The things I do

Other than doing software development, I am involved in providing consulting services to companies and businesses.

Some of the stuff I do include systems administration (ie, maintenance), integrating different OS platforms (Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Windows) to work together, writing simple scripts to switch the active node on clusters, backing up servers, etc.

Since I need to understand requirements before I can perform these tasks, I usually fire off a few emails to solidify the requirements before saying yea or nay. However, sometimes, writing emails isn't sufficient, and I have to go down and meet the customers, together with my working partner.

Now, on my working partner. They're basically a hardware business, and they sell hardware, some Sun stuff, some Wintel stuff, etc. Since selling hardware is a competitive business, they have to value-add on to some of their solutions. A friend who knows my capabilities (in being able to integrate different systems and also write scripts, software, etc) hooked us up, so that we can work hand in hand together, to provide business to our customers.

Lately, however, I seem to be taken for granted, as a particular sales person from one of the consulting gigs I have taken on, asked me to provide proposals and do meetings, without mention of charges.

Now, as I'm an independent consultant, running around doing meetings and proposals, without charging, is not so good a thing, since it doesn't make me money.

So now, I'm thinking, how do I break the news gently to that sales person, that being an independent consultant, I have to charge for all these, otherwise I won't be able to sustain myself?

Somebody, help!