Estimating for Consultants

The other day someone wrote to me expressing surprise that their software support folks refused to give a firm estimate for some small piece of work (adding a printer definition within the app). They wanted my opinion as to common practice. Well, in common practice most software vendors sell all encompassing support contracts that cover this sort of thing, so this was a little unusual to start with. My answer was probably surprising, though.

I agreed with the vendor. I won't do estimates for even the most trivial work. If I can, I'll give you a rough idea of what kind of time might be required, but there is no way that I'm going to quote a not-to-exceed price for anything. Well, that's not entirely true: once in a great while, if I have one of those strange situations where the received value is much higher than the work involved, or where it's something I want to do for educational purposes, I may give a firm price. I might also do it for a charity where I'm intending to charge them as little as I possibly can anyway. But generally, no way - I sell time and knowledge, not necessarily results.

That can be hard for some people to accept. "I can't do business with you if you won't give a firm price". Fine. We can't do business. I didn't come knocking on your door soliciting work, did I? You came to me. If you insist on a firm price, you'll have to go elsewhere.

Arrogant? Maybe. But consider this: whatever it is you want me to do, I probably do have some idea of what it involves, and I will tell you that: "Should be no more than two hours normally". Ahh, but there is that "normally". I have no idea what I might run into on your system when I go to do it. It's your system, and your network. There are literally dozens of potential pitfalls I can probably think of instantly, and dozens more that I might not ever expect to see. But everyone of them could cost me time, and in my business, time really is money.

I might be able to do research to know whether or not problems exist. For example, if I'm going to do this remotely, I might want to check that your firewall will let me in and that it won't kick me out five minutes later. If I'm adding software, I might check that you have disk space and all prerequisite software that you should have but might not have. There will be other things I need to check.. but every one of these checks takes time. Time costs me money, and unfortunately the pre-check time might in itself be awfully close to what it would take to just do the work. It might even be more: if I just charged in and did it, I might find no obstacles at all, and get done more quickly than it would take to check every condition.

Well, too bad, you say. We have the same problems in our business, but we average it out. We know that once in a while we'll have a problem or two outside of our control, but that's just part of the cost. The good with the bad, as they say.

OK, I say, but you make widgets, or build boxes, or whatever. I do thousands of different things, in thousands of different places. Most of your environment is known and controlled - mine isn't. I can't average it out in any way that would make sense.

So, yes, you might see that as arrogance. Or even laziness, stubborness, or maybe even foolishness because of lost business. Perhaps it is all of that. But it is how I've done business for over twenty years, and I'm not likely to change.

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