Day Two Cloud 084: So You Want To Be A Consultant

Today’s Day Two Cloud gets into consulting. We’ve gotten a lot of listener questions about the consulting world. How do you start a consulting business or join a firm? What does the job actually entail? Is it a good job to have? How do you build a client base? We’ve got a couple of guests who have answers. We’re joined by Michael Jenkins, Sr. Systems Reliability Engineer at Managed Kaos; and Anthony Nocentino, Enterprise Architect at Centino Systems and Pluralsight author. We discuss: * How someone gets into consulting * The differences between consulting and contracting * Pros and cons of independent consulting vs. working for a firm * Issues such as scope-of-work and billing * Dealing with scope creep * Closing out a project (it’s hard to say goodbye) * Getting paid * Taking care of yourself * More Show Links: @managedkaos – Michael Jenkins on Twitter @nocentino – Anthony Nocentino on Twitter CentinoSystems.com Transcript: [00:00:05.540] – Ned Welcome to Day Two Cloud. Today, we’re talking about consulting. That’s right. We’ve actually gotten a lot of questions about this. How do you start a consulting business? What do you do when you are consulting? And hopefully we’ve got some answers for you in this episode. We’ve got two great guests that have a ton of experience in this regard. What stuck out to you about what they talked about, Ethan? [00:00:29.510] – Ethan Man there’s a lot of things.If I had to pick one thing, I think I would focus on our section where we talked about how do you get more clients? [00:00:39.800] How do you get more work, because it’s one thing to start consulting, because someone says something and and you’re like, I can do that job. But then it’s like, oh, that project’s done, I need more work. And we dive into that. And I thought that was a great part of our discussion. But there was a it was all great to be fair. Ned. [00:00:56.030] – Ned Yeah, this was we could have gone on for hours and I was sad to cut them off when we did. But you’re really going to enjoy this conversation. We’ve got Michael Jenkins and Anthony Nocentino and of course, me and Ethan. So what more could you ask for? Enjoy this episode. [00:01:10.370] Michael Jenkins, welcome to Day Two Cloud. Why don’t you tell the fine folks out there a little bit about yourself and what you do? [00:01:18.860] – Michael Thanks for having me, Ned. My name is Michael Jenkins. I’m a systems reliability engineer. I work mostly in the fintech and media and entertainment space. My specialty is continuous and continuous integration and continuous delivery and automation. [00:01:34.500] – Ned Awesome. Awesome. And our other guest is Anthony Nocentino, I think I said that right. Anthony, welcome to this show. Tell us a little about yourself. What do you do? [00:01:43.940] – Anthony You totally got that right. Hey, everyone, I’m Anthony Nocentino. You know, I’m an enterprise architect and founder of Nocentino Systems and also a Pluralsight author. As a consultant, I specialize in system architecture and performance, mostly in transportation, legal and in the education industry. [00:02:00.260] – Ned All right. And as you alluded to, this episode is all about the wild and weird world of consulting. So why don’t we start there? Let’s start there with a brief story. How about how each of us got into consulting to begin with?