Hi everybody, I have been milling over this for about a week now and really can’t find some information that I am trying to find. I live in a very small municipality and the mayor is my neighbor. We were talking and she wants me to come down and have a meeting with them to possibly be a contracted IT person for them.
The information I’m trying to find is best practices I guess. Like I know that hourly I’m going to charge them 45-50 somewhere in there. But I don’t know what would be good to have in a contract to help cover me and stuff like that. Sorry I’m quite vague because I have really no idea where to go with this.
I have done field work for several years for field nation and I have my own computer repair company but I’ve never done IT contractually and I and completely clueless.
Make sure everything is spelled out! I.E. if your going site to site are you using your car / their car / public transport, because if it’s your car you want to get mileage reimbursed and the rate per mile setup before the contract starts.
See if you can get on the health care plan if they have one. Even if you have to pay for it yourself it might be a better / cheaper plan than what you currently have.
Ensure you have minimum quotas or a monthly/annual minimum charge for your service contract. If you have to drop what you are doing to take care of then as a priority then having some baseline recurring revenue would be ideal.
tbh i would run a mile from this if it were a mayor in the uk.
reason, our mayors are supplied with everything they need to do the job.
from transport, to secretary’s and engineers.
so if she asked me, over the garden fence if i would do some IT work for her on the downlow.
i would be wondering why.
because like i said she has all that covered as a benefit of her job.
if your municipality is similar.
i would build another 4 feet on the fence and go talk to a solicitor/lawyer.
coz she might be doing something thats illegal/frown upon and could result in you being held to account if she gets rumbled.
if im wrong then blame hillery
but hey, she did do it… so we gotta be careful of this stuff now…
coz you dont want to be holding the bag if she is dirty and trying to hide it.
It ensures you’re paid X minimum agreed upon, even in the event you do zero hours of work within X range of days/months.
It’s very common place in freelance / small scale IT MSP companies.
For reference, in some computer forensics contracting I did I charged an 8 hour retainer monthly. If I automated their forensic processes for offboarding staff, and had the files created automatically the same everytime and I didn’t touch a single button after running the script doesn’t mean I worked 8 hours, but you can bet I was paid for it.
The context of the following largely depends on the local culture but I find things below to be true:
If the Mayor gives you a wonky contract, make sure you could curry a favor of sorts from the mayor and be chummy overall. Otherwise just say no.
This is not just a business contract, but in a way, it could become a social contract as well. Think of the mayor as a local lord and you are a vassal of sorts. Be prepared to drop everything you are doing when called for and do work above and beyond the expectation. The objective is to be “knighted” and be given a recurring contract of the city that is being run.
Unfortunately, (or fortunately) reelection happens and hope that you would do a good job to impress the next mayor and keep the contract as recurring.
Don’t contract in person, but through your own limited liability company (LLC) if possible. This legal framework provides some level of protection from lawsuits.
In the US setting up a LLC can be done in 10 mins and just costs a simple administration fee. In other countries the requirements can be much higher.
