Just recommending a couple of books to you:

Personal Networking - Mike Cope ## A book entirely devoted to building your network of contacts with independent consultancy in mind.

The 7 C's of Consulting - Mike Cope ## Excellent book. The author has a very practical, new age philosophy on consulting. Ie, he's not a ruthless businessmen. He understands that your clients are you business and your success is determined by your relations with them.

The only type of book on consulting I'd be careful of is ones written by programmers. Most programmers are programmers because we like writing code and solving problems. When you're working on open source projects, or writing your own code you can do things entirely your own way, usually the best way :) Sadly in business you have to work within the constraints of your client and a lot of programmers fail in this respect because they're not flexible.

You need to be the type of person that companies/people feel they can approach with a problem and get a friendly and helpful response. Would you want to seek out a firm that will make you feel uncomfortable? Charge you through the nose without giving you solid solutions? A lot of consultancies are failing because they're like that. There's so many jokes about consultants due to the nature of the business these days. Look at this one.. :)

A man walks into a consultancy firm and inquires about the rates for a study. "Well, we usually structure the project up front, and charge $50 for three questions', replied the consultant. "Isn't that awfully steep?" asked the man. "Yes", replied the consultant, "And what was your third question?"

Would you want this type of person to solve your problems?

Those books talk a lot more about all these very important and overlooked aspects of becoming an independent consultant.
These are all important aspects to factor into your pricing scheme etc.

I'm in the process of starting up my own consultancy. What I'll be doing for pricing is providing a free on site assessment of the problem with advice/analysis of the problem and a follow up with how I would solve it and how much it would cost.
I'd then provide them with free technical support shortly after in case they had problems with my system. I'd also fix it for free if it broke down since these things would be MY fault. My job is to solve their problem, not write code and head out the door.

Hope this is of some help

Thanks all, and i know its going off topic, but I think its important to have a handle on the business end...

that way i can concentrate on whats important! Programming!

Tough questions, and all of them towards OT.

I don't have an answer for any of them, but just a few days ago I came across this article on how to determine prices. It may give you some useful ideas.

Actually, I think Joel's article is more about how not to determine prices :-)

duff

The easy answer is this: make a contract that benefits you as much as possible, and get them to put down as much as they will. Don't worry about the client because they'll tell you when they want to negotiate something.

The hard answer is: it depends on the the client, and you need to get an attorney who knows about these things. If you aren't hard up for business, you can play tougher. If you really need money, you'll have to agree to things that are more in favor of the client.

I wish I could find this perl program I used to have (have only, I didn't write it) that acted as the contract. It spit out the postscript for the thing you printed. It was more of a novelty, but it impressed a couple of clueful clients.