The Consultation Trap: When Free Advice Becomes Free Work – Business Boundaries Picture yourself offering a complimentary thirty-minute consultation to demonstrate your expertise and win new business, only to discover that prospects treat this generosity as an opportunity to extract your most valuable insights without any intention of paying for implementation, returning weeks later with … Read more
You lower your consulting rates to forty percent below market averages hoping to win more clients through competitive pricing, and you succeed in attracting abundant business from people who negotiate your already-low rates even lower, demand immediate responses at all hours, question every invoice line item, compare your work unfavorably to competitors they claim would … Read more
Your contract specifies building a five-page website for fifteen thousand dirhams with two rounds of revisions included. Three weeks into the project, the client casually mentions wanting a blog section during a status call, then later asks about e-commerce functionality for just a few products, then requests member login capabilities because their board suggested it … Read more
You analyze your annual revenue report and discover that three clients generated sixty-eight percent of your total income while the remaining forty-two clients contributed only thirty-two percent despite consuming seventy percent of your time through endless small projects, scope negotiations, and support requests that never quite justify their administrative burden. Meanwhile, your three major clients … Read more