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The most expensive question you can ask a consultant is, “What else do you recommend?”

This seems like a simple thing. At least if you’re a consultant. Potential clients approach you and they know they need something done. They may have a good idea of what that something is and they may even be able to provide a wish list of things to get done. However, for all that preparedness they ruin it all for their budget by asking, “What else do you recommend?”

Now some consultants do business this way. They are paid to help the client understand their needs and map out a solution. However, understand that this is a very expensive proposition in most cases. Hours of meetings and calls and emails exchanged back and forth can go into defining the scope, as we call it.

I wrote this article, originally on August 2, 2007, long before the current economic slowdown and jobless numbers. The Department of Labor is reporting a national 8.5% unemployment rate, a number we have not seen since 1983. Nearly 1 in 10 Americans have no job, and those are just the people who filed for unemployment [...]

Late last night, the #rtjobs hashtag showed up on my radar over on Twitter. It was being championed by @You2Gov as a mechanism to help connect those looking to fill positions with those looking for work. Naturally, I fall into this last group but I often hear about jobs that I am not able to consider, whether because of skill set or geography.

So while the #rtjobs project is developing over on Twitter, I slapped up a site that would help organize that information. Using WordPress and the Twitter Search API, I put together a site that I hope is both useful and productive.

About a year ago, I began working with b5media on a limited basis. I was contracted to migrate the About Weblogs network blogs into b5media – a job that included having to write a custom importer for WordPress which would migrate the content from Nucleus CMS. Little did I know at that time that doing [...]

As you all have noticed, my posting has been severely down in the past week. It has been a very busy week which has been the cause of the low posting. Much of that has to do with my personal life. I am not going to go into that, but I’ve been fighting a depressing [...]

As I talked about before, I recieved a job offer that should be a decent job to walk into. I, apparently, feel better about it than I did a week and a half ago when I initially posted. I still think the company is getting a steal and I hope they realize that.
I will be [...]