Around the World 2018 — Consulting, Speaking, Thinking
This was really productive year. 11 conferences, 8 workshops and bunch of on-site consulting in various companies from corporations like Microsoft to small startups. 2018 is almost over, no more conferences and workshops are scheduled for December and it’s time to celebrate holidays with my kids and summarise this year. If you follow me on Twitter or here on Medium, or if you heard at least one of my talks at my Youtube Channel, you probably know that I am an independent consultant and I work with various companies both remotely and on-site, developing cutting edge products in Web/Mobile/AR/VR/IoT fields. I also teach workshops around the globe both at conferences and at clients offices. If you need such a workshop or consulting, you can reach me through my website. In this blog post, I won’t talk about which conference was the best this year, cause all of them were really cool, but I will describe a life from independent consultant and speaker perspective. And I will be honest with you. There will be good parts and the bad or confusing parts.
I’ve been a consultant for quite a while, but moving from being employed and doing occasional gigs to being 100% consultant was a tough decision to make and frankly speaking, at first I worked with a company that gave me client leads and managed whole pitching process. So 2017 was not so different from being full time employed. 2018 is the year when it all changed. And here where I start with good parts of being an independent consultant.
The Good parts
✅ Being able to choose your projects and tech
This one is the best part of being an independent consultant. When being employed you are limited to developing a specific product. Even if it’s super engaging and you use the best technologies out there in the market (which is usually not the case), you cannot completely change the project unless you change your job. You may be able to change the project to some degree but it is still limited by company business.
When you are consulting you are able to take only projects that you believe in or projects which use technologies you like. And sometimes when looking for projects, you can find pure gold. Like for example healthcare apps oriented to make patient lives better or apps that help kids sports clubs to raise money for equipment. These businesses in addition to being cool startups to work for also gave me that emotional feeling that you make the world a better place.
✅ Never ending learning
Being a consultant means you need to learn a lot and be aware of what is going on in the industry. For me, it’s Web, Mobile, AR, VR and IoT and sometimes it’s too much to process. But I like this. I like learning lots of new stuff and having answers to problems on intersections of these technologies.
You can say, — “it doesn’t matter if you are a consultant or not, you still can learn”. True, but being able to work on various projects gives you more in-depth perception of what is used in industry and don’t forget that you interact with lots of senior developers some of which have more knowledge than you on some specific field, that you might want to learn.
If I can compare the amount I’ve learned in this year It will probably be 5 times more than when I worked full time for a company.
✅ Flexible hours and remote working
No 9 -5 office hours. At least for me. One of the reasons I chose this lifestyle is because I didn’t want to spend time in the office or commuting to the office when I can spend some time productively. Speaking of being productive while working remotely I wrote a blog post early this year so check it out.
It’s true that I don’t work remotely all the time and occasionally travel to clients offices for workshops or on-site consultation, but If I would have worked at client offices, It would probably be too much travelling, which as my friends say I already do too much.
The Bad and confusing parts
❌ Uncertainty
Good things come with a price so there are also bad things based on such flexibility. Being an independent consultant means that you are uncertain if you will have project in a month or two and you need to plan accordingly. Open saving account “just in case” if you client does not pay (never happened to me) or project, you are working on unexpectedly closes(that did happen). Of course this also needs to be reflected in your agreements with clients, but even when you have these agreements and have a saving account “just in case”, things can sometimes go wrong and you need to be emotionally prepared for that. And regardless of how ready you are, it is a stress both for yourself and your family.
❌ Pitching and looking for clients
Looking for clients is not an easy task so I can’t say that I’ve found a certain way to find perfect clients. Maybe also because I tend to take only part-time clients, having around 3 clients in the same time. Some people say it’s constant context switching and that it’s unmanageable, but I like it that way. I decided to work that way after one client I have worked for, unexpectedly closed the project and I was just in the middle of conference travel weeks, so I had about 1.5 months without any projects. I am pretty sure that it can be handled also in client agreement having some kind of early notice clause, but I was never a sales person so I haven’t figured how to do it properly. Maybe you need to be a bit of a sales person when you are an independent consultant.
⚠️ Bookkeeping
When you are an independent consultant, you basically in charge of everything, so bookkeeping is one of those things. While typically you hire a bookkeeper to deal with all tax related things, still you need to manage things in a different way. I usually pay tax bi-monthly. That basically means, that I need to plan deducting part of income for future tax payment. And it’s not only that or the fact you need to send all your receipts to a bookkeeper. Every client is different. One pays immediately, other after 30 days, etc. So you need to be aware of all of that and plan accordingly.
While it is a bad thing from one perspective, but personally I think it teaches you to be more organised and to plan everything ahead of time. Not only business related, but in general.
⚠️ Time management is tricky
Time management is different. Totally different. And you need to be able to manage your time in a perfect way if you need to succeed as an independent consultant. If you have home office as I do, you need to plan being there for important meetings, If you are on the go, you need to have good wifi. If you are speaking at a conference, you need to plan when to work for a client and sometimes suppress an urge to go sightseeing in favour of working.
Public Speaking
After we’ve gone through good and confusing parts of being an independent consultant let’s understand how public speaking looks like. Especially for a self-employed person.
The Good parts
✅ Travelling
As I wrote in the beginning of this blog post I travelled a lot this year . In average it’s about flying every 3 weeks or so. It’s amazing how many beautiful places I’ve seen this year.
I usually arrive a day or two before the conference/workshop just in case if my flight will be delayed. This year I’ve been only to Europe and US, but next year I will be also travelling to Asia. For now only to React India conf, but will see. I actually want to go to China, Japan, Australia, Singapore so if you hear about conferences there that have open CFPs there, let me know. In addition to just sightseeing I tend to do trail running, hiking and recently also started to look for scuba diving since I’m really into this last half a year.
✅ Meeting people
There are some really smart and cool people I met at conferences and since they also travel a lot we usually meet once in a couple of months. And this list of awesome people I meet just continue to grow. That is regarding fellow speakers. But in addition to them there are really cool folks among attendees that I would like to see one day speaking at conferences. Cause basically everyone can do it. Everyone can share their knowledge to the community and teach people.
✅ Helping and contributing
Speaking of teaching and helping people. It’s a feeling of accomplishment and joy, when you hear people come with you with a problem bugging them for long time and you solve it for them. Or you explain technology to someone eager to learn it for quite some time. I like that feeling in addition to the fact teaching at workshops or conferences is an emotionally rewarding experience, because people appreciate what you are doing.
✅ Learning new things
Attending conferences is not only about speaking. It’s also about learning new stuff, discussing various topics etc. Every conference I’ve been to brought tremendous value to my learning process.
The bad and confusing parts
❌ Being disconnected from your family
I have three kids and two of them are 2 and 5 years old. Travelling every three weeks can be emotionally hard both for me and my kids. I compensate my travel time to my kids when I return back home. I work only in evenings which is perfect for my clients because it’s basically US time zones and perfect for my kids since I can spend time with them. In average I can say that I spend more time with them than I spent while I worked from the office and commuted to work, but even when having all that great time and fun while travelling and speaking, I miss my kids very much.
The part that was super hard to me is that because of one of the conferences I had to miss my son’s art exhibition, because they moved an exhibition date to conference dates. And it was already couple of weeks before the conference.
❌ Health
When I travelled less last year, I used to have a daily workout routine that I could not continue this year. Which really upsets me. I am in the process of creating ultimate traveller workout routine, and I will see how it goes. If it will work I will share with you.
Workout is not the only thing that is affected by so much travelling. Keeping diet is much harder with all that cool food around, sleep schedule is not stable because of time zone shifts and jet lags or working late at nights to keep up with deadlines. The fact I travel does not mean I don’t have deadlines with my clients.
❌ Expenses
Expenses of individual consulting are a huge problem when we talk about public speaking. People tend to say — well that’s how you get clients. Not really. Most of my clients didn’t come from meeting them at conferences, but mostly by referrals. It’s true that when public speaking people know more about you and you have better chances to get awesome project. But there are better and less costly ways to generate leads. So speaking at conferences is not for getting more clients. It’s a myth.
You can say, — “ well but conference pay for travel and accommodation”. True. but you usually get accommodation for 3 nights tops and travel. When you travel across the Atlantic, you usually want to arrive several days before so you won’t be completely destroyed by Jet Lag. And that’s only the tip of an iceberg. Every country is different and expenses in Poland are even not close to expenses in San Francisco. And you need to take this in account. When travelling you spend on food and uber/car rental as a basic thing. Flying to the conference and back is a dead time that you cannot work 100% productively. Airplane wifi helps, but not so much. Preparation for the talk will take several days of your time and no one will compensate you on that time that you could have worked for the client. And of course, there is a sightseeing part. Expenses for museums and activities you do while travelling. But I won’t count that. You can say they are not crucial and I will agree.
I planned to count how much I’ve spent on expenses this year, but I guess I have to go through all my expenses and figure out what was absolute crucial and what was not. I can say for sure that it’s a 5 digits figure USD.
Summary and takeaways
I promised honest blog post about how my public speaking and consulting life looks like and here it is. Life of independent consultant is great. Life of public speaker is also great. And I absolutely love it. Combination of both is tricky, You need to take into account various things. And to be honest I am considering for the next year if being independent consultant will work for me or better to work as Developer Advocate or Technology Evangelist/ Dev Relation for some cool company which is focused on developer experience or better architecture solutions. These positions usually involve lots of learning, experimenting with new technologies and architectures and lots of public speaking. So basically the same thing I do but with more stability.
