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by napoleond
4398 days ago
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> Would clients delay payment for their attorney? Yes, routinely! That's what Thomas and Patrick are getting at. For better or worse (and trust me, I've felt the "worse" side of it lately+) companies will, for a plethora of boring and stupid reasons, not always get their payables out on time. It's completely normal. They're not trying to screw you. It just happens. You can choose not to work with those companies, or to expend your energy toward making sure your clients always pay you right away, but that's a poor use of your time as a consultant. What you should do instead is: (a) charge more and (b) consider adding interest on late payments. Lawyers and accountants do that, and then they don't really care if you're late paying because they've been charging you favourable (to them) interest. + I'm in the process of spinning down the consultant thing and getting a "normal" job again for a while, largely because of cash flow errors. It was one of several hard lessons learned, but that's partly why I bothered to comment: it's not realistic to expect good clients to change the way they do business for you, so you need to understand, accept, and plan for the reality of stuff like delayed payment. |
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To a one, the most lucrative clients all have contracts reviewed by house counsel, and many have purchasing departments trained to do nothing but review contracts. Anything remotely complicated you put in a contract is (a) going to get stripped out and (b) potentially going to add weeks to the amount of time it takes to get a master agreement in place; more than once, a few weeks delay in legal was all it took for the window of opportunity for a contract to pass.
At any rate: you are exactly right. Have you ever seen a thread where Patrick, me, or some other established consultant harangued HN about raising their rates, and about not setting rates based on some double-digit-percentage uplift of what their last full-time job was? This is why.