Making a Living as a Contract Engineer, Designer, or CAD Jockey

This is kind of in response to all of the great comments I got on the last post about independent contractors.

First of all, if you have a PE license, I recognize that the rules are different. I don’t have a PE because nothing I’ve ever been asked to do has ever even come close to requiring it. I did the EIT thing years ago, but never moved forward with it. Most of my work is in consumer and medical plastics.

I get people asking me, I guess especially more so in the past few months, how they can become an independent contractor. It’s really simple: just get people to hire you to do mechanical design type of work for short amounts of time. That’s it.

Seriously, there is a little more to it than that.

1. Have a great network in place
2. Have the correct tools and skills in place
3. Have a way to communicate with your network

I developed my network over several years in a few different ways. The biggest way was to be an employee of a reseller. Doing tech support, training and demos for resellers you get to know a lot of people, and if you do a good job, the fact that they remember you is a good thing, not a bad thing. Not everyone gets this opportunity, but it is an easy way to get a lot of low level experience and meet a lot of people from a wide range of industries.

The second thing that I did was to be very active on web forums. Working with the reseller made me well known in a small geographical area, say western NY or the Mid-Atlantic, but getting well known on the web gave me more of a general notoriety. I spent a lot of time on the newsgroup comp.cad.solidworks, and then on the SolidWorks forums when they became available. I answered a lot of questions, which was the helpful part, but then I branched into a lot of opinion based stuff, which probably was less helpful for my career than answering technical questions, although a lot of people learned my name. Some people say any press is good press, but I believe content and context count.

Someone asked how much business comes from the web. I’ll be the first to admit that direct web business, or money that falls out of the sky just because I have a web site with the right words and pictures is very low. I have had a couple of jobs from that source, and it just happens that my book deals were one of them, but very little else of consequence. Usually it is word of mouth, even if the original person learned about me through the web.

The other thing I’ve done is to do a lot with user groups, and present on various topics here and there.

My blog is not really intended to be any sort of business driving effort. If it were, I would clean it up a bit, have more modeling content and less opinion. I have maintained a website since 1995. The blog format just makes maintaining it and adding new content much easier.

I get business from around the country, with a couple of steady customers, a few habitual repeat customers, and a lot of one-time affairs. Most of the one-time jobs are for inventors who don’t have any CAD system, and often very little idea of how the whole product development thing goes.

It doesn’t really take that much business to keep one person going, but the hardest thing about it is getting work when you can get it. A steady stream without too much at any one time is the trick. I wind up trying to manage what I consider to be a big project, like a book that takes 3 months with smaller projects that bill maybe 10 hours. It’s hard to do. Another tough thing is a long term customer who has a couple of hours a couple times a week, and then maybe I don’t hear from them for a month, and then I have to work them back into the schedule.

Sometimes people come to me with a job that will only last a couple of hours, say an import repair job or something. You have to have a minimum. I don’t usually charge for communication time, phone calls, emails, etc. but when you spend a few hours communicating for a 1 hour paid job, I tend to have a minimum charge instead of doing that hourly. It doesn’t really pay to try to do very small jobs like that on an hourly basis. So yes, I’ve charged people over $300 for 45 minutes of work. Is it wrong? I tell people up front if that is going to happen, and most often they go through with it. For them the fuss of finding someone else is just too much, and keeping their other projects going is important.

And someone else said that they take whatever work they can get and learn on the job when necessary. I guess I would do that if I charged a bit less. At the rate I charge, I think people expect me to know a few things. I might take a sheet metal design/modeling job, but I wouldn’t sign up to design a conveyor system. My expertise is plastics and complex shapes. I do a fair bit of small mechanism design, and I could certainly do castings, but not machine design.

Here’s the one that some people don’t believe. I don’t do drawings. I mean I have done them, and I can do them, but most customers aren’t interested in drawings. They want 3D data to drive CNC.

I also do some stuff like CAD administration services. Some SolidWorks and Workgroup PDM administration. I do training and on-site troubleshooting.

If you’re going to get into consulting/contracting, I think you need a niche. Who is going to hire someone who is just a general SolidWorks user? There might be a need for that kind of stuff, but I usually get hired when the local talent can’t handle the job. I rarely get that fluff work 2D to 3D that everybody advertises for. I get the kind of jobs where they give me an awful 3D model from Alias or something and ask for a parametric SolidWorks model +/- .005″, and then ask for changes. With 90 day terms. Sometimes you have to take work like that because it is what’s available.

All of the easy CAD modeling work goes to India and China and some places in Africa (like Rwanda) now. So if you want to charge a rate high enough to make it worth your while, you have to know some things that they don’t know in India.

I have a couple of people that I will sometimes off-load jobs to if I don’t have the time. And sometimes they send work my way for different reasons. If I were going to refer work to someone, I wouldn’t just refer any work to anyone, I would want the needs to match the specialty.

Someone else pointed out the differences between modeling work and design work. Sometimes the modeling is extremely simple, but the design work requires you to understand several manufacturing processes, as well as materials, mechanisms, and so on.

Sometimes you don’t get paid on time or at all. Over the past 5 years I’ve been stiffed by 3 different customers for a total of about $10k. It’s a casualty of business, although there are ways to prevent things.

1. don’t let some one who made you sign an overly wordy contract owe you any money – they don’t intend to pay you anyway
2. if there is something irregular about a job, like an overseas client, or clueless inventor, get money up front, say 50%
3. never accept “stock in the company” as payment
4. let people know that you are unhappy with 60 or 90 day terms, and if you can do it, turn down the work altogether or counter with a 100% up front payment requirement, which is equally ridiculous and disrespectful
5. when you get people who just like to continue to tweak things and never come to the end of a project, let them know that you have other things to do, unless they pay well and you don’t mind milking a project
6. make sure people know how far you are willing to go down the prototype and manufacturing route. inventors may assume that you can run a production facility for them and do all of their prototyping
7. inventors often do not understand the differences between buying things as a retail consumer and buying things as a business

Generally, people looking to get into contract work are looking for contacts. I try to discourage people from doing that if they don’t already have a list of people who could hire them for work. You almost have to avoid doing contract work until you can’t afford to avoid it any more. I don’t think you can get into it as a last resort or after you’ve already been laid off. I made the jump when my last employer and I were sick of one another. I asked him to give me a month’s worth of work as an independent, and then go our ways. They did it, and that was all I needed to get rolling.

Anyway, what would I want from a “thing” like this? I’d like a list of people and specialties. If I get some work I can’t do, I’d refer the customer to someone on that list. I think this would be a “we’re gonna help each other out a little” rather than “Matt Lombard is gonna make me rich” kind of list. I wouldn’t want any formal agreement, just a list to refer work to. Maybe a site that people who need work done could look at and pick someone.  Anyone else have any ideas?