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Do the Hustle

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Summary

Obie Fernandez will leverage his experience successfully selling consulting services for both Thoughtworks and Hashrocket to help you with the following questions: How do I figure out how to price my services? How do I figure out the kind of work I want to sell? How do I write contracts and statements of work? What about proposals? And RFPs? How do I close the deal?

Bio

Obie Fernandez is Founder and CEO of Hashrocket, a boutique web consultancy and product shop headquartered in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. He has a blog http://obiefernandez.com/ and speaks at conferences and technical user groups on a regular basis. He is a series editor and book author for Addison-Wesley.

About the conference

RubyFringe is an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging Ruby projects and technologies. They're mounting a unique and eccentric gathering of the people and projects that are driving things forward in our community.

Recorded at:

Aug 17, 2008

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Community comments

  • Outstanding presentation

    by Vic _,

    • Re: Outstanding presentation

      by M V,

      • Re: Outstanding presentation

        by Ali Motaz,

        • Outstanding presentation

          by Vic _,

          Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

          Wow, great presentation by Obie.
          eom.
          .V

        • Re: Outstanding presentation

          by M V,

          Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

          Truly great presentation.

        • Slides

          by Mark Richman,

          Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

          Where can I get a PDF or PPT of Obie's slides?

        • Re: Outstanding presentation

          by Ali Motaz,

          Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

          Great!
          This could backfire on Obie, he exposed himself as a salesman and not a techie, this totally ruins and go against what people would respect him for.

          "Make your clients fear you!" ... bad
          "Make your clients respect you!" ... good

          "Charge as high as you can" ... bad
          "Charge as low as you can" ... good
          Toe support this, I remember in a paper about Dell, they were talking about how they offer custom services to large clients or deals, by for example preloading the new computers with the software he needs for each user. They said it would cost the client -i dont recall the exact number from the paper - for example 20 $, they said they could have charged him 15 $, and the client would still take it, but no, Dell charges 5 $!

          As another example, the whole outsourcing business is based on this concept, offering as low as they can!

          I understand, premium products to maintain their image need to charge premium prices, but obie didnt go their, his pricing discussion was weak, why would anyone be impressed by this talk

          Read a marketing book if you wonna learn or get serious about pricing, there is a lot more to it if you wonna be scientific and systematic about it, else your number will be just a guess, a shot in the dark that could win or miss, and even this argument is acutally better advice than obie gave

          obie must be doing something right, else people wouldnt be impressed by the little he say, he does seem to have created an audience ... but not matter how good he is, what he said in this presentation is nothing at all!

        • Re: Outstanding presentation

          by eric weisenheimer,

          Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

          So... how much do you make a year? Sorry but some of us have no interest in charging as little as possible for our services.

        • Re: Outstanding presentation

          by Stefan Tilkov,

          Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

          Ali, Vic, and M: Would you be nice enough to edit your profile and put in your real name? Although we haven’t published any restriction from using aliases, the intent for InfoQ discussions is to maintain a level of professionalism, in which using real names is an important factor. Thanks!

        • Re: Outstanding presentation

          by Ali Motaz,

          Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

          Also please add the ability to edit or at least delete posted reply, you can see I missed the allowed html note in my previous message

          ;)

        • Re: Outstanding presentation

          by Leandro Silva,

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          Great!!!

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