[snowman]

Relax and go with the flow. I am an Electronics Engineer that went into full time consulting over 20 years ago. Before I did this I had friends that had been full time consultants for a long time and they were all carrying a mininum of $20k to $50k in overdue billings. I never dreamed it would be possible to carry that much money on the books, but I ended up the same way as they did. The real crunch comes when a project winds down and ends. Payments for the last couple of invoices seem to drag on forever, you just have to keep billing them, politely, but firmly. Sometimes it helps if you have a wife or a cpa type call and try to collect for you, they can be firm, yet not endanger your personal relationship with the firm. Just never give up. In the end I was paid for every invoice.

I was forced to retire due to medical reasons, and I continued to receive money for 3 years after I quit work, thats how long it took for all of them to catch up.

I can't tell you how to collect, but I can tell you that if you intend to stay in business you will end up carrying a lot of dough on the books, a lot more than you thought possible. But thats the consultant business, especially engineering.

Note: In the meantime you bust your hump to get extra work with other clients to keep paying your mortage on time. I have had 17 clients at the same time. I did the work for the ones that paid well first. For the others I hired help and paid them when I got paid. (sound familiar?)

Final word of wisdom. Never charge by the hour, just the job, thats the only way to make the bucks. If you made 3K by the hour, you probably could have made 10k by the job. Some of my best jobs came in at what amounts to a labor rate of $20,000 per hour. There is no Fking way any of my clients would have paid this as an hourly rate. Yet they were very happy to have the job done for the fee charged. Bid all jobs like you are doing them from scratch. If you have done something very close to it before, you only have to do half as much work for the same pay. This is also how you learn to afford to carry so much money on the books.

Last word of wisdom, invest, invest, invest in the best tools available for your profession. Back in 87 I purchased a software program for $85K. With this program I could beat out most of the so called consultants in my business, do the work much faster, and provide a state of the art result for my client. Its not what a tool cost, but what it earns for you.