Afraid that you are going to lose money and time with an unlimited subscription consulting service?

It is a valid concern. Recently a member of Ditcherville, an online community for consultants positioning themselves as experts and do NOT charge by the hour, asked a few questions about Office Hours and Unlimited Access consulting services. I was tagged and asked to answer some of the questions.

Here was my response:

Preface:

Just a reminder that my Office Hours include NO HANDS WORK. I advise and consult.

Delivery includes written reports with instructions, diagrams(often with pixel art), and often links to code in GitHub that has already been written but no actual code and I don't "Flip switches" or otherwise directly make changes in their AWS infrastructure.

Also random but I do not do project management. I usually am teamed with a PM that I "recommend" tasks that the team does but they get to work with the leadership team to figure out the priority.

Is it limited to certain timeslots in your week?

My goal is to contain as much of the questions or interactions to the office hours. They absolutely can ask me stuff outside of office hours. If it is small or not urgent I usually say something like "Let me do a write up and I can present it to you at the next office hours".

If it is high priority or otherwise causes my client to hemorrhage money I generally try to set up a time in my overflow time or in an empty slot.

If I was getting barraged by requests outside of the Office Hours frequently (Which has never really happened) then I would say something similar to the following:

"Either I am bad at my job and the servers are going down because I have failed you and we should part ways or you are not following the advice I am giving and therefore not getting value from me and we should part ways".

I am obsessed with finding the handful of people on this planet I can add the most value too... and take a cut in return.

Do clients have to book in advance?

All my clients have assigned times at the point when we sign the proposal. I give them options from my calendar to choose from. Nothing in the morning, that is my time to work on the business or heads down stuff.

Since my clients pay by the quarter, the recurring office hours for me are partially a way to be proactive and stay ahead of problems. I always tell them to call me before “it” hits the fan.

Also so they don’t forget I am there. I would not want to have them forget about me for months while I collect a paycheck and then they say “Are we using this guy”. I find ways to add value to them during these office hours. Honestly, sometimes I am just a shoulder to cry on.

Is there a maximum duration? What is the duration? What are other limits… number of sessions, scope, or type of topic…?

2 hours but let me explain…

Another weird thing about my practice is my office hours are NOT limited to the decision-makers. It is actually open to all of their 25 or so devs.

How do I prioritize who gets to ask questions? My policy, that I remind both the Project Manager that sets the meeting's agenda and the CTO, is “Come to me with your biggest problems. The problems that cost you $100,000 an hour. Not the Jr dev that cannot connect to the wifi”.

It works. And if they don’t have a million dollar problem then they probably don't need me and it's time for us to part ways.

My best customer knows that just because they don’t have a million dollar problem today doesn’t mean that they won't tomorrow. They have had many over the years. So it's just easier to keep me around as insurance. I find ways to add value in between proactively.

Proactive example: When I hear about a vulnerability I make a post about it and then send it directly to them giving them a heads up. It doubles as content for my content marketing but it is also valuable to them. See this post as a perfect example of that: https://schematical.com/posts/s3-encryption-ransomeware_2025-01-15.

The funny thing is I am probably going to do the same thing with this message. Repurpose it as content and queue it up to go out this weekend as a bonus post for my mailing list 🙂