Consulting, Pricing & Contract Negotiation

Price an engagement at a number the market actually pays — not the number you'd quote yourself. Negotiate scope, payment terms, and IP carve-outs that protect your work. Learn to say no — to bad scope, bad payment terms, bad IP language, and bad-fit clients — as a specific, compounding skill. Consulting negotiations are the most engineering-shaped negotiations there are: every term in the SOW is an explicit interface contract, and your job is to push back on the asymmetric defaults the larger party offers — the same discipline as redlining a vendor agreement for your own dependencies. The pricing model (project / hourly / retainer) is the billing model, and the wrong billing model leaks revenue exactly the way a mispriced SaaS tier does. The IP carve-out schedule is your lockfile for intellectual property — explicitly pinning what you brought in pre-existing so it doesn't get silently absorbed into the client's dependency graph. Without it, "what's mine vs what's the client's" gets murky at exactly the moment it matters.