Here's an anecdote for a different approach that wasn't intential, but wound up giving the company a good sampling of my skills and personality, and me a good s

Here's an anecdote for a different approach that wasn't intential, but wound up giving the company a good sampling of my skills and personality, and me a good sampling of what it was like working for them. I volunteer some consulting and IT services for a local non-profit. They were having another company build some business specific software for them, which had been recommended to them by their board(client is part of a franchise structure of sorts). It was far past schedule, and from my perspective the client had misunderstanding of the scope and timeframe for this type project, which let to the client questioning me "should we just scrap it?". By volunteering along side the company doing the software build(which was also volunteering, mostly) we were able to get the project on track, and update the client's expectations to a more realistic view of the timeframe and outcome. By volunteering alongside them, for another org that we both were happy to support, I didn't feel like I was doing free work for them, and they weren't struggling to pay full salary and onboarding cost to find out the same. Just a thought for an approach to get a sample of each other without one party doing free work for the other.