Pro-bono work — why I do it.

I do a small amount of pro-bono work for cus­tomers. There are many rea­sons not to do pro-bono work, and very few rea­sons to actu­ally do it. Gen­er­ally, doing free work for cor­po­rate, for-profit enti­ties is unfair. It doesn’t rep­re­sent equi­table com­pen­sa­tion for the work per­formed, which doesn’t stick well with me.

Despite that, I keep doing small amounts of pro-bono work. I do this pri­mar­ily because it leads to excep­tion­ally happy clients. Excep­tion­ally happy clients lead to excep­tional ref­er­ences. Con­se­quently, when doing such work, I try to make sure that the clients I per­form free work for are in mar­kets I’m try­ing to enter. That may be geo­graph­i­cal, or a par­tic­u­lar industry.

Of course, for pro-bono work I rarely accept big, lengthy projects. The major­ity of pro-bono work I do is men­tor­ing and coach­ing, although I do look at other work. Feel free to con­tact me if you would like to dis­cuss a small pro-bono project.