NYCPHP Meetup

[Kristina Anderson]

Ed,

More than 90% of what I do is from my office here in my apartment, 
although on rare occasion I will work onsite if requested and if in the 
mood to get out a bit.
Gives me an excuse to wear my fancy threads, right?

My clients are small businesses and if they could afford to pay me 
$3,000 a week, I know most of them would gladly do so.  But in this 
economy, most of them scrape to come up with $2,000 a week.  I am deeply 
suspicious of consultants who claim to bill out over $12,000 a month 
since I have been around and know the deal...

$100 an hour is great but in many cases, you're not even approaching 40 
hours or even 20 hours a week in billings.  Any programmer should be 
good enough with math to see that consistent billing of 40 hours per 
week and less time spent on marketing is the key to greater monthly income.

Kristina


On 4/2/2011 3:09 PM, Edgar Reyes wrote:
> Kristina,
> Ok now I get where you are coming from, see we where taking about 2
> different situations, I very rarely take jobs that require me to go into the
> clients office for X amount of time every day.
>
> I like to take projects I will give the client an estimated date of
> completion and update him accordingly. So if it takes me 3 weeks or 3 months
> the quote that I gave him stands unless he asks for extra features. I live
> in Long Island so for me to go into the city for less then $75 per hour is
> not really worth it cause I have to account for the 2.5 hour commute time
> every day that's over 12 per week that I'm loosing, I know a lot of people
> don't count their commute time cause that's just part of the job, but I take
> everything into account when taking a job, hey that time is time that I
> could be spending with my family and that's worth a lot more then $75 per
> hour.
>
> But again to each its own, it seems like you are doing well and are happy
> with your rates and many others here who are charging more are doing well
> and happy also. So I guess the lesson here is that there is a market for
> every one. One thing though, one reason why I don't charge less and always
> try to stand my ground is because some time back when I used to charged less
> some companies actually wouldn't hire me because they thought that since I
> wasn't charging them as much I probably was not as good!! Go figure, ones I
> raised my rates I got more jobs :) people are strange.
>
> ER