I’ve been doing Agile for too many years to feel like I’ve learned something unless I identify it with a proper retrospective. I’m about to start an FTE job, and my consulting will obviously drop way off (but not entirely). So here we go:

What went well

• I passionately loved the independence. I could fire a client when I thought they were doing something that was stupid/unethical. I didn’t have to account to anyone for my time at conferences. I made it to all the weird middle-of-the-day school stuff. My spouse was in the hospital for 11 days, and I could absorb that without talking about it.
• It really forced me to get better at negotiation, scoping, planning, and self-management. No one was going to save me by telling me the priorities of projects — that was on me.
• I learned a lot about building a personal and professional reputation. It matters that I blog. It’s important to follow up on business cards and connections. I never advertised my services except by telling people they were available, and I had stages where I turned away work.
• I discovered moxie as a selling point. Not unreasonable bragging, but people are happier when they spend a lot of money on someone who seems confident about themselves and what needs to happen. I would have guessed that would be a turn-off, but no, that mostly applies to earlier stages in a career.
• I got to work on some kick-ass projects and refine what parts of writing and projects I’m good at.
• I got to go to so many conferences and learn so much stuff about things that I never would have thought I cared about, but it all feeds into the hopper and then a week or a month or six months later, it turns out that data was valuable.

What needed improvement

• Cashflow. Sweet fancy moses, cashflow. This year to date, I have pulled in about $30k and gone $10k into debt. I had two contracts die on me after I had turned down other work to take them, and a client that paid Net-45….ish. If I reminded them. As a sole earner for a family of four, including two teenagers, this is not super. If I knew I was going to make that persistently, I would adjust our style of living, but I kept optimistically thinking that the universe would not screw me over again, right? And this was just a little bump. It wasn’t.
• Relatedly: taxes. I did not get that set up as soon as I should have and I will spend some time untangling it.
• I needed some things in my contracts that weren’t there: a kill fee/clause. A late fee. I racked up about $700 in late/overdraft fees because I thought people were going to pay me when they said they were. This is not a malicious problem, it’s a problem because I had already exhausted my buffer cash.
• I need to keep working on how I track time. There is a lot of my job that is basically talking to people, wandering around thinking, and staring at the ceiling. It’s legit work, but I feel weird charging people for ‘I mowed my lawn and also thought about your data structure problem for two hours’.
• I need to figure out how to pay myself for loss-leader/reputation building stuff, like blogging and mentoring. If I classify it as “not-work”, it eats the leisure time I need to recharge, interact with my family, and sew nifty dresses. If I classify it as work, then it’s unpaid work, which has a lot of emotional stuff going on.

Action items

If I do consulting full-time again, here are some things that make it more likely to work out for me.

• Start with 6 months of cash buffer instead of 3. This is because I don’t have any other income stream
• Write my own contract (well, hire a lawyer to do it), and make sure my clauses about kill fees, late fees, and payment schedule get into whatever contract I sign.
• Hire a tax accountant sooner rather than later.
• Work on adding passive income to smooth out bumps.
• Factor in equipment costs and less-obvious travel costs in my calculations (if you take 50 flights a year, you wear out luggage, even the nice stuff) (I’m using a 3-year old laptop, and software costs money.)