{"id":2190,"date":"2016-06-06T07:30:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-06T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=2190"},"modified":"2016-06-06T06:45:28","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T12:45:28","slug":"cash-flow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2190","title":{"rendered":"Cash Flow"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Contracting, like any other business, is all about cash flow.  You want to make sure you have more money coming in the door than leaving the door.  <\/p>\n<p>A <a href=\"http:\/\/thetimoneygroup.com\/\">friend of mine<\/a> once told me that the best advice he had received about running a one person business was that there were three components to the work:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>getting work<\/li>\n<li>doing the work<\/li>\n<li> getting paid for the work<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>and if you didn&#8217;t enjoy all three and treat them equally, you&#8217;d be in a world of hurt.<\/p>\n<p>I find this be be very true.  Don&#8217;t consider contracting if you are only interested in the doing of the work (whether that be development, design, data manipulation, etc).  You don&#8217;t have to be perfect at the other pieces (getting the work and getting paid for the work), but you ignore them at your peril.<\/p>\n<p>Good ways to get the work:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Market yourself.  I like blogging, but contributing to open source and speaking at user groups and conferences seem to work well too.\n<\/li>\n<li>Always be networking and helping others.<\/li>\n<li>Look for work before your contract ends.<\/li>\n<li>Have a cash reserve so you don&#8217;t have to take the first gig that comes along.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Good ways to get paid for the work:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Sign a contract<\/li>\n<li>Stop work if you aren&#8217;t getting paid<\/li>\n<li>Be persistent&#8211;I have chased invoices for five months before getting paid (this included sending the responsible party a holiday gift)<\/li>\n<li>Use an accounting system (I like <a href=\"https:\/\/mooreds.freshbooks.com\/tryfreshbooks\/www\">FreshBooks<\/a> but use something!  I started with a spreadsheet).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If you&#8217;d like to learn more about contracting, I am speaking at the June Boulder Ruby Meetup.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.meetup.com\/boulder_ruby_group\/events\/231236036\/\">You can RSVP here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Contracting, like any other business, is all about cash flow. You want to make sure you have more money coming in the door than leaving the door. A friend of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contracting-basics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2190"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2210,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2190\/revisions\/2210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}