Going 1099 is a book that teaches you how to become a solo federal sub-contractor and gain control of your working life, earn more money and unlock more free time. I wrote it because quite a few people have asked me how they can become a 1099. I figured it was best to write a single book that I can send them and that I can share with others who are interested. This newsletter goes out Monday - Friday and covers topics that will help you succeed in starting and maintaining successful 1099 career.
Working against your company
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At the last company I worked for, most of the projects were Firm Fixed Price (FFP). This meant that no matter what the company spent to get the job done, they would received a fixed fee for completing the job. This is a great opportunity to increase profit margins if you're efficient. If they could complete a job that was costed out to take one year with three people but actually do it in six months with two people, their project margin has dramatically improved. The problem when I worked there was that individual employees were measured on utilization rate. Basically you had a billable target of X number of hours and if you were below that, you were less likely to get a raise. But working more hours doesn't actually help the company in a FFP scenario. In fact, it hurts efficiency! I was incentivized to take LONGER on projects to hit billable hours targets. But the company would be rewarded if they completed the project FASTER. So now the employees and the company are working at cross incentives. I understand why the company does it. It's an easy metric that SEEMs logical in some ways. They can tell how much an employee works per year. But it creates weird disincentives and it drove me crazy. That's the type of thing that made me want to go 1099. My incentives were aligned to me, not to a company metric that didn't make sense for anyone. If you keep finding yourself in similar nonsense situations and really hate it, going 1099 may be right for you. If you're interested in learning how to get your first solo 1099 federal sub-contract, check out my book: |
I'm Dale, the author of Going 1099
Going 1099 is a book that teaches you how to become a solo federal sub-contractor and gain control of your working life, earn more money and unlock more free time. I wrote it because quite a few people have asked me how they can become a 1099. I figured it was best to write a single book that I can send them and that I can share with others who are interested. This newsletter goes out Monday - Friday and covers topics that will help you succeed in starting and maintaining successful 1099 career.
Move faster than this to impress your clientSource The government is slow. Like real slow. Its employees are slow, and so are a lot of contractors. If you can just be a little faster, you'll look impressive. For example, I just started onboarding onto a new project and the account set up process has many steps requiring annoying phone calls to the help desk and submitting various forms. A normal pace for a contractor is to stretch this out over a week. I did most of this in a day. The client...
I maybe wouldn't gift a sweater at your next meetingSource One of the unintended benefits of writing my book is that it gives me a fun talking point when I'm networking for my business. For example, I met with a couple yesterday who run a small contracting business and I gave them a copy of my book as a small gift, which led to an interesting discussion about why and how they started their own business. I'm opposed to spending too much time on formal marketing activities when you're trying to...
Government's reaction to your pitchSource I have a friend who is living in Romania and is interested in going 1099. Obviously, Romania is not a center of a US government contracting and he doesn't plan to move to DC soon, so I was not optimistic he'd be able to pull it off. But, he did mention he did have a few friends who work at the US embassy there, so here's what I advised him to do: Ask his friends if they know of any contractors working either at the embassy or on behalf of the embassy...