to be a consultant…? contains more pithy consulting maxims.

"The best employees are always the most mobile employees."

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:09:22 -0500

“The best employees are always the most mobile employees.”

Five Minutes a Day for Fresh-Baked Bread

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:05:10 -0500

Five Minutes a Day for Fresh-Baked Bread

The 3 Components of Good Web Design - Psdtuts+

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:48:05 -0500

The 3 Components of Good Web Design - Psdtuts+:

This is also a very helpful article when in comes to IA.

A List Apart: Articles: Flexible Fuel: Educating the Client on IA

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:08:15 -0500

A List Apart: Articles: Flexible Fuel: Educating the Client on IA:

This check off list is very useful for project managing a website. I use it all the time. It’s my go-to when deciding what steps to take in which order.

The 7 Harsh Realities of Social Media Marketing

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:05:37 -0500

The 7 Harsh Realities of Social Media Marketing:

Including helpful tips, from an expert in the field.

Embed iPhone and iPod Touch Applications In Your WordPress Blog

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:45:40 -0400

Embed iPhone and iPod Touch Applications In Your WordPress Blog

How To Be a Consultant, a freelancer or an independent contractor | jacquesmattheij.com

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:36:52 -0400

How To Be a Consultant, a freelancer or an independent contractor | jacquesmattheij.com

Shape - CSS template

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:58:29 -0400

Shape - CSS template:

green, asian, one-column

Glyphish

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:58:29 -0400

Glyphish:

Great icons for great iPhone applications

Response to 'Why Social Media Isn't Living Up To...'

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:21:39 -0400

Response to 'Why Social Media Isn't Living Up To...':

It seems that the businesses best suited to the social media environment would be those without the pointless overhead (literally) of an Industrial Age organizational structure, e.g. a “marketing department.”

Most people, when ordered to work towards making their position (and career) redundant, will do a remarkably poor job of it. Perhaps that is why the “re-engineering” is going so slowly?

"“Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and when it works, it commodifies or obsoletes..."

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:33:34 -0400

“

“Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and when it works, it commodifies or obsoletes everything. That’s not to say that there’s no money out there to be had, but the money won’t come from a single, monolithic product line. The days of companies with names like ‘General Electric’ and ‘General Mills’ and ‘General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.

“We will brute-force the problem-space of capitalism in the twenty first century. Our business plan is simple: we will hire the smartest people we can find and put them in small teams. They will go into the field with funding and communications infrastructure—all that stuff we have left over from the era of batteries and film—behind them, capitalized to find a place to live and work, and a job to do. A business to start. Our company isn’t a project that we pull together on, it’s a network of like-minded, cooperating autonomous teams, all of which are empowered to do whatever they want, provided that it returns something to our coffers. We will explore and exhaust the realm of commercial opportunities, and seek constantly to refine our tactics to mine those opportunities, and the krill will strain through our mighty maw and fill our hungry belly. This company isn’t a company anymore: this company is a network, an approach, a sensibility.”

”

- excerpted from Cory Doctorow’s Makers, Part 1 (of 81)