Hi I’m A Consultant
Today I scored my first consultant job on odesk. In some ways it’s a return to the mentoring for startups I did in Liverpool a few years ago (I actually have a mentoring certificate on the office pin board), except that I will probably have to work harder and for less money. However, I’m looking forward to the challenge of advising other companies about putting their sites into the cloud.
This first job is for a company in Virginia USA who are looking to put their new high demand web app onto Amazon, with Scalr managing the scaling element. I have quite a bit of experience using both these tools with our set up at Giant Digital, so I will hopefully be able to offer some help to my first client.
I think the biggest hill I have to climb is making myself clear when explaining things, as it’s always difficult to second guess where someone else’s knowledge is, and then you don’t want to come across as patronising either. Also, I have a weakness of not being able to build arguments, as I tend to go for a scatter gun approach. So I’m helping that doing consulting work is going to help me tighten up my presentation skills. The other challenge I’m facing is to judge where the line is between professional and being too casual with people.
Anyway, I hope this to be the first of many projects that I can work on with clients who are looking to move onto AWS and Scalr.