WEBVTT 00:00:00.001 --> 00:00:04.140 Have you ever wanted to get into consulting? Maybe you're seeking the freedom to work on 00:00:04.140 --> 00:00:09.200 whatever project you'd like or gain more control of your time. Many folks see consulting and 00:00:09.200 --> 00:00:13.740 freelancing as the next step in their career, but what do they need to put in place first? 00:00:13.740 --> 00:00:18.400 What are the challenges they might not see coming? Join me as I speak with Reuven Lerner and Casey 00:00:18.400 --> 00:00:24.100 Kinsey, two successful software freelancers, about their journey and their advice. This is 00:00:24.100 --> 00:00:28.240 Talk Python To Me, episode 231, recorded September 11th, 2019. 00:00:28.240 --> 00:00:46.700 Welcome to Talk Python To Me, a weekly podcast on Python, the language, the libraries, the ecosystem, 00:00:46.700 --> 00:00:51.800 and the personalities. This is your host, Michael Kennedy. Follow me on Twitter where I'm @mkennedy. 00:00:51.800 --> 00:00:57.160 Keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talkpython.fm and follow the show on Twitter via 00:00:57.160 --> 00:01:03.560 at talkpython. This episode is brought to you by Linode and Brighter AI. Please check out what 00:01:03.560 --> 00:01:07.880 they're offering during their segments. It really helps support the show. Reuven, Casey, welcome to 00:01:07.880 --> 00:01:12.000 Talk Python To Me. Thank you. Great to be here. Hey, how's it going? Hey guys, it's super to have 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:19.140 you here. This is the topic I'm really excited to cover because it touches on these things that you 00:01:19.140 --> 00:01:23.140 can do to sort of take your career to the next level, which is always something I'm really, 00:01:23.140 --> 00:01:28.080 really excited about. We're going to talk about freelancing, getting into consulting, some of the 00:01:28.080 --> 00:01:33.180 things that you want to do, some of the things you want to avoid, all that kind of stuff. But before we 00:01:33.180 --> 00:01:37.860 get into those, I want to ask you two questions, but not the two questions I normally ask folks because 00:01:37.860 --> 00:01:44.520 there's a different commonality here. So let's start with both of you talking about your podcast 00:01:44.520 --> 00:01:49.320 that you run. I think they're pretty relevant to the conversation. So Reuven, you want to kick us off? 00:01:49.380 --> 00:01:54.060 Tell us about the Freelancer Show. Sure. I'm one of the panelists, I guess I could say the lead host, 00:01:54.060 --> 00:01:57.080 lead panelist on the Freelancer Show. I've been doing it for about four or five years. 00:01:57.080 --> 00:02:02.100 And it's basically a weekly panel discussion, plus occasional guests talking to people about 00:02:02.100 --> 00:02:06.600 how do you create a freelancing career? That's to say, a lot of people are, especially people listening 00:02:06.600 --> 00:02:11.380 to this podcast right now, are excellent at programming. But in order to be a successful 00:02:11.380 --> 00:02:15.860 freelancer, you need to actually have a lot of business skills too. And so we try to talk to people 00:02:15.860 --> 00:02:22.580 about everything from marketing to support to good clients to bad clients to finding a niche and so 00:02:22.580 --> 00:02:26.500 on and so forth so that you can have a successful business, not just be good at technology. 00:02:26.500 --> 00:02:30.240 That's really cool. And I've listened to some of the episodes. I do enjoy it and I'm subscribed to it. 00:02:30.240 --> 00:02:36.060 It's a good one. Now, just to set the stage for us to set the perspective here, maybe just quickly 00:02:36.060 --> 00:02:38.260 define what freelancing means to you guys. 00:02:38.260 --> 00:02:39.040 Oh, wow. 00:02:39.120 --> 00:02:45.040 Is it just straight consulting? Is it like if I worked for a consulting firm, am I a freelancer? 00:02:45.040 --> 00:02:49.440 Like what is the, am I personally a freelancer running my own software business? Probably not, 00:02:49.440 --> 00:02:52.160 right? If I'm an employee, I'm probably not. Where would you put that? 00:02:52.160 --> 00:02:53.000 I would say yes. 00:02:53.000 --> 00:02:54.120 You'd say yes? You think I am? 00:02:54.120 --> 00:03:00.260 Yeah. I mean, I'd say if you are a business owner, that's a small enough business and yours is, 00:03:00.260 --> 00:03:03.880 as is mine, then I'd definitely call you a freelancer. I mean, 00:03:04.000 --> 00:03:09.580 there's so many different terms like freelancer, consultant, contractor, and I tend not to quibble 00:03:09.580 --> 00:03:14.160 over the differences too much. I think if at the end of the day, you get to decide what projects 00:03:14.160 --> 00:03:19.280 you're working on and you're not reporting to a boss who tells you what to do, I'd put that roughly in 00:03:19.280 --> 00:03:20.540 the freelancing camp. 00:03:20.540 --> 00:03:25.120 Awesome. Nobody can tell me what time to be somewhere or what to wear. It probably puts me in there. 00:03:25.120 --> 00:03:29.480 And I'm still employed. Casey, how about you? Tell us about your show. 00:03:29.660 --> 00:03:34.480 Yeah. Well, first, thanks for the special treatment, getting questions differently for us. 00:03:34.480 --> 00:03:37.620 Yeah. I don't make this up for everyone. I just wanted to let you know this is special. 00:03:37.620 --> 00:03:42.440 We run a show. So I run a consulting firm, software development consulting firm, 00:03:42.440 --> 00:03:47.560 and our engineering team produces a podcast called Friday Afternoon Deploy, 00:03:47.560 --> 00:03:52.260 which is tongue in cheek for the thing that we should never do, but often find ourselves doing, 00:03:52.260 --> 00:03:53.780 the point code on a Friday. 00:03:53.780 --> 00:03:55.900 Push deploy, go get a beer, what could go wrong? 00:03:56.120 --> 00:04:03.020 Exactly. Many things, it turns out, which is often a topic of the show, but it's aimed at developers. 00:04:03.020 --> 00:04:08.860 We talk a lot about Python on that show because that's our main backend language here at our company. 00:04:08.860 --> 00:04:11.880 What's your company name? Just so people know what it is. Can you say? 00:04:11.880 --> 00:04:18.980 Lofty. Lofty Labs. And yeah, so we talk about how we build apps, web development, and mobile app development, 00:04:18.980 --> 00:04:26.920 and really just kind of capture what you would maybe call the water cooler type conversations that happen around our office. 00:04:26.920 --> 00:04:34.180 So it's aimed at other developers. It's a point of catharsis for us where we can lament the terrible things that we shipped to production that week 00:04:34.180 --> 00:04:38.000 and the joys of client services and all those sort of things. 00:04:38.000 --> 00:04:40.400 It's a lot of fun. We've been doing it for almost a year now. 00:04:40.400 --> 00:04:42.060 Yeah, that's a good show as well. Very cool. 00:04:42.800 --> 00:04:47.420 And maybe each of you could just tell me what you do day to day so folks know where you're coming from. 00:04:47.420 --> 00:04:48.300 Casey, you want to start with you? 00:04:48.300 --> 00:04:52.800 Sure. So I'm the CEO here at Lofty, which means a lot of different things. 00:04:52.800 --> 00:04:55.340 We're still a pretty small company. We've got about eight people. 00:04:55.340 --> 00:04:57.980 And so my job changes every day. 00:04:57.980 --> 00:05:02.600 But ultimately, this company is the incorporation of my freelance business. 00:05:02.600 --> 00:05:11.160 So I incorporated as a freelancer and then just naively stumbled into accidentally overbooking myself and hiring people. 00:05:11.160 --> 00:05:12.540 That's kind of how we got here. 00:05:12.540 --> 00:05:15.060 And so today, I still write code occasionally. 00:05:15.060 --> 00:05:19.280 I try and keep myself out of the project work to build a more sustainable business. 00:05:19.280 --> 00:05:25.940 I do a lot of work on sales, marketing, vision, going out and promoting the company and those sort of things. 00:05:25.940 --> 00:05:28.380 But I don't know. I wear a dozen different hats. 00:05:28.380 --> 00:05:29.840 Sounds like a super cool job. Yeah. 00:05:29.840 --> 00:05:32.660 It can be for sure. There's a lot of stuff going on. 00:05:32.660 --> 00:05:35.460 So I find a hat and go, oh, this is a full-time job now. 00:05:35.460 --> 00:05:37.540 I'm going to hire someone to do that and I'll have less work to do. 00:05:37.540 --> 00:05:39.740 And then I just find that there's a new job that I have to do. 00:05:39.740 --> 00:05:44.140 So that's my job. I hire people and then find out that I have 10 new jobs every time I do it. 00:05:44.140 --> 00:05:47.100 Yeah, I know how that goes. Super cool. 00:05:47.100 --> 00:05:48.160 Ruben, how about you? 00:05:48.160 --> 00:05:51.860 I've had my freelancing business for about 25 years now since 95. 00:05:51.860 --> 00:05:56.040 And I started off doing coding and projects, a little bit of consulting. 00:05:56.040 --> 00:05:59.000 And I was always doing some training as well. 00:05:59.000 --> 00:06:00.820 And I was in a variety of different languages and technologies. 00:06:00.820 --> 00:06:05.740 And it was probably about 10 years ago that I said, you know, I really should concentrate on one thing. 00:06:05.740 --> 00:06:07.840 And I really love the training most of all. 00:06:07.840 --> 00:06:10.140 And there's tons of demand for Python training. 00:06:10.140 --> 00:06:11.560 Why don't I just do that? 00:06:11.560 --> 00:06:19.060 And so nowadays, most days, most weeks, most months, I'm in a different city, different country, different company doing Python training. 00:06:19.060 --> 00:06:22.880 Everything from Python for non-programmers to advanced workshops. 00:06:22.880 --> 00:06:24.420 And that's most of my time. 00:06:24.420 --> 00:06:28.400 But I also have a bunch of online courses that I'm increasingly selling, including some video courses. 00:06:28.400 --> 00:06:34.720 And then weekly Python exercise, which you'll be surprised to hear involves a weekly Python exercise. 00:06:34.940 --> 00:06:36.060 Man, you named that so well. 00:06:36.060 --> 00:06:39.220 Truth in advertising and or lack of creativity. 00:06:39.220 --> 00:06:40.360 They go ahead and hand. 00:06:40.360 --> 00:06:44.280 And the idea is like to keep people fluent and improve their practices. 00:06:44.280 --> 00:06:44.880 Cool. 00:06:44.880 --> 00:06:47.780 So you both have a lot of experience in this. 00:06:47.780 --> 00:06:49.320 And you've walked the walk. 00:06:49.380 --> 00:06:55.420 And I think one of the interesting themes here is like, so I want to quit my job so I can go write all the code I want. 00:06:55.420 --> 00:06:59.700 And it turns out there's all these other things that have nothing to do with code that you have to figure out. 00:06:59.700 --> 00:07:02.540 So we're going to have a fun time digging into those, right? 00:07:02.540 --> 00:07:04.780 That's the great irony of it. 00:07:04.780 --> 00:07:08.280 So we talked a little bit about what is freelancing. 00:07:08.280 --> 00:07:10.660 You know, I'll throw this out to both of you. 00:07:10.660 --> 00:07:17.040 We've seen on the TOB indexes and we've seen the Stack Overflow article, the incredible growth of Python. 00:07:17.700 --> 00:07:22.640 And we know that Python is growing in very large ways at large. 00:07:22.640 --> 00:07:28.720 But if I have some Python skills, how does that translate over to freelancing? 00:07:28.720 --> 00:07:31.060 Is Python a good space to be in? 00:07:31.060 --> 00:07:37.860 I know like if I did say .NET, I could walk up to like an enterprise customer and say, hey, I want to do consulting with you. 00:07:37.860 --> 00:07:47.180 And they would probably take that because those are both places that use that technology and they're willing to pay tons of money to solve problems because they have like large businesses. 00:07:47.620 --> 00:07:48.580 What about Python? 00:07:48.580 --> 00:07:51.020 I definitely think it is a good space. 00:07:51.020 --> 00:07:52.480 And it's part of that. 00:07:52.480 --> 00:07:53.740 Part of that's that growth, right? 00:07:53.740 --> 00:07:55.940 That Python's been taking off. 00:07:55.940 --> 00:08:00.360 And a lot of that growth comes from it's taking off in a lot of different industries. 00:08:00.360 --> 00:08:03.540 I think that makes it a pretty marketable skill set, right? 00:08:03.540 --> 00:08:13.820 Because being a quality Python developer is applicable in the work that we do in web-based software, cloud platforms, those sort of things. 00:08:14.000 --> 00:08:21.480 But this huge shift in data science and AI towards Python has opened up. 00:08:21.480 --> 00:08:29.440 There's a ton of opportunities on that side, whether that's predictive analytics or business intelligence or just a lot of things like that. 00:08:29.560 --> 00:08:33.420 There's a lot of great DevOps tools built on or working with Python. 00:08:33.420 --> 00:08:37.240 And so because of that, I think that it's a pretty broad market. 00:08:37.240 --> 00:08:45.280 And I think that may be different from specifically some other programming languages that are a little more purpose-built to singular purposes. 00:08:45.280 --> 00:08:46.160 Say PHP. 00:08:46.160 --> 00:08:47.460 Like Swift, for example. 00:08:47.460 --> 00:08:49.540 Or PHP, right? 00:08:49.540 --> 00:08:52.340 Where you're definitely building for the web with that. 00:08:52.340 --> 00:08:53.360 Python's applicable. 00:08:53.360 --> 00:08:57.700 And so you won't find an enterprise company out there that's not doing some Python work too. 00:08:57.700 --> 00:08:59.460 True, they've got big .NET teams. 00:08:59.460 --> 00:09:02.160 But they've got business intelligence teams and analytics teams. 00:09:02.160 --> 00:09:04.920 And not necessarily in their software product development. 00:09:04.920 --> 00:09:06.520 But there's Python going on everywhere. 00:09:06.520 --> 00:09:15.980 You know, one of the things that struck me as you were speaking, and I totally agree with what you were saying there, is if I'm doing C++ or if I'm doing Java, let's say, 00:09:16.500 --> 00:09:23.060 what it means for me to be an expert in that technology probably is hard to achieve. 00:09:23.060 --> 00:09:28.100 There's probably people that have been doing that for 15 years, and they're just really good at it. 00:09:28.100 --> 00:09:30.720 And how am I going to go, well, I've been doing this for three. 00:09:30.720 --> 00:09:32.020 You should hire me instead. 00:09:32.020 --> 00:09:32.240 Sure. 00:09:32.240 --> 00:09:32.940 Right. 00:09:32.940 --> 00:09:34.000 Like, that's a hard sell. 00:09:34.000 --> 00:09:40.620 But there's so many new things in Python that nobody has been an expert for 10 years in TensorFlow. 00:09:40.620 --> 00:09:44.820 In the web space, there's so many new modern web frameworks. 00:09:45.540 --> 00:09:47.640 Jason Knight, Jopranto, et cetera, et cetera. 00:09:47.640 --> 00:09:50.120 These are a handful of years old, maybe. 00:09:50.120 --> 00:09:52.780 No one has been an expert for many, many years on these things. 00:09:52.780 --> 00:09:58.500 And so I feel like you can maybe break in as a specialist in some area easier because of that. 00:09:58.640 --> 00:10:06.460 So just to go back to something that you had said before, Michael, like, you know, if you're a .NET developer, you can go to these enterprises and, you know, they're looking for people to solve their problems. 00:10:06.460 --> 00:10:08.760 The key thing is they're looking to solve problems. 00:10:08.760 --> 00:10:13.120 And increasingly, these companies are increasingly like they're using Python to solve those problems. 00:10:13.280 --> 00:10:14.980 They're saying, well, we could use .NET. 00:10:14.980 --> 00:10:15.680 We could use Java. 00:10:15.680 --> 00:10:18.280 But we want to use Python for a whole variety of reasons. 00:10:19.000 --> 00:10:21.420 And so, yeah, I mean, Python is a great space to be in. 00:10:21.640 --> 00:10:27.200 But I don't think you're going to get that far just being a Python expert or a technology expert. 00:10:27.200 --> 00:10:29.800 You want to be an expert in solving some kind of problem. 00:10:29.800 --> 00:10:31.560 That just happens to use Python. 00:10:31.560 --> 00:10:34.820 That's a really hard mindset for a lot of programmers to adopt. 00:10:35.220 --> 00:10:39.780 Like, I'm going to go, I'm going to use Python really well to analyze log files. 00:10:39.780 --> 00:10:44.780 I'm going to use Python to do the DevOps and make the servers run more smoothly. 00:10:44.780 --> 00:10:50.940 And when you're solving these problems and you're saving these companies money, truth be told, they often couldn't care what technology you're using. 00:10:50.940 --> 00:10:55.980 And you'll be able to find a company that wants to use Python to solve them and will be delighted to have you come do it. 00:10:55.980 --> 00:10:57.120 That's a really good point. 00:10:57.120 --> 00:10:57.440 Yeah. 00:10:57.440 --> 00:10:58.940 They might not even care, right? 00:10:58.940 --> 00:11:02.720 I guess it depends on how much they integrate into their larger systems. 00:11:03.360 --> 00:11:12.300 You know, but knowing how to scale websites or how to create proper databases with indexes so it doesn't take five seconds to load your stupid web page, right? 00:11:12.300 --> 00:11:13.340 Like, why does that ever happen? 00:11:13.340 --> 00:11:20.200 So, you know, those are skills that don't necessarily have to do specifically with Python, but you have to learn them. 00:11:20.200 --> 00:11:22.540 And then you don't even get started on the web, right? 00:11:22.540 --> 00:11:24.360 There's like five other languages you got to know. 00:11:24.360 --> 00:11:24.680 Right. 00:11:24.680 --> 00:11:29.400 HTML, CSS, JavaScript, some variant, maybe TypeScript. 00:11:29.400 --> 00:11:30.160 I don't know, right? 00:11:30.160 --> 00:11:30.640 Yes. 00:11:30.680 --> 00:11:41.340 And I agree with what Ruben's saying because the more that you align yourself with a label like that, and Michael, you mentioned, you know, you can specialize in a framework and be a specialist there. 00:11:41.340 --> 00:11:44.520 And that can definitely work and work well for your business. 00:11:44.520 --> 00:11:52.780 However, the more you position yourself as specifically that, you are putting a shelf life, right? 00:11:52.820 --> 00:11:55.880 Because you're like you mentioned, like these new frameworks are coming out rapidly. 00:11:55.880 --> 00:12:10.860 And so the more that you can differentiate yourself as a problem solver or a solver of a particular type of problem, rather than a person who wields a specific tool, you're no longer bound to the shelf life of that tool. 00:12:10.860 --> 00:12:14.260 And particularly in like front end web development is a great example. 00:12:14.260 --> 00:12:20.720 Like those tools don't have that long a shelf life and you'll be constantly reinventing your positioning to keep yourself in business. 00:12:20.720 --> 00:12:20.980 Right. 00:12:20.980 --> 00:12:25.560 We just changed our domain name from consultings for Angular to consultants for Vue. 00:12:25.560 --> 00:12:25.620 Exactly. 00:12:25.620 --> 00:12:28.680 We lost all of our SEO and all of our customers. 00:12:28.680 --> 00:12:34.100 Something you talked about that I think is really interesting and I want to dig into a little bit is mindset. 00:12:34.100 --> 00:12:43.840 You can definitely go the freelancing route as an expert in some technology, like the world's expert in CSS, the world's expert in caching, the world's expert in something like that. 00:12:43.840 --> 00:12:52.420 But even unless you are the world's expert in one of them, you're going to be seen by your potential clients as like what's sometimes called staff augmentation. 00:12:52.420 --> 00:13:00.540 You are doing a technical job and they could hire someone to do it, but they're going to hire you and they give you decent consulting rates for it. 00:13:00.540 --> 00:13:03.900 But that's because you're working with the technical team and you're seen as an addition to that. 00:13:03.900 --> 00:13:13.900 But if you're solving high level business problems, saving them lots of money, helping them to achieve their goals, then you're going to be dealing with people at a higher level at the company and they will pay you appropriately. 00:13:13.900 --> 00:13:14.400 Yeah. 00:13:14.400 --> 00:13:19.120 And you probably get the type of outcome that you were looking for in the beginning. 00:13:19.120 --> 00:13:19.380 Right. 00:13:19.380 --> 00:13:27.240 If your outcome is I want more freedom, I want more autonomy, I want to choose my projects, I want to sort of be my own boss. 00:13:27.240 --> 00:13:31.160 You're not going to get that by just being like staff augmentation, as you pointed out. 00:13:31.160 --> 00:13:31.340 Right. 00:13:31.340 --> 00:13:31.780 That's right. 00:13:31.780 --> 00:13:32.920 And I mean, I'll go even further. 00:13:32.920 --> 00:13:37.500 Like, so when I do training, I'm not dealing with the technical teams and their budgets. 00:13:37.500 --> 00:13:44.960 I'm dealing with the HR department or that sort of department, the training department and their budgets, which are wildly different. 00:13:44.960 --> 00:13:47.760 And I might add different in like better for me. 00:13:47.760 --> 00:13:59.020 And then like the two don't have anything to do with each other because they see the training as a strategic advantage for the company and for the employees as opposed to, okay, we'll just get this website out faster. 00:13:59.220 --> 00:13:59.300 Right. 00:13:59.300 --> 00:14:06.280 Well, and if you're talking about training and consulting, you know, maybe you sell one week course to that one team and then they're good for years. 00:14:06.720 --> 00:14:10.180 On the other hand, if you are in the organization, you're taught the levels you're talking about. 00:14:10.180 --> 00:14:14.540 It's like, we have a plan to move our entire company over to Python in the next two years. 00:14:14.540 --> 00:14:15.920 We have 20,000 employees. 00:14:15.920 --> 00:14:16.920 How do we do this? 00:14:16.920 --> 00:14:18.520 These are not even similar. 00:14:18.520 --> 00:14:19.400 That's exactly right. 00:14:19.400 --> 00:14:21.300 Totally different scopes of problems. 00:14:21.300 --> 00:14:26.160 And I don't want to dog on staff augmentation because that's like half of our business here. 00:14:26.160 --> 00:14:27.000 So don't get me wrong. 00:14:27.000 --> 00:14:30.460 It's a really interesting way to have a job that still gives you more flexibility. 00:14:30.460 --> 00:14:37.940 And you probably can charge better rates than, you know, if you're just working locally at a small, I don't know, government agency in a small town. 00:14:37.940 --> 00:14:39.100 I don't know, making stuff up, right? 00:14:39.100 --> 00:14:40.260 There are certain benefits there. 00:14:40.260 --> 00:14:44.680 I mean, staff augmentation type work can be a little less risky, right? 00:14:44.700 --> 00:14:46.820 It can be a little longer term, a little safer. 00:14:46.820 --> 00:14:50.920 When you go into that role, I mean, you kind of are a butt in a chair, right? 00:14:50.920 --> 00:14:54.800 And that makes you a commodity, whether you like it or not. 00:14:54.800 --> 00:15:00.520 I mean, you really are like, you're going to feel a lot more market forces on the rates that you can charge. 00:15:00.520 --> 00:15:11.740 You're going to be, often cases in staff augmentation, you know, for like US-based freelancers, you might be in pretty strict rate competition with offshore models and things like that. 00:15:12.120 --> 00:15:15.460 That's different when you're not doing that kind of augmentation work. 00:15:15.460 --> 00:15:20.940 When you're working at the higher levels of the business, you don't necessarily have those same market forces that you're competing with. 00:15:20.940 --> 00:15:25.220 This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by Linode. 00:15:25.220 --> 00:15:28.960 Are you looking for hosting that's fast, simple, and incredibly affordable? 00:15:28.960 --> 00:15:34.060 Well, look past that bookstore and check out Linode at talkpython.fm/Linode. 00:15:34.060 --> 00:15:35.960 That's L-I-N-O-D-E. 00:15:35.960 --> 00:15:40.380 Plans start at just $5 a month for a dedicated server with a gig of RAM. 00:15:40.380 --> 00:15:46.420 They have 10 data centers across the globe, so no matter where you are or where your users are, there's a data center for you. 00:15:46.420 --> 00:15:53.420 Whether you want to run a Python web app, host a private Git server, or just a file server, you'll get native SSDs on all the machines, 00:15:53.420 --> 00:16:00.840 a newly upgraded 200 gigabit network, 24-7 friendly support even on holidays, and a seven-day money-back guarantee. 00:16:00.840 --> 00:16:02.440 Need a little help with your infrastructure? 00:16:02.440 --> 00:16:07.200 They even offer professional services to help you with architecture, migrations, and more. 00:16:07.200 --> 00:16:10.160 Do you want a dedicated server for free for the next four months? 00:16:10.160 --> 00:16:13.200 Just visit talkpython.fm/Linode. 00:16:13.200 --> 00:16:21.160 One thing I do want to dive into is this mindset change that you have to make in order to be a good consultant. 00:16:21.160 --> 00:16:26.820 Now, let me try to start this topic off by way of an analogy from training. 00:16:26.820 --> 00:16:29.240 Maybe you'll connect with it, Ruben. 00:16:30.240 --> 00:16:39.160 If you're an employee and you have some project and you have to figure out, let's say, I need to talk to a database to do something or something like that, right? 00:16:39.160 --> 00:16:41.160 Well, in Python, we have lots of ways. 00:16:41.160 --> 00:16:45.520 You could talk to it through DBAPI2, just direct SQL queries. 00:16:45.520 --> 00:16:48.340 You could use SQLAlchemy or one of the other ORMs. 00:16:48.340 --> 00:16:52.880 You could say, I'm going to use a different database like Mongo and then use an ODM or talk directly to it. 00:16:53.200 --> 00:16:55.880 So there's all these ways in which you could solve your database problem, right? 00:16:55.880 --> 00:17:00.000 As an employee, if you find one way that works, you're good, right? 00:17:00.000 --> 00:17:02.100 Your project is now beyond that step. 00:17:02.100 --> 00:17:02.740 You're talking database. 00:17:02.740 --> 00:17:04.820 The next thing you need to do is add the next feature. 00:17:05.600 --> 00:17:16.060 As a trainer, if there's a way to talk to it directly with SQL, use an RM and all these other things, you need to know all the ways, the trade-offs of them. 00:17:16.060 --> 00:17:29.840 And you just have to have this mindset of like, it's not enough to just know how to solve this problem, but I need to know how to dive into the lower level and consider the trade-offs and consider all the things at a level deeper, I think, than if you're just an employee. 00:17:29.840 --> 00:17:34.560 I feel like there's a lot of stuff like that in the consulting world as well. 00:17:34.560 --> 00:17:37.500 I mean, obviously training is some flavor of consulting, right? 00:17:37.500 --> 00:17:48.340 So what do you think some of the mindset challenges are of, say, being just a standard employee where, you know, you just go to work, you work for eight hours, and, you know, hopefully something gets accomplished? 00:17:48.340 --> 00:17:52.960 I think there's a lot there, mindset difference, and I touch on maybe a couple of them. 00:17:52.960 --> 00:17:58.760 I mean, you know, one thing that stands out there is, for me, common tooling was always important, right? 00:17:58.760 --> 00:18:04.900 So solving a problem in a one-off way would work well within the confines of that project. 00:18:04.900 --> 00:18:17.140 But if I wanted to, and this maybe is getting a little ahead and thinking more about how you market and position yourself, but if you're coming in as a consultant, you're probably from an economic basis more expensive than an employee. 00:18:17.660 --> 00:18:19.420 And so you really need to be proving that value. 00:18:19.420 --> 00:18:23.760 And a lot of times that rolls down in this field into time, right? 00:18:23.760 --> 00:18:26.800 So how can I get in and solve this problem quickly? 00:18:26.800 --> 00:18:30.960 And that's the value that I'm providing is I can get in quickly and do it. 00:18:31.360 --> 00:18:33.320 And, you know, that may mean common tooling. 00:18:33.320 --> 00:18:44.040 So understanding kind of how to generally abstract a problem in the particular example you gave and say, you know, what's one really great tool that I know very well that I can go tackle these kind of database problems? 00:18:44.040 --> 00:18:52.760 This is my ORM I work with, or this is how I do these kind of things that maybe gives you a speed advantage that gives your customer margin, right? 00:18:52.760 --> 00:18:54.060 Is maybe one example. 00:18:54.060 --> 00:19:04.700 So I'm sure that most programmers know, like have had this experience of a non-technical friend or family member saying, I can't figure out how to do X. 00:19:04.700 --> 00:19:08.100 And you as a technical person are like, well, I really don't know anything about X. 00:19:08.100 --> 00:19:08.820 I can't help you. 00:19:08.820 --> 00:19:09.840 And they say, well, just try. 00:19:09.840 --> 00:19:15.140 And you walk up to the search screen and you type something to Google and bam, you have found the answer. 00:19:15.140 --> 00:19:17.960 And they're like, see, you did know about it. 00:19:17.960 --> 00:19:19.360 And you're like, no, no, I really didn't. 00:19:19.360 --> 00:19:21.780 And everyone might be right there. 00:19:21.780 --> 00:19:28.480 The thing is, because you have a background steeped in the right way of phrasing questions, you can find the answers more quickly. 00:19:28.480 --> 00:19:42.000 And so I always, when I was doing consulting projects, I would say to my clients, I'm probably going to have to spend some time, a third of the time, a quarter of the time learning new stuff to know how to do what you need or learning new technologies or finding the best way to do it. 00:19:42.000 --> 00:19:48.300 But I'm still going to be able to do that faster than someone who doesn't have experience because I have this accumulated knowledge. 00:19:48.300 --> 00:19:51.040 And I know what questions to ask and how to parse the answers quickly. 00:19:51.300 --> 00:19:53.200 And the same is also true in my training, right? 00:19:53.200 --> 00:19:55.840 So very often people ask me questions I don't know the answer to. 00:19:55.840 --> 00:20:02.160 And I then use it as an opportunity to learn new stuff, explain it back to them, and then I incorporate it the next time around. 00:20:02.160 --> 00:20:09.140 And so I'll never claim that I know everything, but I'll claim that I can like figure it out because of the experience faster than sort of the average person. 00:20:09.220 --> 00:20:09.740 Yeah, it's true. 00:20:09.740 --> 00:20:15.940 as a consultant and as a trainer, you spend a lot of time getting up to speed on something that you 00:20:15.940 --> 00:20:22.380 maybe are not an expert at. And so you have this polished skill of just how do I just learn this 00:20:22.380 --> 00:20:27.400 thing and make it work, right? And it's, you know, everyone in technology has to do that, but you do 00:20:27.400 --> 00:20:33.460 that on a weekly basis, probably, right? And Casey, you know, it's like people come to you guys and 00:20:33.460 --> 00:20:36.460 like, Hey, we have this project. It's kind of like stuff you've done before, but there's this whole 00:20:36.460 --> 00:20:40.620 different angle that you maybe have never touched. And so it's probably similar, right? 00:20:40.620 --> 00:20:45.580 Totally. I mean, we have clients come in and bring us a project and we know exactly what 00:20:45.580 --> 00:20:51.620 kinds of technology we might use, but we don't necessarily have any domain knowledge of their 00:20:51.620 --> 00:20:56.720 business or industry, right? And so that's the part that we have to get up to speed and apply it. 00:20:56.720 --> 00:21:00.820 And to go back to what Ruben just said, you know, the engineers in our team are sitting in that 00:21:00.820 --> 00:21:06.020 consultant role for our clients. And I remember in the early days going through some of our 00:21:06.020 --> 00:21:10.080 our billing logs and going to some of our consultant engineers and saying, Hey, why didn't 00:21:10.080 --> 00:21:15.260 you bill for that time? And they said, well, I didn't really know the answer to the problem. 00:21:15.260 --> 00:21:19.740 So I had to do some research and I said, Whoa, here's, and this is something we tell everybody 00:21:19.740 --> 00:21:25.780 when they start here. Now we're not necessarily getting paid to know the answer right off the 00:21:25.780 --> 00:21:30.640 top of our heads. We're getting paid to solve the problem. And part of the solving problem is 00:21:30.640 --> 00:21:34.660 knowing how to find the answers to questions. We don't know that bookends really nicely. 00:21:34.660 --> 00:21:39.600 And what Ruben just said, because we actually see that. And that is a good example of that 00:21:39.600 --> 00:21:45.180 mentality, not sort of intrinsically being there for people that go into consulting of like, well, 00:21:45.180 --> 00:21:49.440 I wasn't actually writing code. Therefore that time wasn't billable. Like, no, no, no. But the 00:21:49.440 --> 00:21:54.460 process of working that out and working through it and crafting that beautiful Google search query 00:21:54.460 --> 00:21:59.520 that dug up the result on the first page is a skill. And that's, that's precisely what we're 00:21:59.520 --> 00:22:02.760 being paid to do. So I think that's another great example of the mentality. 00:22:02.760 --> 00:22:07.360 That's a core foundation of problem solving. Let me tell you a really quick story. I just 00:22:07.360 --> 00:22:14.640 recently hired somebody in a halftime consultant role for doing some integration, single sign on, 00:22:14.640 --> 00:22:19.300 that kind of stuff with my courses. Guys doing a great job. And I interviewed a couple of people. 00:22:19.300 --> 00:22:24.280 One of the things when we were talking that was really nice was, I was like, Oh, maybe we could do 00:22:24.280 --> 00:22:28.100 this. What do you think about working that? And I kind of described the problem or I kind of thought 00:22:28.100 --> 00:22:32.660 some of the solutions might be. And the guy's like, that's probably not the right way. Like we can think 00:22:32.660 --> 00:22:38.200 about it, but I actually think that's not best. Here are the problems and you should think about it this 00:22:38.200 --> 00:22:42.780 other way. And I was just like, Oh, this guy's, he's got the job, right? If he's willing to say, 00:22:42.780 --> 00:22:48.040 no, you're not doing it right. Like, actually, I know, know you're pretty smart, but this situation, 00:22:48.040 --> 00:22:52.340 you should really think about this. And let me just try to guide you away a little bit. I'm like, 00:22:52.340 --> 00:22:57.640 oh, this is the type of guidance that this is the person I want that says, not just go, 00:22:57.640 --> 00:23:00.920 yeah, well, Michael told me to do this. So I did it right. Like, no, no, they have some 00:23:00.920 --> 00:23:04.320 expertise that's that I need them to come help me with. Right. 00:23:04.320 --> 00:23:09.960 Clear demonstration there of the difference in mindset of, you know, I'm here to solve the problem 00:23:09.960 --> 00:23:14.040 and provide expertise, not necessarily to implement a task list. 00:23:14.040 --> 00:23:18.380 Exactly. And you know, that was an interview to be hired. It wasn't like he was already hired and 00:23:18.380 --> 00:23:22.120 then talking, he was, I could have got upset and said, no, you've got to do it my way. Right. 00:23:22.120 --> 00:23:23.700 But of course, that's not my reaction. 00:23:23.700 --> 00:23:27.440 There are two things that come out of that story, by the way, which I think are important for people 00:23:27.440 --> 00:23:32.640 to realize. First of all, a lot of people who are new to consulting are afraid at that initial meeting 00:23:32.640 --> 00:23:37.940 of giving away the store. Well, I'm not going to give away any advice because like, that's what I'm 00:23:37.940 --> 00:23:41.420 going to be charging for. And if I give away the advice, they'll think I'm a sucker and they'll like, 00:23:41.420 --> 00:23:46.100 not pay me for it. No, no, no. They will be appreciative of you seeing knowledge and they'll want more of it 00:23:46.100 --> 00:23:49.000 because it can't possibly be that everything, you know, came out of that meeting. 00:23:49.000 --> 00:23:55.300 The second thing is, if you're a consultant, you want to be working for a client who is appreciative 00:23:55.300 --> 00:24:00.160 of that pushback. If you go to that initial meeting and you give pushback and the client or potential 00:24:00.160 --> 00:24:04.900 client is like, actually, I'm going to tell you what to write and how to write it. Like, you don't want 00:24:04.900 --> 00:24:07.380 to work for that person, right? You're not in the stenography business. 00:24:07.380 --> 00:24:14.100 That's a really good point. So maybe we could talk about choosing clients. You touched on that a 00:24:14.100 --> 00:24:19.540 little bit and even turning down work or firing clients where you feel like it's not working. 00:24:19.540 --> 00:24:25.240 So what are some of maybe some of the red flags or the green flags? Like when you see somebody like, 00:24:25.240 --> 00:24:30.760 I want to work with this team or that person, or I know to stay away from this time bomb. 00:24:30.980 --> 00:24:38.720 We've got a lot of those. Red flags are a long and ever evolving list for us. But I mean, 00:24:38.720 --> 00:24:43.260 there are some definite ones. And unfortunately, some of them may not come up until you're in the 00:24:43.260 --> 00:24:47.060 engagement. You're actually in and doing the work. There's some red flags that come in the production, 00:24:47.060 --> 00:24:51.980 but try and suss a lot of that out when I'm initially talking to a potential client. 00:24:51.980 --> 00:24:58.260 I think that when you start feeling very early on in the conversation, price pressure, 00:24:58.260 --> 00:25:03.760 it's a pretty good indication that someone's not really aligned in the value that you're providing. 00:25:03.760 --> 00:25:07.960 Right. And if you're constantly having to defend like, yes, that's going to take some time and it's 00:25:07.960 --> 00:25:12.820 going to take some money. You can expect that. I think if that's how the conversation is going 00:25:12.820 --> 00:25:17.920 before you've been written a check, that pressure is only going to get stronger after the check comes. 00:25:17.920 --> 00:25:23.000 That's kind of my mentality is like, okay, take everything that the client just told us in this 00:25:23.000 --> 00:25:29.780 kind of initial prospecting meeting and anything that was kind of felt like pressure or prickly or 00:25:29.780 --> 00:25:34.720 something we didn't like, expect that to be cranked up about 10x after they've actually paid you money 00:25:34.720 --> 00:25:35.720 because it will. 00:25:35.720 --> 00:25:37.460 Because now you're on the hook. 00:25:37.460 --> 00:25:37.800 Yeah. 00:25:37.800 --> 00:25:38.060 Yeah. 00:25:38.060 --> 00:25:39.400 And they've got skin in the game. 00:25:39.400 --> 00:25:42.740 It's not going to get better, right? They're not going to get nicer. They're not going to get 00:25:42.740 --> 00:25:46.820 nicer and give you less pressure after you start working for them, after they start paying you. 00:25:46.920 --> 00:25:47.360 Right. 00:25:47.360 --> 00:25:52.980 So that's one thing we look out for is that sort of stuff. And the other thing is, I mean, 00:25:52.980 --> 00:25:57.460 pricing comes a lot into this. And anytime that there's friction on pricing, I feel like that's 00:25:57.460 --> 00:26:03.340 the time to walk away. If you're really having to negotiate your upfront value, right? If you're in 00:26:03.340 --> 00:26:07.200 that conversation, you're really having to push hard, like, no, it's worth it. It's worth the time. 00:26:07.200 --> 00:26:11.520 It's worth the money. There's probably a misalignment there on their understanding of the value that 00:26:11.520 --> 00:26:15.960 they're getting. And that usually gets worse. I think people that have a good understanding, 00:26:16.000 --> 00:26:20.300 you know, clients that know why they're hiring and know what that time's worth. And that's implicit, 00:26:20.300 --> 00:26:24.640 get it. They've done the research. They've, they, maybe they've engaged with a consultant before. 00:26:24.640 --> 00:26:26.900 I think those are good green flags as well. 00:26:26.900 --> 00:26:30.900 Okay, cool. Reuben, what about you? What are some of your various flag signals? 00:26:31.240 --> 00:26:35.520 Yeah, definitely the price pressure thing. Like whenever I talk to someone about doing, 00:26:35.520 --> 00:26:39.240 I mean, nowadays doing training and they asked me what I charge and they're like, really, 00:26:39.240 --> 00:26:44.160 really? Yeah. Can we get a special deal? You know, we're going to give you lots of work 00:26:44.160 --> 00:26:49.200 and we have lots of content, lots of contacts. We will recommend you to lots of people, 00:26:49.200 --> 00:26:53.280 right? At least I'm out of the business of being heard, like being told, well, we'll give you equity in 00:26:53.280 --> 00:26:59.680 the company, which like, oh, please, you know, all these things are just basically a big, big red 00:26:59.680 --> 00:27:06.020 flags. A good thing is, I mean, in the training business, if there is a training manager who knows 00:27:06.020 --> 00:27:10.260 what they're doing and like how the whole game is played and they're from a large organization, 00:27:10.260 --> 00:27:15.380 that's going to need a lot of training. Wow. That is like the best because I know that I'll be able 00:27:15.380 --> 00:27:18.060 to come back there, you know, once every month, once every two months, once every six months, 00:27:18.060 --> 00:27:21.640 it's like basically guaranteed income. So long as I do a good job and they're happy. 00:27:21.640 --> 00:27:25.920 You also want to know that they're sort of just going to be easy to deal with. And that's a very 00:27:25.920 --> 00:27:32.040 fuzzy sort of thing. Typically I'm very bad. And maybe because I'm male, maybe because I'm a programmer 00:27:32.040 --> 00:27:38.140 or whatever, I'm bad at like feeling the vibes from a client. But when I come home and I tell my wife 00:27:38.140 --> 00:27:44.060 about like the client I met with, she will very well instinctively be like, you do not want to work 00:27:44.060 --> 00:27:48.020 with these people. I'm like, but, but, but she said, no, no, no, no. Like, like, listen to what you're 00:27:48.020 --> 00:27:52.340 saying. Listen to yourself. And these do not sound like good people to work with. Also, 00:27:52.340 --> 00:27:57.580 once someone has given you trouble, don't go back to them. Now it's very like the worst advice, 00:27:57.580 --> 00:28:02.460 the worst advice I ever got in my consulting career was in like the first month or two of it, 00:28:02.460 --> 00:28:06.260 where there's this lawyer I met. He said, okay, I've been in business for myself for many years. 00:28:06.260 --> 00:28:12.900 I'm going to give you great advice. Never say no to work. Always take work. This was literally the 00:28:12.900 --> 00:28:17.000 worst advice I've ever gotten because there's so many bad clients out there. And I actually believe this 00:28:17.000 --> 00:28:21.480 for a while. I would just like take everything unless you like are desperate for the money. 00:28:21.480 --> 00:28:22.400 And it does happen. 00:28:22.660 --> 00:28:26.220 I can imagine when you're getting started though, especially if you're getting started because you 00:28:26.220 --> 00:28:31.400 lost your job. It wasn't your, you couldn't plan ahead and build up towards it. Right. It's a tough 00:28:31.400 --> 00:28:31.760 trade-off. 00:28:31.760 --> 00:28:36.900 It's very hard to say no. And I'm not saying, you know, be principled and homeless, right? That is not 00:28:36.900 --> 00:28:43.780 my, my, my plan of action here. But if you have the option of like waiting a little bit and getting a 00:28:43.780 --> 00:28:49.400 better job and saying no to people who are clearly just going to cause you trouble, the trouble is not worth it. 00:28:49.400 --> 00:28:54.580 You're absolutely right on that. And, and you can say that, and I'm speaking from personal 00:28:54.580 --> 00:28:59.040 experience here. I think a lot of people have to make that mistake because people told me that over 00:28:59.040 --> 00:29:03.200 and over and over and over. Not worth it, you know? And it's like, but when you're hungry, you have a far 00:29:03.200 --> 00:29:07.520 less discerning palate and the best saltine I've ever eaten. 00:29:07.520 --> 00:29:14.720 Exactly. But, but ultimately, I mean, you learn those lessons the hard way and it's hard to be trying to get your 00:29:14.720 --> 00:29:20.960 personal business off the ground or your business and need the money, need the revenue and just like let an 00:29:20.960 --> 00:29:26.760 opportunity pass by. You just want to get your arms around everything. But hopefully someone out there is, is less 00:29:26.760 --> 00:29:31.440 stubborn than me and like takes that advice to heart because it really helps. But otherwise it'll 00:29:31.440 --> 00:29:35.940 probably happen once and you'll go, Oh man, that's what everyone told me. And that box gets kind of 00:29:35.940 --> 00:29:38.880 permanently. I get it now. Yeah. That's why they said this. 00:29:38.880 --> 00:29:45.540 Yeah. All right. So that's kind of the red flags for getting started a lot. Although Reuben, you just 00:29:45.540 --> 00:29:50.480 say if they give you trouble, don't necessarily come back asking for more of it. But what about firing 00:29:50.480 --> 00:29:54.420 clients? If you find yourself in a negative situation, how do you extract yourself? 00:29:54.420 --> 00:29:59.840 I'm very blunt about it. Like, I mean, I'll, I'll call them and I'll say, but it usually happens if 00:29:59.840 --> 00:30:03.740 they don't pay. That makes it pretty easy. That's a pretty big red flag there. Yeah. That's easy. Right. 00:30:03.740 --> 00:30:08.620 They don't pay. And then they say, but I'll pay you soon. And I really need more work. Ha ha. I don't 00:30:08.620 --> 00:30:13.280 believe you. And I'm not going to do more work. And I say, sometimes I'll be blunt and say, I'm sorry, 00:30:13.280 --> 00:30:18.240 I need clients who will pay me. Sometimes I'll say, I've got other opportunities going on and I'm going to work 00:30:18.240 --> 00:30:23.920 with those. And sometimes like, I just, you know, won't call them back. You know, that's very rare, 00:30:23.920 --> 00:30:29.580 but you got to fire clients. You've got incentive clients. And by the way, good clients who are not 00:30:29.580 --> 00:30:34.240 willing to pay you as much as other clients, you have to fire them too. Not because they're bad people, 00:30:34.240 --> 00:30:38.840 but because if I've got client A who's going to pay me, you know, something and client B is going to pay 00:30:38.840 --> 00:30:43.160 me twice something. Client B is worth more. Nothing, no way about, you know, two ways about it. 00:30:43.160 --> 00:30:48.080 I was personally, I'm too empathetic, maybe too empathetic to be doing what I do, 00:30:48.080 --> 00:30:52.860 but like I let myself be a doormat in a lot of like early situations like that. 00:30:52.860 --> 00:30:57.400 And I think that goes back to mindset. I mean, you really have to, even if you're not thinking, 00:30:57.400 --> 00:31:01.800 oh, I'm building a business, right? It's still business, right? You still have to make sure 00:31:01.800 --> 00:31:06.940 that you're capturing value, right? And every customer that's not paying or paying a little bit too 00:31:06.940 --> 00:31:12.600 little is even if you like them, there's a lost opportunity cost of having someone that pays you 00:31:12.600 --> 00:31:17.640 appropriately or on time or, you know, like there's intangible things. It's not just monetary compensation, 00:31:17.640 --> 00:31:23.540 it's stress. I really don't like being up at night stressed about an invoice. We don't let people do 00:31:23.540 --> 00:31:28.160 that to us very often. It's one thing when you have a great customer and it's a short-term problem, 00:31:28.160 --> 00:31:32.940 like those things come up, but definitely firing clients for us and for me when I was freelancing, 00:31:32.940 --> 00:31:37.980 being direct is really good. I really have to psych myself up for that phone call, you know, 00:31:37.980 --> 00:31:42.940 like I spend some time in front of the mirror, you know? Oh, yes. Yeah. I feel like there's a lot of people who, 00:31:42.940 --> 00:31:48.760 you know, they're programmers, they love code, they love solving problems, but they don't love confrontation. 00:31:48.760 --> 00:31:54.640 You know what I mean? And it just seems like there's probably some thick skin that has to be grown 00:31:54.640 --> 00:31:58.860 and some assertiveness maybe that you have to like build in yourself for some of these, 00:31:58.860 --> 00:32:02.580 some of these conversations are just hard, right? You have to fabricate it almost. I mean, 00:32:02.620 --> 00:32:05.860 not for everyone. I can't speak for everyone's personality. Yeah. For me, I think I would. 00:32:05.860 --> 00:32:09.500 I'm a programmer. Like I like working with machines. I don't like working with people. 00:32:09.500 --> 00:32:15.600 And so like definitely there's like some psych up to that, but I just, you know, make sure and kind 00:32:15.600 --> 00:32:21.480 of tell myself and reassert to myself that I don't necessarily owe anyone an explanation, right? If it's 00:32:21.480 --> 00:32:25.640 not good for business, it's not good for business. And particularly when you're out of the employee 00:32:25.640 --> 00:32:30.360 mindset and you're in the consultant mindset, no one else is looking out for your best interests anymore. 00:32:31.100 --> 00:32:34.380 Maybe they, you didn't have that many people necessarily looking out for your best interests 00:32:34.380 --> 00:32:38.560 as an employee, but you, you surely have less now. So that's your job. 00:32:38.560 --> 00:32:42.280 At least you had a shared interest with the people at the company, right? 00:32:42.280 --> 00:32:43.300 Exactly. Yeah. 00:32:43.300 --> 00:32:43.700 Yes. 00:32:43.700 --> 00:32:47.540 At least when the company survived, it probably you should survive because you seem to be 00:32:47.540 --> 00:32:49.220 contributing somehow or something like that. 00:32:49.220 --> 00:32:54.080 You no longer have an advocate beyond yourself with a client. And so that's kind of my mantra 00:32:54.080 --> 00:32:57.000 when I do that. I was like, I don't necessarily own an explanation. This isn't good for business. 00:32:57.000 --> 00:32:59.580 We're out. And that's how I kind of handle those conversations. 00:32:59.580 --> 00:32:59.820 Yeah. 00:32:59.820 --> 00:33:05.620 This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by Brighter AI, named Europe's hottest 00:33:05.620 --> 00:33:10.900 AI startup by NVIDIA. They're leveraging AI to tackle the challenge of anonymizing video 00:33:10.900 --> 00:33:16.260 streams to seamlessly replace things like faces and license plates. And I'll let them tell you 00:33:16.260 --> 00:33:17.860 all about those in their own words. 00:33:18.100 --> 00:33:23.260 As a member of our team, you will take an integral part in shaping what anonymization means in a digital 00:33:23.260 --> 00:33:29.740 society. Alongside a highly dedicated international team, you will apply your industry proven Python 00:33:29.740 --> 00:33:35.260 skills and deep understanding of algorithms to design and implement data processing microservices 00:33:35.260 --> 00:33:40.940 in a high performance video pipeline. If you're up for the challenge, apply at brighter.ai 00:33:40.940 --> 00:33:47.640 slash jobs. We are looking for software and streaming engineers, DevOps, AI researchers, 00:33:47.640 --> 00:33:53.060 and team leads. Just visit talkpython.fm/bright to get started. 00:33:54.460 --> 00:33:58.780 There are times also when bad things happen and I've still decided to keep working with 00:33:58.780 --> 00:34:03.460 a client. I just changed my, like how I work with them. So I had one training client. The 00:34:03.460 --> 00:34:07.920 way it works is I say it's a daily price for the training for up to a certain number of people. 00:34:07.920 --> 00:34:11.640 And beyond that, you pay per person, trying to dissuade them from doing that. And the first 00:34:11.640 --> 00:34:15.660 time I did a training for this company, they said to me, okay, we didn't have anything over 00:34:15.660 --> 00:34:20.140 that number. So we don't have to pay anything extra. I said, no, but there were more people than that 00:34:20.140 --> 00:34:25.380 there. And they said, oh no, that couldn't possibly be. And I said, okay, look at the invite you sent 00:34:25.380 --> 00:34:29.660 out on the calendar, right? There were 25 people on the invite. You have to pay for the five extra 00:34:29.660 --> 00:34:34.000 people above 20. And so we went round and round and finally they agreed. They were like, oh, okay, 00:34:34.000 --> 00:34:38.840 well maybe if we invited that may fine. So I decided to do more training with them. And on the first day, 00:34:38.840 --> 00:34:43.860 like before we even started, I took a photo of the roster of the people who are going to be there. 00:34:43.860 --> 00:34:49.420 Training ends and they say, we didn't have above the number. And I send them the photo. I say, 00:34:49.420 --> 00:34:53.980 but these are all the people who are in the room and signed in. That couldn't possibly be, 00:34:53.980 --> 00:34:58.960 we can't fit that many people in the room. As you said, I didn't want to have this confrontation, 00:34:58.960 --> 00:35:03.120 but I was like, here's like the photographic evidence. So I wanted to keep working with them 00:35:03.120 --> 00:35:08.080 because not that often I do training for them and they did pay on time. But now I know like how to 00:35:08.080 --> 00:35:13.620 steel myself for working with them again. And they get lowest priority, right? When I have other 00:35:13.620 --> 00:35:16.740 companies that are willing to work with me because I just don't have that sort of agitation. 00:35:17.380 --> 00:35:20.700 You know, I'll do training for you, but we're setting up a time-lapse camera. 00:35:20.700 --> 00:35:20.900 Yeah. 00:35:21.400 --> 00:35:29.200 I like to think about the idea of, and this may sound kind of brutal, but that you should always be 00:35:29.200 --> 00:35:35.400 kind of working to fire your bottom 20% of your clients because that definitely leads, I mean, 00:35:35.400 --> 00:35:40.160 that is going to force you to improve your client base, but that may mean that your bottom 20% 00:35:40.160 --> 00:35:44.580 might not be clients that you hate. And obviously there's discretion to be shown there. Relationships 00:35:44.580 --> 00:35:49.680 are important. Don't get me wrong. But like, that's the sort of mentality that I like to keep is that 00:35:49.680 --> 00:35:56.020 someone's the lowest priority, someone's at the bottom. And the next opportunity that comes up 00:35:56.020 --> 00:36:01.680 that is optically looking better than that, we're going to bump them off. And I think that that may 00:36:01.680 --> 00:36:06.700 seem a little cold, but honestly, it's healthy for business. It keeps you on a progressing, 00:36:06.700 --> 00:36:08.960 improving trajectory with your client fit. 00:36:08.960 --> 00:36:10.120 Yeah, I can definitely agree. 00:36:10.200 --> 00:36:15.600 I have a fortune 100 company that I do a lot of training for, and they send me a question once 00:36:15.600 --> 00:36:22.020 for six to eight months. Are we paying you above average, average, or below average of your other 00:36:22.020 --> 00:36:27.320 clients? And basically they want to make sure that they're not in that bottom 20%. And indeed, 00:36:27.320 --> 00:36:32.100 like when I raised my rates, I waited, they were the last ones I told I was raising my rates. I raised 00:36:32.100 --> 00:36:35.720 them over the course of a year for new clients and other existing clients. Then I went to them and I said, 00:36:35.780 --> 00:36:39.460 you're now paying the least of anyone else. If I'm going to justify working with you, you've got to 00:36:39.460 --> 00:36:44.540 raise their rates. And that combined with their survey, they were like, okay, done. They want to 00:36:44.540 --> 00:36:48.240 preserve the relationship. And they realized they can't be the cheapskates. 00:36:48.380 --> 00:36:53.000 Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that's really, really, I think undervalued when you're an employee, 00:36:53.000 --> 00:36:57.040 but when you, when you build these relationships with these large companies, like the one you 00:36:57.040 --> 00:37:02.280 acknowledged are extremely slow and hard to build. But if you look at it from their perspective, 00:37:02.280 --> 00:37:07.400 they have so many people they could reach out to, but they want to just know who can I call? Who can 00:37:07.400 --> 00:37:12.980 I trust? I've got this problem. I need it. So I need some training Python. Ruben's been great. I'm not 00:37:12.980 --> 00:37:17.820 going to go shopping for more because I don't need to start that over and have a failed class for 20 00:37:17.820 --> 00:37:22.380 engineers. Let's just stick. Right. So once you build these relationships, they're pretty sticky. 00:37:22.380 --> 00:37:26.160 Moreover, when you said they're slow to build, everyone always told me that working with big 00:37:26.160 --> 00:37:32.440 companies took a long time. So twice, twice in the last year, twice in last year, like fortune 100, 00:37:32.440 --> 00:37:37.580 500 companies reached out to me and said, we want you to do training for us. So like I didn't have to 00:37:37.580 --> 00:37:42.440 market to them at all. They reached out to me. It took six months before each course happened. 00:37:42.440 --> 00:37:45.320 Just getting through like procurement and stuff like that. 00:37:45.320 --> 00:37:50.380 Everything. And let's talk about it and dates and content and on, on, on. And that's because 00:37:50.380 --> 00:37:56.120 they were really excited to work with me. Imagine a cold calling someone trying to convince them to 00:37:56.120 --> 00:38:01.320 work with you. It's going to take way longer than six months, way, way, way longer. But once those 00:38:01.320 --> 00:38:05.400 relationships happen, right, then you're in and you're in for a long time unless you really mess it 00:38:05.400 --> 00:38:06.320 up. Got at least six months. 00:38:06.320 --> 00:38:11.900 Those long sales cycles are challenging for obvious reasons. But like when it does drag out 00:38:11.900 --> 00:38:14.940 longer than that, you have this like whole different risk when you're working with big 00:38:14.940 --> 00:38:19.540 businesses like that and you're, you're trying to build that relationship, which is like you're 14 00:38:19.540 --> 00:38:25.480 months into like getting something put together. And then your advocate like restructured, moves away, 00:38:25.480 --> 00:38:28.120 different department fired, and it's just gone. 00:38:28.120 --> 00:38:28.420 Yeah. 00:38:28.540 --> 00:38:32.860 And it happens all the time with those long sales cycles because just the window for something like 00:38:32.860 --> 00:38:35.280 that to happen is that much bigger. That's always fun. 00:38:35.380 --> 00:38:40.260 Yeah. That's happened to me and that's, that's been bad. So let's touch on just a couple of other 00:38:40.260 --> 00:38:47.020 topics here that I think are really interesting. Reuven, you said you charged daily and you charge 00:38:47.020 --> 00:38:53.320 kind of a flat rate up to a point. Let's just talk about what should we charge and then, you know, 00:38:53.320 --> 00:38:56.440 what is the structure? There's, there's all sorts of interesting things like there's hourly, 00:38:56.640 --> 00:39:03.260 daily, weekly, there's flat fixed rate for a project. And then there's this whole concept of 00:39:03.260 --> 00:39:09.980 like creating like productized consulting where somebody might pay like a thousand dollars every 00:39:09.980 --> 00:39:14.540 month and then they can call on you for a certain amount of effort or things like this. Right. So 00:39:14.540 --> 00:39:20.820 what are your thoughts on how you should charge maybe early in your career of this freelancing story? 00:39:20.820 --> 00:39:25.600 And then as you get established, look, the easiest thing when you start off is to do hourly rates, 00:39:25.600 --> 00:39:29.540 right? And everyone talks about it. Everyone thinks about it. And when I do project work, 00:39:29.540 --> 00:39:36.100 I still do largely hourly rates because everyone just sort of goes like, it's the easy, it's the path 00:39:36.100 --> 00:39:43.820 of least resistance. It's not the path of greatest income. And it leads to all sorts of sort of friction 00:39:43.820 --> 00:39:47.620 because no matter what you do, the client's going to assume that you're padding it. 00:39:48.240 --> 00:39:51.560 So one of the nice things about me doing training now is indeed, and there are different ways to 00:39:51.560 --> 00:39:55.840 charge for training also, but I just charge, as you said, like a daily rate for up to X people, 00:39:55.840 --> 00:39:59.820 where X by the way, differs per country because they ask different numbers of questions are 00:39:59.820 --> 00:40:06.180 differently aggressive. And then basically a sort of penalty on top of that. And that has freed me from 00:40:06.180 --> 00:40:10.340 all this business of the hourly stuff. And it is one of the reasons why I enjoy the training so much. 00:40:10.340 --> 00:40:14.420 Yeah. It's pretty clearly bounded and there's not a lot of scope creep, right? It's not like, 00:40:14.420 --> 00:40:18.120 well, that feature was super hard to implement. Actually, we didn't realize it, right? Like, 00:40:18.120 --> 00:40:22.500 it was super hard to tell them about ORMs today. I don't know, right? It doesn't make any sense. 00:40:22.500 --> 00:40:26.800 In theory, like they could complain, well, you didn't touch on such and such a subject that was 00:40:26.800 --> 00:40:31.380 in the syllabus as much as you promised, but that has literally never happened. Like no one cares to 00:40:31.380 --> 00:40:31.740 that degree. 00:40:31.740 --> 00:40:34.680 I was too busy taking photos to prove the attendance in the room. 00:40:34.680 --> 00:40:34.960 Yeah. 00:40:37.020 --> 00:40:40.940 I definitely started with hourly rates. I think most people do. Like you said, Ruben, 00:40:40.940 --> 00:40:46.880 it's, it's path of least resistance. It's kind of old as sand, right? Customers are used to 00:40:46.880 --> 00:40:51.200 transacting in that way of, I mean, people all the time come and sit down with us for initial 00:40:51.200 --> 00:40:54.960 conversation and say, what are your hourly rates? Cause that's just what their expectation is. 00:40:54.960 --> 00:41:01.400 I did that. I agree. Not the path to building the most income, but it definitely the way to get 00:41:01.400 --> 00:41:02.160 started easily. 00:41:02.160 --> 00:41:04.820 I was going to say, before we move off of that, like, you know, what I'm thinking, 00:41:04.820 --> 00:41:11.920 let's suppose I make $40 an hour as an employee. I don't know. Like what would my consulting 00:41:11.920 --> 00:41:17.240 equivalent be? Because as we'll touch on in a minute, there are other fees, other taxes, 00:41:17.240 --> 00:41:22.300 other sort of friction and charges in your life when you're a consultant that doesn't happen when 00:41:22.300 --> 00:41:27.480 you're an employee. So what is like a good starter multiplier that you might like throw out there? 00:41:27.480 --> 00:41:28.500 Is that possible? 00:41:28.500 --> 00:41:34.580 I don't know that I have a multiplier like off the top of head because over time I've 00:41:34.580 --> 00:41:39.140 gotten to where that's probably, I'm an engineer, so it's probably overcomplicated, but here's my 00:41:39.140 --> 00:41:39.480 advice. 00:41:39.480 --> 00:41:40.840 We have a machine learning model for it. 00:41:40.840 --> 00:41:44.880 What I tell people when they ask that kind of question is whatever you do, don't take the 00:41:44.880 --> 00:41:48.820 income you want to make and divide that by 40 hours a week and set your rate there. Cause 00:41:48.820 --> 00:41:52.360 you're wrong. Cause what's going to happen is you're going to take a vacation, you're going 00:41:52.360 --> 00:41:53.600 to get sick, so on and so forth. 00:41:53.600 --> 00:41:58.100 There's going to be latency between a project starting or something like that as well. Yeah, 00:41:58.100 --> 00:42:04.280 exactly. And so what my advice always is, is to figure out what the constituent pieces of overhead 00:42:04.280 --> 00:42:10.060 would be. All of the stuff that costs you time at the very least start there on top of that, 00:42:10.060 --> 00:42:14.400 take the income that you think you're worth it. That I think, I think objectively you could go get on 00:42:14.400 --> 00:42:19.700 the open market and that's a good starting point as your basis, but then take 52 weeks, 00:42:19.700 --> 00:42:25.820 40 hours a week. You got 2,080 hours and then start deducting from those hours, right? Change 00:42:25.820 --> 00:42:29.420 that denominator and say, okay, I'm going to take two weeks of vacation. So now it's 2,000 hours. 00:42:29.420 --> 00:42:34.900 And I think everyone needs to factor vacancy into their rates. You're just not going to have projects 00:42:34.900 --> 00:42:40.240 cleanly lining up to one another. And it may feel kind of icky, this idea that you're charging people 00:42:40.240 --> 00:42:45.560 for time that you weren't working, but that's business. And you have to do that. Like every time 00:42:45.560 --> 00:42:50.380 you rent a hotel room, this'll help. Every time you rent a hotel room, know that you are paying for 00:42:50.380 --> 00:42:54.440 that hotel room and you're paying for a little piece of every other empty room in that hotel, 00:42:54.440 --> 00:42:59.560 because they're not running their business model under the assumption that every room is 100% booked 00:42:59.560 --> 00:43:03.860 all the time. They'd go broke. And it helps me, right? When I see that, and I know that as a consumer, 00:43:03.860 --> 00:43:08.280 I'm actually paying for it that like, okay, this is legitimate. So, you know, I factor in a vacancy 00:43:08.280 --> 00:43:14.620 percentage, like of some expected time, maybe it's 10 to 15, maybe 20% of your time might be vacant. 00:43:14.620 --> 00:43:19.180 You know, you need to find what works there and use that to start deducting from that denominator of 00:43:19.180 --> 00:43:25.060 hours and then take that income you're worth. And maybe now you're dividing that by 1,900 hours 00:43:25.060 --> 00:43:30.520 instead of 2,000, or you're dividing it by 1,500 hours, whatever it is, you know, you need to be honest 00:43:30.520 --> 00:43:36.120 with yourself about it and set your hourly rate from that. And then from there, you've got overhead in 00:43:36.120 --> 00:43:41.800 your pricing. Every time you line up two projects cleanly together, sweet, more profits, right? 00:43:41.800 --> 00:43:43.840 And that's kind of where I would start. 00:43:43.840 --> 00:43:48.460 And that aligns the incentives to have you do that kind of stuff, right? Like it encourages you to do 00:43:48.460 --> 00:43:53.800 those things. But yeah, it sets you up to not die if it doesn't happen. That's a great mindset thing. 00:43:53.800 --> 00:43:56.440 So I cut you off. You're talking about hourly and then some other options. 00:43:56.440 --> 00:44:02.900 Well, I definitely started hourly. We still have one legacy client here at our business that's on an 00:44:02.900 --> 00:44:10.700 hourly rate. But we moved to daily and eventually now we're at a place where weekly rates are what 00:44:10.700 --> 00:44:15.520 fit for us. And that kind of factors into how we package and sell our services. We, you know, 00:44:15.520 --> 00:44:21.960 we're doing a lot of R&D work. We're selling, we use Agile and the Scrum methodology. And so we're 00:44:21.960 --> 00:44:28.860 actually selling sprints. And when we work really hard to get customers mentally in a place where they 00:44:28.860 --> 00:44:33.500 understand that what we're doing is we're not committing to individual line items of scope. 00:44:33.500 --> 00:44:39.080 We're committing to some high level business objectives and we're setting a realistic plan 00:44:39.080 --> 00:44:43.720 for how we're going to work on this for the next 12 weeks. And we price it from there. And they 00:44:43.720 --> 00:44:47.720 understand that the budget controls are in their hand. Every time they come into a sprint planning 00:44:47.720 --> 00:44:51.960 session and say, hey, we'd like to prioritize this. We say, fantastic. This is what fell off the bottom. 00:44:51.960 --> 00:44:54.300 And if you still want to do that, we're going to need to do another sprint. 00:44:54.560 --> 00:44:59.180 That's relatively new for us, admittedly, but it's worked really well. We work on that kind 00:44:59.180 --> 00:45:05.660 of concept of weekly rates and it's gotten us out of the haggle of nitpicking individual hours, 00:45:05.660 --> 00:45:11.720 of shipping someone a timesheet of like, okay, I see you spent 42 hours. Tell me what those two hours 00:45:11.720 --> 00:45:17.080 were specifically for, right? You know, that's no fun. That's kind of where we've gotten because the 00:45:17.080 --> 00:45:22.920 hourly model, you are, to some extent, you're kind of diametrically opposed to the interests of your 00:45:22.920 --> 00:45:27.680 customer, whether you like it or not. It is in the customer's best interest for you to spend the least 00:45:27.680 --> 00:45:32.620 amount of time as possible from a financial perspective. And it's in your best interest from a financial 00:45:32.620 --> 00:45:37.360 perspective purely to spend the most amount of time as possible. Like if you look at it purely as economics, 00:45:37.360 --> 00:45:43.680 you have that tension. And when you move away from the hourly model, that tension can be resolved. 00:45:43.680 --> 00:45:48.920 But that doesn't make it easy. And a lot of times that involves customer education and finding that right 00:45:48.920 --> 00:45:54.000 client fit. So another red flag for me, client says, no, you got to build by the hour. You're not a fit 00:45:54.000 --> 00:45:55.560 for how we engage here. We won't do our best. 00:45:55.560 --> 00:46:00.900 That's interesting. I love the selling the sprints because that sells business value. And that speaks 00:46:00.900 --> 00:46:07.260 to the people paying the bills and making the decisions. And it's short enough that you deliver 00:46:07.260 --> 00:46:11.540 something that they can evaluate and decide how it's going, right? 00:46:11.680 --> 00:46:16.760 And I think that's really important when I talked about like starting out, figuring out what your rate is 00:46:16.760 --> 00:46:22.640 by looking at what your open market rate might be as a basis. If you want to charge above market, 00:46:22.640 --> 00:46:28.540 I think you can go and do that. And I think you should. But you got to figure out what value you're adding 00:46:28.540 --> 00:46:35.060 in order to be worth above market rate. And there are plenty of ways to add value of being more than just a coder. 00:46:35.700 --> 00:46:42.760 And, and, and, you know, for my business, that process of bringing that methodology and allowing 00:46:42.760 --> 00:46:47.960 the customers to have budget controls and ways to check in and good defined scopes along the way 00:46:47.960 --> 00:46:53.480 is the value that we're adding that justifies the premium that they pay for our services rather than 00:46:53.480 --> 00:46:57.100 building it in house or using a, you know, a cheaper firm or something like that. 00:46:57.100 --> 00:47:02.700 Yeah. Super cool. And for what it's worth, the guy that I hired, it's a weekly halftime. 00:47:02.700 --> 00:47:07.580 So it's nice and clear. It's just like, Hey, you know, what do you work on this week? And it's, it's not, 00:47:07.580 --> 00:47:11.960 I already know what next week's going to cost. Right. So it's, it's pretty straightforward. I like that. 00:47:11.960 --> 00:47:18.440 Let's wrap this up with some of the conversation around kind of where we started. Like I'm a programmer. 00:47:18.440 --> 00:47:26.340 I love coding. I love working on software. I want to go freelance. And it turns out I need to find clients. 00:47:26.340 --> 00:47:32.440 I need to do marketing. Oh my gosh, there's extra taxes in accounting. Do I need insurance? 00:47:32.440 --> 00:47:37.860 Do I need an LLC? Should it be an S corp? Do I need, I don't know, whatever. There's all these other 00:47:37.860 --> 00:47:43.620 things. So what are the things that people don't know that they just didn't realize they signed up 00:47:43.620 --> 00:47:47.120 for a self-education in when they go down the freelancing route? 00:47:47.120 --> 00:47:52.720 I mentioned a little bit before, but you know, people who are technical and want to become consultants, 00:47:52.720 --> 00:47:59.740 there's nothing wrong with that. But now you are running a business and that means you're dealing 00:47:59.740 --> 00:48:03.820 with all these other things. And so you need to at the very least make a list of all. 00:48:03.820 --> 00:48:05.440 Even as a business of one, right? 00:48:05.440 --> 00:48:05.820 Right. 00:48:05.820 --> 00:48:10.580 You don't have to be like Casey with a whole bunch of employees. You get a big chunk of this right away. 00:48:10.580 --> 00:48:17.000 Absolutely. Absolutely. You've got to like figure out the tax thing. Very, very important. In the US, 00:48:17.000 --> 00:48:20.980 you've got to deal with health insurance stuff, right? Like there are all these things that your 00:48:20.980 --> 00:48:25.760 employer previously dealt with that you probably didn't even think about very much. 00:48:25.960 --> 00:48:26.400 retirement. 00:48:26.400 --> 00:48:31.600 Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. That's super, super important, right? All these different things 00:48:31.600 --> 00:48:35.860 that like you never even thought about or you saw it on your paycheck stub and now you have to actually 00:48:35.860 --> 00:48:39.660 deal with it. You're also taking on all the risk, right? One of the reasons, right? In case it was 00:48:39.660 --> 00:48:44.300 mentioning this earlier, one of the reasons why consultants charge much more per hour than employees 00:48:44.300 --> 00:48:50.040 in the end is because now you're taking on the risk of not having work or things not getting done or 00:48:50.040 --> 00:48:54.260 they're not paying you and on, on and on. So I would say if you're going to start consulting, 00:48:54.420 --> 00:48:59.700 have a cushion of some cash. People talk about different amounts of time. Let's say six months, 00:48:59.700 --> 00:49:03.880 right? Longer would be even better. It doesn't have to be a lot, but that's to be enough that if, 00:49:03.880 --> 00:49:07.680 as you know, with my clients, it took six months for them to actually do something and pay, 00:49:07.680 --> 00:49:11.960 you can survive that because you're going to have a lot of meetings. You're going to talk to people. 00:49:11.960 --> 00:49:17.720 You talked about the long spin-up cycle to get started, but there's also, we pay you when 00:49:17.720 --> 00:49:23.360 maybe you ship a sprint. And oh, by the way, that's net 30 or net 45. Did you know? So you got to 00:49:23.360 --> 00:49:27.400 wait till the next month and then another 30 days, like, wait, that's like nine months. What just 00:49:27.400 --> 00:49:28.340 happened here? Right? 00:49:28.340 --> 00:49:32.860 I remember the shock that I had when I discovered in Israel, it's pretty typical to play net plus 60. 00:49:32.860 --> 00:49:37.520 And I was like, wait, I just finished the work. What do you mean you're going to pay me in another 00:49:37.520 --> 00:49:43.600 like two and a half months? How can that possibly be? And then of course, you know, one of my favorite 00:49:43.600 --> 00:49:50.560 lines, that's our standard policy, right? And you've got to get used to it. So right. Even if 00:49:50.560 --> 00:49:54.540 you find a client right away and start working with them right away, it's probably going to be at a 00:49:54.540 --> 00:49:55.740 three, four months until you see any money. 00:49:55.740 --> 00:50:01.980 That is exactly what I am. I'm my first freelancing client. I just dove right into it. I did have some 00:50:01.980 --> 00:50:07.020 money put back and I'll add to that, like of having a cushion, have both a cushion and a willingness 00:50:07.020 --> 00:50:11.620 to cut back your lifestyle to extend the duration of that cushion. Cause I think I went in with like 00:50:11.620 --> 00:50:17.840 three months of cushion and then I got into a project and I got net 60 and it like, I ate ramen 00:50:17.840 --> 00:50:23.620 for many weeks waiting for this check to come. And then this check came and I was like, Oh my God, 00:50:23.620 --> 00:50:27.180 you know, it was three months worth of work in one check. And it was like, it was like the biggest 00:50:27.180 --> 00:50:31.120 check I had ever cached, but it was, I was so hungry. You know, I thought about eating it. 00:50:31.120 --> 00:50:38.080 And so I wasn't as, as prepared from, from a financial standpoint to jump into it. And so, 00:50:38.080 --> 00:50:45.480 but fortunately I guess like my mentality, I was willing to shut off all of my bills and like, 00:50:45.480 --> 00:50:50.360 I haven't had cable since. So that was kind of freeing and just like cut back on a lot of things 00:50:50.360 --> 00:50:55.420 and basically go into financial hibernation waiting for that first check to come. You know, 00:50:55.420 --> 00:50:59.380 so cashflow is a tricky thing that you don't, I never thought about before getting into the 00:50:59.380 --> 00:51:02.820 business. And now, now we look, cashflow is a constant thing. I'm always looking at 00:51:02.820 --> 00:51:07.560 because you can do the work and you know, from day one of the first day you wrote some code, 00:51:07.560 --> 00:51:10.200 it could be 60, 90 days before you ever get any money. 00:51:10.200 --> 00:51:14.260 Yeah. I also go through that. Obviously like with sponsors of the show, right? They maybe 00:51:14.260 --> 00:51:20.080 book stuff far ahead, but then, right. There's like you said, net 30, net 45, and there's just a lot of 00:51:20.080 --> 00:51:26.240 delays. Luckily on the course side of things, it's all wired straight up to Stripe. So somebody puts 00:51:26.240 --> 00:51:31.160 their credit card in the money's in the bank. Two days later, there's sort of these two parts and they 00:51:31.160 --> 00:51:33.300 counterbalance each other pretty well in my world. 00:51:33.300 --> 00:51:38.180 I agree. Like I definitely, I know. So I typically run like two big sales a year. Like I do a birthday 00:51:38.180 --> 00:51:44.360 sale. I do a black Friday sale. And I know that if my clients in those, at those periods, again, 00:51:44.360 --> 00:51:49.000 that's for my online courses. If my consulting, my training clients during those periods are 00:51:49.000 --> 00:51:54.020 paying slowly or, you know, it's another 30 days until I see it, those sales can actually help to fill 00:51:54.020 --> 00:51:54.920 in the blanks. Exactly. 00:51:54.920 --> 00:51:59.040 And I'll throw a tip out there. When you're negotiating those payment terms, 00:51:59.500 --> 00:52:04.860 we had a lot of success in, I say we, I mean, this was, this is something I did when I was still 00:52:04.860 --> 00:52:11.000 individually freelancing, man, throw a 1% discount on due on receipt. And you'll be surprised at how 00:52:11.000 --> 00:52:14.780 many companies go for that. Because I mean, when you're dealing with a large organization, 00:52:14.780 --> 00:52:20.600 like unless it just causes an absolute burden in their process, they'll take 1% discount any day. 00:52:20.740 --> 00:52:26.020 And so offering some little things like that can really help in speeding up your cash flow. 00:52:26.020 --> 00:52:30.680 And that saved me a couple times of like, I shouldn't even admit, but I think there've been 00:52:30.680 --> 00:52:34.380 times where we offered a 10% discount. It's like, it's cheaper than factoring an invoice 00:52:34.380 --> 00:52:39.280 to get some cash through. And so that's something else that I didn't realize. And I think is a, 00:52:39.280 --> 00:52:42.900 this is something that you'll learn that is a really good thing. Not necessarily like, 00:52:42.900 --> 00:52:46.680 oh, I didn't know that. And this is awful. Is that everything is negotiable. 00:52:47.020 --> 00:52:52.000 It's not like walking into the AT&T store to buy a phone. You can negotiate every term of a contract 00:52:52.000 --> 00:52:52.920 and you should. 00:52:52.920 --> 00:52:57.160 It's really hard though, to get that, you know, for a lot of people to have that negotiation. 00:52:57.160 --> 00:53:03.220 Cause again, like conflict adverse, just want to please and get this job and whatnot. 00:53:03.220 --> 00:53:06.760 Well, I would say maybe this helps is as a business, when we present a contract, 00:53:06.760 --> 00:53:10.340 I'll tell you right now, we present the contract and the terms in the contract are like, 00:53:10.340 --> 00:53:15.620 this is what we're offering up with the expectation that they're going to negotiate with us. 00:53:15.620 --> 00:53:19.100 And like, we present a contract with, that doesn't have our best terms. 00:53:19.100 --> 00:53:23.680 We're expecting people negotiate and we factor that into it. So know that other businesses are 00:53:23.680 --> 00:53:26.920 doing that. They're giving you, they may not be giving you their best terms. There actually 00:53:26.920 --> 00:53:32.000 probably is some flexibility because savvy companies kind of know that that's going to happen. So 00:53:32.000 --> 00:53:35.520 negotiate, like, don't be afraid of it. Often it's being expected. 00:53:35.520 --> 00:53:38.420 I love those tips. I love those tips. I may take some of them. 00:53:38.420 --> 00:53:42.420 I'll take a royalty on those. Yeah. 1% of the 1%. 00:53:42.840 --> 00:53:46.360 I had a big company contact me. It was probably like a year, year and a half ago 00:53:46.360 --> 00:53:51.100 and everything sounded great. And they said, Oh, and by the way, you're going to have to send us 00:53:51.100 --> 00:53:56.120 what's called in Israel, like a tax receipt in order to get paid. Now tax receipt basically says, 00:53:56.120 --> 00:54:00.560 I have received the money and thus I owe the taxes on it. And they said, and then we'll pay you net plus 00:54:00.560 --> 00:54:05.920 60. I was like, wait, you're telling me that to pay the taxes before I paid. I said, you realize 00:54:05.920 --> 00:54:09.120 it's not legal anymore in Israel that I can just send you sort of a general invoice. 00:54:09.120 --> 00:54:14.440 And this company basically said, well, tough luck. This is what we've been told by our like 00:54:14.440 --> 00:54:19.160 masters in California who don't care about Israeli law. And I said, all right, I'm not going to do 00:54:19.160 --> 00:54:22.980 this. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Actually, we found a way that we can funnel. 00:54:22.980 --> 00:54:24.840 I just remembered. Yeah. 00:54:26.160 --> 00:54:28.500 Right. We can funnel it through a third party. 00:54:28.500 --> 00:54:32.660 There was that other contract in my pocket. 00:54:32.660 --> 00:54:37.640 And I said, am I going to have to pay for funneling through this third company? Oh no, 00:54:37.640 --> 00:54:42.600 we'll pay for that. Don't worry about it. So if you just show a bit of backbone, very often, 00:54:42.600 --> 00:54:46.320 they will be willing to back down. I mean, at the end of the day, these are just people doing their 00:54:46.320 --> 00:54:50.300 jobs, right? Like at the end of the day, it's just people. And if you are giving a good product or 00:54:50.300 --> 00:54:54.820 service, they want to look good to their bosses. And so they want to show they brought a good supplier 00:54:54.820 --> 00:54:58.860 that makes them look good. So, you know, a little bit of money is not going to affect it. 00:54:58.860 --> 00:55:02.580 And I think that there's a delicate balance there on when we talked about red flags earlier. 00:55:02.580 --> 00:55:06.300 I think that, you know, if you have to push a little bit to get your best deal, that's okay. 00:55:06.300 --> 00:55:10.640 But if you have to push too much, that can take you into the territory of, do I really want to work 00:55:10.640 --> 00:55:15.280 with this group? Like if they really brought me an awful deal, like that's one of the worst things is 00:55:15.280 --> 00:55:20.360 like you turn down a deal and then like you're so far off on price or something that you're, 00:55:20.360 --> 00:55:24.340 you know, they say, well, we're willing to pay this rate and it's 25% less than your rate. 00:55:24.480 --> 00:55:27.960 And you say, nah, no, thanks. And they go, okay, nevermind. We'll pay your rate. It's like, okay, 00:55:27.960 --> 00:55:33.380 well, like that doesn't give me a lot of confidence that you're not trying to work me over here. You 00:55:33.380 --> 00:55:37.020 know, like if you were comfortable with that rate in the first place, why'd you make this offer? So 00:55:37.020 --> 00:55:41.940 you got to balance that. Definitely. Someone brings you a bad deal and you have to negotiate to survive. 00:55:41.940 --> 00:55:44.220 That's probably a bad, bad customer. 00:55:44.220 --> 00:55:49.820 That's good advice. You know, I want to come back really quickly to this hourly versus weekly 00:55:49.820 --> 00:55:58.080 and net 30 and getting paid after and all this stuff. So when I started this whole thing that I'm 00:55:58.080 --> 00:56:02.900 doing with the podcast and the courses and stuff, there would be times where maybe I would sell six 00:56:02.900 --> 00:56:08.840 months worth of ads or like you said, Ruben, there'd be some like a new course launch and that would bring 00:56:08.840 --> 00:56:13.740 in a lot of revenue, but then it would take two weeks or sorry, two months for me to write the next 00:56:13.740 --> 00:56:19.520 course or for those ad slots to be used up before I can do it again. So I would get these big checks 00:56:19.520 --> 00:56:25.180 like Casey talked about. They're like, sweet, look at this. But then I would have to go a really long 00:56:25.180 --> 00:56:30.620 time without getting, it was no longer every two weeks, my direct deposit shows up. It could be months 00:56:30.620 --> 00:56:37.080 and it's unknown what the next destination is going to be. And obviously preparing as you all spoke 00:56:37.080 --> 00:56:41.160 about, it makes a lot of sense. But the other part I want to talk about, just get your thoughts on what, 00:56:41.160 --> 00:56:47.400 you know, sort of helping my family adjust to this world that they didn't necessarily, they were 00:56:47.400 --> 00:56:52.380 supportive of, but didn't necessarily buy into. Like I know my wife and I, we would be financially 00:56:52.380 --> 00:56:56.700 planning and like, oh, we got to pay these bills or this too much coming up for the kids or whatever. 00:56:57.360 --> 00:57:02.680 And all of a sudden all that had to get reworked. Like what are y'all thought on, on this? I think 00:57:02.680 --> 00:57:08.200 that's maybe something you have to adjust to. Even when the money is good, it's still like way more 00:57:08.200 --> 00:57:12.600 erratic. I definitely had some personal adjustment, but I'll defer to Reuven. Maybe he has insight. 00:57:12.600 --> 00:57:19.900 I was fortunately had the disposition of being single when I made that jump. And so when I, when I met my 00:57:19.900 --> 00:57:25.220 partner, I was already in freelancing. And so she just sort of, she kind of knew what she was getting 00:57:25.220 --> 00:57:29.860 into jumping into it. And so that, that sort of self-selected. So I don't have any advice there. 00:57:29.860 --> 00:57:32.660 That may not be helpful. I had to work that over for myself. 00:57:32.660 --> 00:57:34.220 But you had the ebb and float. 00:57:34.220 --> 00:57:39.120 Yeah. And I had to manage my own cash for those long periods of time and being conservative 00:57:39.120 --> 00:57:44.620 financially is really smart there. But outside of, I had the luxury of not having to adapt. 00:57:44.620 --> 00:57:49.440 It wasn't affecting anyone else's lifestyle, but my own. So I was fortunate in that regard. 00:57:49.440 --> 00:57:51.380 That's cool. You kind of got to be a financial camel. 00:57:51.600 --> 00:57:54.300 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Retain, retain money. 00:57:54.300 --> 00:57:55.680 Reuven, go for it. 00:57:55.680 --> 00:57:57.040 Exactly. 00:57:57.040 --> 00:58:02.280 My wife and I met when I'd already been freelancing for about four years. And for her, it was kind of 00:58:02.280 --> 00:58:05.560 weird that I didn't know exactly how much I was going to make each month. And like, it went up and 00:58:05.560 --> 00:58:10.920 down. She would definitely say to me, okay, like, you know, how's next month looking? So that we'd know 00:58:10.920 --> 00:58:15.120 if we could buy something or if we couldn't buy something. And, you know, one of the nice things about 00:58:15.120 --> 00:58:20.520 training is that I now sort of schedule things way far in advance. So I know what a month is going to 00:58:20.520 --> 00:58:24.280 look like pretty much, you know, even three, four, five months in advance where I'm going to be and 00:58:24.280 --> 00:58:28.140 what it's going to be looking like, which has definitely helped with our stability and our good 00:58:28.140 --> 00:58:32.540 things. I should add, by the way, my kids were all born. I have three kids. They were all born like 00:58:32.540 --> 00:58:37.400 years after I started freelancing. And I remember saying to them a few years ago, you know, most adults 00:58:37.400 --> 00:58:42.720 go to the same place each day and work with the same other people each day. And they were like, 00:58:42.720 --> 00:58:44.580 no way. That sounds crazy. 00:58:44.580 --> 00:58:47.380 That's awesome. 00:58:47.380 --> 00:58:53.060 I would say the biggest sort of the two things that my wife and I should have done years ago when we got 00:58:53.060 --> 00:58:58.680 married, which sounds like Casey was smart enough to do, was we started finally a few years ago budgeting. 00:58:58.680 --> 00:59:04.020 Like, let's figure out how much we're going to be like spending. And that took off a lot of pressure 00:59:04.020 --> 00:59:09.300 for me for earning as much as I possibly can every month. As long as I can earn my salary, 00:59:09.300 --> 00:59:13.920 I'm calm. And anything above that is gravy, but I don't have to be killing myself to earn, 00:59:13.920 --> 00:59:17.740 you know, as much as possible 24 hours a day. The other thing we started doing as part of this 00:59:17.740 --> 00:59:23.480 whole budgeting thing was, as Michael said before, we started saving for retirement years too late. 00:59:23.480 --> 00:59:27.480 I mean, we'll still have something for retirement and everything. You cannot start putting away money 00:59:27.480 --> 00:59:32.040 for retirement early enough. I cannot stress this enough, especially to young people thinking about 00:59:32.040 --> 00:59:35.660 freelancing. Start ASAP and don't look back. 00:59:35.660 --> 00:59:39.700 And also a latecomer to that. I mean, like, I think that overall goes into, 00:59:39.700 --> 00:59:43.920 if I could do it all over again, I wish I could, before jumping into this world, 00:59:43.920 --> 00:59:49.720 really train myself up on just some financial literacy that I was lacking, because that would 00:59:49.720 --> 00:59:54.120 have been helpful in the beginning. And it pays off dividends long run on the retirement side. 00:59:54.120 --> 00:59:58.680 And I was well out of freelancing and into running a company before I even started thinking about 00:59:58.680 --> 01:00:02.500 that, which is unfortunate. But definitely, if you can factor that into your model, 01:00:02.500 --> 01:00:03.900 you'll be that much more successful. 01:00:03.900 --> 01:00:08.020 Absolutely. The retirement stuff does feel like something like, I can just kick that down the 01:00:08.020 --> 01:00:13.840 road. You know, I cannot put off taxes because I might go to jail. So we got to do that. And I 01:00:13.840 --> 01:00:19.620 got to have clients. So I better learn marketing. But I could probably kick retirement down until I've 01:00:19.620 --> 01:00:22.780 got a handle on the other stuff. And you know, maybe that is the right thing to do, but 01:00:22.780 --> 01:00:23.920 shouldn't kick it very far. 01:00:23.920 --> 01:00:27.740 It's one of those things that I think we can lie to ourselves pretty easily, especially if you're 01:00:27.740 --> 01:00:33.380 going into consulting or freelancing, under the pretense of entrepreneurship, right? It's really 01:00:33.380 --> 01:00:38.500 easy when you're excited, and you're motivated, and things are going well to be like, hey, you know 01:00:38.500 --> 01:00:42.400 what, I don't need to think about retirement, I got to grow this business. I'm going to be charging 01:00:42.400 --> 01:00:47.600 $1,000 an hour in five years. And I'll, you know, I'll just work for a year and retire on that, or, 01:00:47.600 --> 01:00:51.860 you know, and maybe you will, right? I don't think there's anything wrong with having those sort of 01:00:51.860 --> 01:00:57.420 aspirations. But the pressure is a lot less when you know that you don't have to, right? 01:00:57.420 --> 01:01:03.580 Financial pressure sucks. That's my advice. And so I do everything I can to not have any. 01:01:03.580 --> 01:01:07.900 Yeah, let me like wrap that back around. We talked about like getting clients, we talked about 01:01:07.900 --> 01:01:13.660 the right clients, the red flags. If you don't have that financial pressure as much, you can make better 01:01:13.660 --> 01:01:17.640 choices at the beginning of projects and the beginning of engagements that keep you happier. 01:01:18.240 --> 01:01:22.480 Right, you're not forced into like, I'm really in the corner here, I got to just take it. 01:01:22.480 --> 01:01:27.640 Sales solves everything. And one of the biggest problems it solves is it is simply, it's not about 01:01:27.640 --> 01:01:31.080 selling, closing every deal that comes in front of you and making a bunch of money. 01:01:31.080 --> 01:01:38.180 One of the greatest luxuries of having a good pipeline of clients is the flexibility to be 01:01:38.180 --> 01:01:42.580 choosy with which ones you work with. I mean, that's a beautiful luxury that you don't have when 01:01:42.580 --> 01:01:48.340 you're hungry. But if you can get there, ultimately, you're always picking for better client fit. So 01:01:48.340 --> 01:01:53.840 aim to be choosy. That's a great goal to have more than any other financial goal. Like I would tell 01:01:53.840 --> 01:01:59.420 people, don't be focused on how much money I can make. Be focused on the idea of I will get to pick 01:01:59.420 --> 01:02:05.060 the projects I work on. Because for me, that's a much healthier life to live, like from a stress 01:02:05.060 --> 01:02:05.580 perspective. 01:02:05.580 --> 01:02:10.600 I'm gonna go even further than that. I agree with everything you say. But the fact that I now 01:02:10.600 --> 01:02:16.380 have some like choosiness and financial stability has also helped my emotional health and my marriage, 01:02:16.380 --> 01:02:22.440 right? It means that I can actually concentrate on these relationships. And I'm not constantly stressed 01:02:22.440 --> 01:02:26.020 over Oh, my God, Oh, my God, Oh, my God, I don't have enough days of consulting work next month. 01:02:26.020 --> 01:02:28.520 What are we going to do to pay for XYZ? 01:02:28.520 --> 01:02:32.760 Absolutely. Yeah, it's good all around. All right, there's so many more things we could talk about. 01:02:32.760 --> 01:02:37.120 We might have to do a follow up show at some point. But I wouldn't be respectful of your time. So 01:02:37.120 --> 01:02:42.140 probably gonna have to wrap it up there. Now I'm gonna ask the two regular questions at the end and 01:02:42.140 --> 01:02:46.740 give you all a chance for a final call to action. So if you're gonna write some Python code, what editor 01:02:46.740 --> 01:02:47.960 do you use? Reuben, start with you. 01:02:47.960 --> 01:02:50.840 The only editor that exists, as far as I know, GNU Emacs. 01:02:50.840 --> 01:02:55.040 I've heard vicious rumors that other editors exist. 01:02:55.040 --> 01:02:56.700 Another list. 01:02:56.700 --> 01:03:00.480 It's both an editor. Yeah, it's an editor and an operating system. It's all good. 01:03:01.900 --> 01:03:11.280 Yeah, definitely call. I was hardcore PyCharm for a long time. But I made the shift to pure evil. And I use Visual 01:03:11.280 --> 01:03:14.200 Studio code. That's cool. I still go back to PyCharm every once in a while. 01:03:14.200 --> 01:03:27.280 Yeah, I like both of those. And I definitely think the momentum around PyCharm is growing. It's doing some cool stuff. So also nice. All right. And then notable PyPI package, maybe not the most popular one, but something you came across like, oh, man, this is super cool. People should know about 01:03:27.280 --> 01:03:28.280 this. Casey? 01:03:28.280 --> 01:03:33.960 Casey? No, let Reuben go first, because I got to look one up because it's awesome, but I can't remember the name of it. All right. Go, Reuben. 01:03:34.120 --> 01:03:51.340 Okay, I'm just going to go like a super ridiculously easy default, the one I use every day for my teaching, which is Jupyter Notebook. You know, Jupyter Notebook, Jupyter Lab. I know it's like boring and everyone uses it. But oh my God, it has changed my teaching dramatically. Because not only can I show them what I'm doing, but I can then send them the document and they can play with it themselves at home. 01:03:51.500 --> 01:03:52.940 Super cool. Casey, you find yours yet? 01:03:52.940 --> 01:04:11.220 I'm going to put a little addendum in there because I just found something. Actually, you're right. I just found something this week called Git Auto Push. Git Auto Push takes your Jupyter Notebook, commits it to Git, and pushes it to GitHub. And then you can share when you're doing live lectures. Has changed my life in three days of using it. 01:04:11.220 --> 01:04:11.840 That's pretty sweet. 01:04:11.840 --> 01:04:12.580 Oh, that's awesome. 01:04:12.580 --> 01:04:20.620 We could use that on a client project. We do a lot of Jupyter stuff. Very cool. Jupyter Labs and Jupyter Hub are also really neat. Mine is AsciiMatics. 01:04:20.620 --> 01:04:21.520 AsciiMatics. 01:04:21.520 --> 01:04:35.340 Yeah, you got to check this out and maybe find an example of it implemented somewhere. But it's a, I'm reading from the description, a package to help people create full screen text UIs from interactive forms to Ascii animations on any platform. 01:04:35.440 --> 01:04:49.980 So it's like build a console UI that is animated like the Matrix, and it is awesome. It serves no actual practical purpose whatsoever that I know of, but it is so cool. It's like building UIs from the movie Hackers. 01:04:50.120 --> 01:05:07.800 Yeah, yeah, that's a great one. I'll go ahead and throw one out as well. I just ran across something called HTTPX, which is a library that is 100% compatible with requests, but adds on HTTP2, as well as several levels of async integration and some other cool stuff. 01:05:07.800 --> 01:05:11.500 So very cool if you're looking to do a little more than just straight requests. 01:05:12.340 --> 01:05:23.520 All right. Final call to action, guys. Someone out there listening, they're excited. They're like, okay, I think I've got all these lined up. That was great advice. I want to get started. What do they do? What are the first steps? What's first month look like? 01:05:23.660 --> 01:05:35.940 Maybe this isn't helpful advice, but it's the advice that I give all the time, which is you want to jump into freelancing. If your first question is, how am I going to find my first client? My advice is don't do it. 01:05:36.440 --> 01:05:53.320 I don't mean don't ever do it, but I do think that you should know who your first couple of clients are before you make the jump. It's going to take the pressure down quite a bit. And that may mean either taking a position in the consulting world to get a taste of that business if you hadn't had it, or just bootstrapping your network. 01:05:53.320 --> 01:06:18.400 Call on people that you've worked with. At least get that lined up before you quit your day job. And like for me, I was able to make a few phone calls. I had some good contacts. And from the day I decided I was going to quit my day job to go on into freelancing, it took me like three weeks. I had a couple potential projects lined up, and then I pulled the trigger. So it doesn't necessarily mean like stay in your career for another year, but definitely know who those first couple of projects might be and try and stagger them. 01:06:18.400 --> 01:06:23.780 Good advice. Do the legwork to not land in an empty pool when you jump. 01:06:23.780 --> 01:06:25.920 Totally. Yeah. That hurts your legs. 01:06:25.920 --> 01:06:45.880 All right. So I'm going to extend the swimming and pool metaphor here. So it's a very common to think that if you're going to succeed in freelancing or in business in general, you want to be all things to all people. And this turns out to be not the case. You want to be, as it were, the big fish in the small pond. 01:06:45.880 --> 01:06:56.740 You want to be really well known for something. The analogy that I've heard numerous times is if your sink is clogged and you open the yellow pages and you see lots of plumbers and one plumber says, I unclog sinks. 01:06:56.740 --> 01:07:01.760 Well, maybe there aren't a lot of people who need that particular service, but the people who need it are going to jump to that ad. 01:07:01.760 --> 01:07:16.660 You want to be the person who solves one particular problem really, really well. And I would say before or while you're starting up, Philip Morgan's book, The Positioning Manual, is fantastic, both in helping you to figure out what do you want to work on? 01:07:16.740 --> 01:07:29.720 What is your niche? And does a great job of getting rid of your fear at doing this. They're like, wait, I'm going to be turning away 90% of my clients. Isn't that the most idiotic thing I've ever done? And no, it's actually the thing that's going to save you and make you stand out. 01:07:29.720 --> 01:07:42.500 Yeah, that's really good advice. It's a great analogy, right? If you get sick, if you have a heart attack, you don't want somebody who's a general practitioner. You're going to go find the doctor who is a heart specialist. 01:07:42.860 --> 01:07:55.800 If you get accused of murder, you're not going to get the general attorney. You're going to get the criminal murder defendant, right? Like, yeah, you kind of want to be in that place. That helps you definitely get first reached out to and also maybe have higher rates, justify higher rates. 01:07:55.800 --> 01:07:56.260 For sure. 01:07:56.260 --> 01:08:02.060 All right. You guys, this was a really fun conversation. Hopefully it helps some folks out there and keep doing what you're doing. It's pretty awesome. 01:08:02.060 --> 01:08:03.120 Thanks so much. It was great. 01:08:03.120 --> 01:08:03.980 Awesome. Thanks, Mike. 01:08:03.980 --> 01:08:04.780 Yep. Bye, guys. 01:08:04.780 --> 01:08:08.480 This has been another episode of Talk Python To Me. 01:08:09.160 --> 01:08:15.680 Our guests on this episode were Reuven Lerner and Casey Kinsey, and it's been brought to you by Linode and Brighter AI. 01:08:15.680 --> 01:08:19.860 Linode is your go-to hosting for whatever you're building with Python. 01:08:19.860 --> 01:08:25.320 Get four months free at talkpython.fm/linode. That's L-I-N-O-D-E. 01:08:25.320 --> 01:08:32.680 Work in the hottest new area of Python, machine learning, with Europe's hottest AI startup, Brighter AI. 01:08:32.680 --> 01:08:37.380 Visit talkpython.fm/bright to apply today. 01:08:38.140 --> 01:08:39.380 Want to level up your Python? 01:08:39.380 --> 01:08:44.240 If you're just getting started, try my Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps course. 01:08:44.240 --> 01:08:52.400 Or if you're looking for something more advanced, check out our new async course that digs into all the different types of async programming you can do in Python. 01:08:52.400 --> 01:08:57.060 And of course, if you're interested in more than one of these, be sure to check out our Everything Bundle. 01:08:57.060 --> 01:08:58.940 It's like a subscription that never expires. 01:08:59.500 --> 01:09:01.240 Be sure to subscribe to the show. 01:09:01.240 --> 01:09:03.740 Open your favorite podcatcher and search for Python. 01:09:03.740 --> 01:09:04.880 We should be right at the top. 01:09:04.880 --> 01:09:13.860 You can also find the iTunes feed at /itunes, the Google Play feed at /play, and the direct RSS feed at /rss on talkpython.fm. 01:09:13.860 --> 01:09:15.960 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. 01:09:15.960 --> 01:09:17.460 Thanks so much for listening. 01:09:17.460 --> 01:09:18.520 I really appreciate it. 01:09:18.760 --> 01:09:20.280 Now get out there and write some Python code. 01:09:20.280 --> 01:09:40.280 I'll see you next time. 01:09:40.280 --> 01:10:10.260 Thank you.