Why I wrote The Independent SAP Contractor

The question I get asked more than any other, by a considerable margin, is a version of: “I’m thinking about going independent — what should I know?”

Sometimes it’s a fellow SAP consultant at the end of a project. Sometimes it’s an in-house analyst who’s watched contractors bill twice their salary and is doing the math.

For years my answer was messy. I’d share what I’d learned in fragments — the arithmetic that surprised me, the contract clauses I wish I’d read more carefully, the regional tax traps that caught me off guard. But I’d always end the conversation with the same thing: “There’s really no one book that covers all this.”

I checked. Repeatedly. Every so often, when the question came up again, I’d look to see if someone had finally written the guide. Plenty of books on how to do SAP. Plenty of books on going freelance in general, mostly useless if you’re calibrating a day rate for an S/4HANA migration. Almost nothing that captured the SAP-specific reality of independent contracting.

That gap is why I wrote the book.

Two things shaped it more than anything else. I’ve been on the contractor side for years now — through end clients, system integrators, and staffing agencies. I’ve made most of the mistakes this business has to offer, and figured out a few things worth passing on. And I also do some SAP recruiting on the side — sourcing consultants for system integrators and end clients. Sitting on the other side of the table changed how I thought about my own business, and about what actually gets contractors picked.

Very few people writing about SAP contracting see both sides of that table. Fewer still write about it honestly.

That dual perspective is the frame for the book. My hope is that it saves you a version of the first eighteen months I spent figuring things out in the field.

The Independent SAP Contractor is available now on Amazon Kindle.

— K.C.L.