Goodbye, Lingnu

[Nadav Har'El]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011, Shachar Shemesh wrote about "Goodbye, Lingnu":
> I'm sorry to announce that another Linux consulting company is biting
> the dust.

Hi Shachar, this is sad to hear :( Good luck in your new job at LiveU.

It occurs to me that if 250 shekels per hour sounds (as you explain in
your blog) too much, then maybe the problem isn't with this number, but
with the basic idea of charging for hours.

Let me explain: Imagine that I am looking for a consultant to set up
a mail server in my company, to create a online store for me, or
whatever (you can replace those examples by something closer to your
domain). Imagine that I find company A, and company B, as possible
candidates, both highly recommended (so I can assume the quality of
their work is similar). I'd be really naive to only care about the price
per hour that each company charges - maybe A takes 250 shekels/hour, but
can do the job in 10 hours, and company B takes 100 shekels/hour, but will
take 100 hours to do the same job? Wouldn't I be stupid to pick company
B just because of their lower hourly rate?

So maybe the key to winning over your competitors isn't to charge less
per hour, but rather to complete the job in less time. (you can of
course hide this will all sorts of creative marketing)

You can complete the job in less time if you stop thinking about selling
time, and instead think about which jobs you can take which will allow you
to *reuse* things you learned, and code you wrote, while working for previous
clients. For example, if you just finished setting up a web front for a
grocery store - and you developped all sorts of scripts and expertese to do
so - go and find another grocery store as a client, because you can now do
their job in half the time.

Of course, this is intuition. I didn't actually try to run a company like
this, and didn't put my money where my mouth is. So maybe I'm all wrong here.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                    Monday, Nov 14 2011, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |are not my own.