Not OP but in case it's interesting: I was a remote employee (IC) for about 12 years, and this was a recurring problem. I was one of a handful of remotes in a

Not OP but in case it's interesting: I was a remote employee (IC) for about 12 years, and this was a recurring problem. I was one of a handful of remotes in a global team across several time zones, so at some level everybody had to deal with this problem: I didn't have a good handle on the office politics in the US, but the people in the US had just as tenuous a grip on the office politics in Singapore, and so on. Somehow it usually worked out OK, but we had a director who was very good at shielding us from the more distracting stuff, and we were working on a chronically understaffed, mission-critical, unglamorous, profitable product, so it sort of attracted "just do the work" types. The OP, however, is a consultant, which brings a very different set of political considerations. Last time I did remote consulting, which was a long time ago, the biggest thing you had to worry about was budget. Was the $2M project going to get $5M next year or $1M and why? If it's $5M you'd better be able to offer more services or they might push you out in favor of a bigger shop; if it's $1M you'd better make sure you have an internal champion to make sure you still get some of the work; and if you think you can't influence the decision you're not paying attention. Back then, consultancies would have people on staff just to take all the meetings and drink the drinks and press the flesh and know these things. I'm talking about shops with maybe 10-20 people. I don't know how it works now, but I would bet tomorrow's lunch that whoever still has those people makes more money than whoever doesn't. (I was a solo consultant, and my lunch was a lot more modest.)