What FikaWorks Has to Offer Our Clients

To understand why clients would choose FikaWorks, clients should understand how FikaWorks is organized.

Elective and Curated membership

Every FikaWorks member elects to take part in the organization and pays dues into the organization. Billing goes through the cooperative but those payments go straight to the member and then the member pays dues that all members voted on to cover the cooperative expenses.

Membership is curated by current members. We currently only accept membership from people we have worked with in the past. All members must only meet one criteria, excellent cloud native skills.

Excellence is our brand

We focus on this one ability of excellent cloud native skills because that is our brand. We have all agreed that our one shared goal for our clients is to provide excellent work. This enhances the reputation of the cooperative and eases the stress of being a cloud native consultant that works on contracts.

We want to be a resource where clients can come to FikaWorks directly and feel comfortable knowing they will only get engineers that are qualified for the domain of work that is needed, and if no one is available we will not try to recruit or place someone unqualified to increase revenue, because the revenue does not stay in FikaWorks, it goes straight to the member.

FikaWorks as an organization is not revenue or growth driven. The only people that gain from a contract is the member himself, meaning they are financially motivated to maintain that excellent reputation when working for a client.

Because we are democratic, all members are invested in maintaining that brand, so if one member attempted to take on a contract for which they were not qualified, all members would object.

In summary we are actually financially motivated to turn down contracts that would tarnish our brand.

Problems to Solve

The current landscape of bringing on highly skilled cloud native engineers has a multitude of issues.

Recruitment Agencies

The quality of the recruitment process is a mixed bag, some agencies perform good work and others (most?) are staffed with people that have little to no knowledge about the technology for which they are recruiting. Yet it still is growing and making 100’s of billions each year. All of those billions are either coming directly from the engineers payment or from the client directly.

To make the situation worse, depending on how your contract is situated recruiters may be motivated to actually provide you with lower quality engineers, so they can take more money off the top of the contract or they will bargain basement the engineer leaving you with lower quality work.

The Consultancy

I have already discussed some challenges that consultancies face with utilization. But these companies suffer from other issues.

Split Brain

Every engineer in your office that is part of a consultancy, is being pulled in two directions. Should they serve their client’s best interest or serve the consultancy. You will find your best interest is not always the objective. Context switching between serving the employer and serving the client can not only cause stress to the engineer but can have a direct impact on the work being delivered.

Chill and Bill

With FikaWorks if one of our members were at a client and the hours being filled are not bringing value to the client, we will end our day and your billing stops for the day.

In any other consultancy C-levels and stockholders will never want their engineers doing that. Which goes right back to “utilization”. When they get a client’s contract they want to maximize their billing. They budget their year on filling out the clients hours as much as they can.

A constituent of mine worked for one of the large consultancies and they actually had a poster in their cafeteria, that said “Just Chill and Bill”.

Turnover

With any consultancy the contract is with the consultancy not the engineer. This means the engineer can get up and abandon your contract at any point in time.

This issue is further complicated by the fact that, the engineers happiness and success is directly related to how the consultancy manages the engineers and not the compensation you are offering the consultancy. So poor salaries, poor management, growing pains, acquisitions, etc are out of your control. So even if an engineer is enjoying the work they are doing with your company, and they are doing good work, they may just leave.

In FikaWorks all of the clients termination policies are passed through to the member. So they are directly culpable as if they contracted directly with the client. They don’t have to take any work they do not want to do, but when they do they still are responsible.

The Value Proposition of FikaWorks

So FikaWorks is built on members that are not only experts in their field, they take accountability for the work they are realizing, not only for their own professional development but legally to the client as well.

They are doing the work you need because they want to be there and they are not driven to pad their bills, but instead focusing on quality delivery.

Because all money is going directly to the members you are maximizing the purchasing power for your contract, and you can have faith in their ability to deliver that product.

We at FikaWorks think this new model for working with clients serves the main parties involved in any Cloud Native consulting effort. It is lean, maximizing customer buying power for quality work.