I have another question, my friends, What do you think is a good NS career? • Is it earning $200-250 per hour? • Is it building your own consulting firm? • Is it knowing everything(almost) in the field? • Is it delivering a lecture at Suiteworld? • Is it the years of experience? • Is it the number of recommendations on your LinkedIn? • Is it a big enough network? and everybody knows you by name, more of a Tim or Eric? What is your goal? or How are you doing it right now? (That might be a goal for somebody). I am 3.5 years into it, and I want to understand how to take things to the next level. Side Question: Do you think sticking to NS is a good idea in the long term?

It up to you individually to decide what 'the next level' means. It can be any of those things you mention or many others. Even though I do a lot of NS work, I've never really considered it my 'career' - but I do think it is a platform with a bright future.

I only charge $100/hr for side work i need to up my rates

@creece dude that's low - I used charge $130 CAD (100 USD) now $160 CAD (about 125 USD). Charge more man how you are gonna afford your new toys otherwise 🤣

@Sam-I-Am I want to get away from the billable hour all together and go to a retainer model. Some months there's not a ton of hours for some people so its even worse.

that's the ideal billing, works more for administration and management issues though,

most of what i'm seeing/wanting to do is pretty much that. A few coding things here and there ontop of it but just not having to deal w/ hours is nice. I feel like if you can get someone like myself w/ 10 years of dev experience for 3-4k per month, that's gonna be friendly to your budget (cheaper than hiring full time dev by far) and you're gonna get decent work.

Partners seem to want to just sell as many implementations as they can, so they can get the implementation and licensing share money. They don't really get the licensing incentive after a few years, so they don't focus on them. The partners then never build up a support team.

some of the larger partners are moving toward managed services offering (same as ACS) to solve this issue. One of them offered me a position in late 2021 to manage and build the managed services practice. - I declined

Yep, we had a consulting firm a few years back that told us we needed to pay a retainer for their offshore team just in case we needed them.

I'd be curious if a retainer model increases in popularity. I've done it once, years ago (totally unrelated to NetSuite) and it was quite pleasant.

It would also be cheaper in the long run. Having someone w/ lots of experience for 50-60k/yr is 3-4X cheaper than having that same person full time. And from my personal experiences, most companies do not really need a full time resource. They either need a temporary resource to come in and fix something, or someone available to pick up a few new projects. If you aren't just pumping your permanent netsuite resource full of hours, you're just wasting money.

I think that's why NS partners are so popular - most componies using NS don't have full time devs, at least in my experience (which is biased since I do work for a consulting firm so that's what I see)

I agree but then you get into the billable hour hole where you (as a client) get ripped off IMO.

It's a good idea Chris, I just wouldn't look forward to drumming up work. I've done independent consulting in the past (not in NS space) and found it harder.

Yeah I do it now some on the side. Its a little rough initially as clients that have had this happen are a little hostile towards netsuite in general.

I also think it's unfortunate that customers often don't know, and can't tell the difference between quality development and amateurs. The sales pitch is often similar even though the work product can be significantly different.

Right now i just do suiteapp dev so i don't deal w/ clients hardly at all unless shit hits the fan.

Ah, I don't do enough of that. IMHO SuiteApps are where it's most important to have the most rigorous dev standards.

Yeah you can do that for sure. Its just selling a client a retainer vs hours is the main thing IMO. It doesn't take that much to prove your worth if you can just get in. I've been helping a friend's company out with development and the consultancy that was in there ghosted them and the code is terrible. Like i'm not being an ass and just nitpicking... its clearly written by someone who is new or doesn't have much dev experience.

I have done independent consulting on a retainer once - it was quite nice. I helped them when needed, often not needed, got paid. Hung out living in my motorhome in vegas.

I am a noob on this and I want to understand 1. How does this retainer model work? 2. Like do you guys fix 20 hours per month, for X amount? How does it work if they need more than that for any month? Do you increase the cost, or don’t do any extra hours? 3. There might be some months where there is less work, is that amount fixed in that case? (Seems like) 4. Don’t you guys give timesheets and invoices to your clients in case of a retainer model? and if that is needed, how does it make any difference with hourly billing? 5. I am guessing, I would have to track my hours anyway, I don’t want to give 30 for the price of 20? Do you average out in the long term?

As I see it, the intent of a 'retainer' is a company reserving a portion of your time and attention. If the retainer is X hours/week then the buyer should expect you to leave at least X hours/wk in your schedule for their needs. The idea is you don't take on more work that would prevent you from providing that support, nor do you just disappear - they are 'retaining' a portion of your time and attention. If you are invoicing customers as an independent anyway then that remains, but it should be easy to automate - or even if not using any fancy software you just make a copy of the previous invoice since the retainer amount would be identical.

For timesheets, I just have a word doc with some info and send them an invoice for a list of what I did an a pool of how many hours it took. Like I did x/y/z and im billing for 10 hours.

I used to do that but have gone granular due to a client. Now I have an entire invoicing system, a full project module. The plus side is that I am tracking my full revenue, in reports generating timely invoices, with minimal effort. Sending with a button click. That is a charm, and I feel better using this compared to all of the things that I tried in the past.

These days I'd be taking a hard look at one of the online tools for managing the accounting stuff. Too bad NS isn't available for free to independents 🙂

I tried harvest at first, even after paying that gives less, I am good with Zoho Invoice now, which gives me all the required functionality, and it’s free. This has pretty much everything, in case you want to try.

I literally send a Word Doc lol you're pretty advanced

I actually use Zoho for my personal mail - seems fine as a mail provider. I still use gmail for my UI though 🙂

Haha, It adds more to the customer experience and makes me happy to see everything in one place. haven’t used their email, I am stuck with Gmail too 😄

for what it's worth, you can have Zoho as your mail provider but still use Gmail as the user interface (that's what I do - only downside is emails are delayed a few minutes because gmail has to poll to pull them in)

I don’t reply on emails in few minutes 😄 , I take time, so I’ll be good on that 😄

Yeah, once in a while when I need someting like a 2FA email code, I'll pop into the Zoho email client. It's not bad, I'm just used to all the features (and keyboard shortcuts) of gmail. Overall they have been a reliable and super cheap email provider. I switched to them for my custom domain about a year ago (decided I didn't need to pay for GSuite any more).

I have my custom domain on Google, I did a quick search and seems I can migrate that to Zoho, I think I am fine for google for now, but I’ll definitely exlore Zoho.