Everything else in my life had fallen away and I needed to fill my schedule, so I signed up for a class. By the end of the first day I was hooked.
My teacher stood almost seven feet tall, knew the material completely, and was extremely likeable. His name was Fred. After a single semester I knew what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
Near the end of that semester Fred handed me my first consulting job.
What did the job involve?
Fixing programs on a TRS-80, which at the time was as modern a machine as you could buy. Sixteen kilobytes of memory and two five and a quarter inch floppy drives.
The client offered six hundred dollars. I had my eye on the six hundred dollars.
What I did not have was any idea whether I could fix the programs. I found that out later, once I was in too deep to withdraw gracefully. I was overconfident, underprepared and completely naive, and I would like to be able to say I have since met many consultants who started better, but I have not.
What did I get wrong?
Looking back, everything it was possible to get wrong.
I did not validate my assumptions. I accepted the client’s description of the problem, the state of the code and the amount of work involved, and every one of those turned out to be optimistic. An hour of questions at the start would have surfaced it. I did not ask, because asking felt like admitting I might not be able to do it.
I did not write a statement of work. Nothing described what I was delivering, by when, for how much, or what was outside the job. Which meant the project was whatever the client believed it was, and their belief could change.
And I did not know whether I could do the work. That is the one that matters most, and it is the one that felt least important at the time, because six hundred dollars was in front of me.
Why is validating assumptions the one that catches people?
Because it feels like distrust when it is protection for both sides.
New consultants avoid asking hard questions at the start because they are worried about seeming difficult, or slow, or insufficiently confident. So they take the description as given and start work. Then on day three the thing that was supposed to be simple turns out to sit on top of something nobody mentioned, and now the timeline is fiction and somebody has to have an uncomfortable conversation anyway.
The questions were always going to get asked. The only choice is whether you ask them before the price is set or after.
What is a statement of work for?
It gives you something to point at.
The value is not legal, or not mainly. It is that when the client asks for something outside the agreement, there is a document, and the conversation becomes ordinary. That is a change, yes, here is what it would take. Without one, the same request is a test of your willingness to be accommodating, and you will fail that test repeatedly until the job is unprofitable.
I have watched consultants with decades of experience lose money on jobs for exactly this reason. Not because they were bad at the work. Because there was no boundary, and every reasonable-sounding addition made the project slightly worse until it was a disaster.
Should you take work you cannot do?
There is a version of this that builds careers and a version that damages them, and they look similar from outside.
Stretching into adjacent work is normal and necessary. Nobody’s second job is identical to their first. The test I use now is whether I can describe, concretely, how I would find out what I do not know. If I can name the documentation, the person to ask, or the way to work it out, the gap is bridgeable.
On the TRS-80 job I could not have answered that. I had no plan for discovering what I did not know, which is the difference between a stretch and a gamble. It worked out, more or less, through the sort of effort that is not repeatable and should not be a business model.
The book on this: Build a Profitable Consulting Practice is 30 chapters on the commercial half of consulting: statements of work, pricing, the clients to refuse, and forty years of getting it wrong first.
What would I tell somebody taking their first one?
Ask the awkward questions before you agree a price. They do not make you look weak, and they are the only thing standing between you and a job that costs more than it pays.
Write down what you are delivering. Two pages is plenty. The point is having something to point at, not the legal apparatus.
Know how you would learn what you do not know. If you cannot describe that, you are not stretching, you are hoping.
Price after understanding the work, not before. A number agreed in ignorance is a number you will regret for the whole project.
Tell them early when it goes wrong. The problem rarely destroys the relationship. Finding out late always does.
I still think about Fred handing me that job. He gave me a start that I was entirely unready for, and I have come to think that was the correct thing to do, because there is no version of readiness that arrives before the first client. What you can control is how much of the damage is avoidable, and forty years on, most of it still is.
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