March 18, 2017
“If coding is bad for profits, what am I supposed to sell?”
You may have heard me say in the past that coding for clients is not a great use of time for an experienced developer.
There are much more profitable ways to spend your most precious resource.
But what are they?
Here are a few things off the top of my head that I’ve done on behalf of my clients over the years, all of which were dramatically more profitable than coding:
- Reviewing RFPs before sending them out
- Sanity checking incoming proposals and quotes
- Disputing hours entries on invoices from outside dev shops (oh, the irony!)
- Translating business needs into dev speak and vice versa
- Planning migrations to cloud services
- Suggesting application architecture
- Prioritizing features based on estimated dev effort and ROI
- Sourcing outside agencies and consultants
- Vetting applicants for full time dev positions
- Advice on salary negotiation for dev hires
- Coaching junior devs in various technical areas
- etc etc etc
Clients place great value on these things and more.
Have you ever done any of these things? Could you? Can you think of similar ones that you’re already doing (probably for free)?
Adding a few of these into your mix of offerings is a great first step away from the hourly billing treadmill.
Sell your head, not your hands.
—J