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How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

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Re: How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

#41
post #22

How early can I start doing this? I'm young but confident and I do feel like I have something to offer people already. I guess it's getting the first client which will be tricky...

"How early can I start doing this?"

Read the book Million Dollar Consulting. It pretty much gives a step-by-step guide, from lead gen to writing proposals to how to bill by value:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_19?url=search-alias...

It repeats itself a lot and is generally poorly written, but there's still a reason why it's been the top consulting book for decades.

Re: How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

#42
post #35
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get a blog and start making new business acquaintances. (Being in the Valley should not exactly have you hurting for options on that score.)

How do you make business acquaintances? I have a hard enough time leaving the house.

If you write Ruby and go to a SFRuby Meetup, you will learn quickly that even if you are looking for work it is quite annoying to say you are looking for work, as the recruiters swarm in like vultures to fresh carrion.

Re: How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

#43
post #36
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might just be me, but I don't see a market for consulting based on writing RESTful APIs. I could be very wrong about that, though.

Generally speaking, there's always a market for expertise. If that's your area of expertise and are markedly better at it than the next guy, there's a market for it. The key is in figuring out the niche "I can train your people to build better APIs than you have now, and hence enable much better engagement from the customers of your API" -- that's a value proposition, and people are willing to pay for it. "I can buil…

Maybe I'm just not used to that kind of consulting. eCommerce is much closer to the real dollars than web services.

Re: How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

#44
post #17
post #11

So what do I do if I don't have a blog or any real friends to refer me? I don't know anyone at all here in SV and no one seems to want me anyways. On the flip side, I suppose that there are people that could use me but they don't know how to find consultants. The only time this has happened was when a potential employer and I didn't quite work so they let me name a price for the time I worked and they paid (rare in c…

"So what do I do if I don't have a blog or any real friends to refer me? I don't know anyone at all here in SV and no one seems to want me anyways." Change that. Go to conferences. Go to meetups. Leverage whatever professional network you currently have to expand it. Start a blog. Post to it. Establish yourself as an authority on something. If you can't do the above yet (because you aren't an authority on something),…

> Go to conferences. ... Find conferences that relate to it and attend... later, speak at said conferences.

Well, I'm screwed. I can barely speak in private or deal with people.

Perhaps someone else can use your advice, though.

Re: How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

#45
post #22

How early can I start doing this? I'm young but confident and I do feel like I have something to offer people already. I guess it's getting the first client which will be tricky...

There are lots of ways to find a first client:

* Craiglist/eLance/oDesk ad * Tell people you want to do consulting work. People know other people. * Walk into a relevant business, after having found something could contribute, and ask them if they'd be interested in you helping them make money.

I've used all three. A local Kijiji ad has been surprisingly lucrative. Probably 10K over the past couple of years.

Referrals work great, as you're already proven.

The third one may sound iffy, but if you ACTUALLY can help, and you sound like you can, people will JUMP at the opportunity to have you help them. Happened to me multiple times.

Re: How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

#46
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full-time programmers can be had for $50 to $100 per hour, but they can create millions of dollars of value, far in excess of what they're paid. Consultants are one of several groups of people who take a share of the difference.

This is why I work for myself, am building my own company(ies). I knew I would never get paid the value I can bring to the table, and I would never be motivated to do my best in that scenario.

You think you could never get paid the value you bring to the table because you are imagining delivering services to the kinds of companies who would think to look at freelance markets to find the going rate for building code in the platforms you work in.

But the world is full of businesses with absolutely no technical competence at all, and so much operational competence in their own field (health services, benefits consulting, reinsurance, whole animal butchering, whatever) that they could take over the world if someone anywhere would just notice the opportunity to scale their processes (lead gen, customer retention, supply chain, market expansion, franchising, customer service) with basic technology.

To many, maybe most of those businesses, just being able to throw together a Bootstrap/Rails app makes you some kind of terrifying Wizard. If you can get over the urge to talk like a Wizard, and apply the customer service aptitude taught to every new employee at Nordstroms, you would probably find it's nowhere nearly as hard to capture the value of your work as you think it is.

I'd also note: if you're incapable of convincing a tech-impaired local business to consider a value-priced engagement that will make or save them millions of dollars, you may have a hard time building your own company(ies). Maybe not, though! Totally possible to skip that step.

Re: How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

#48
post #13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In broad strokes, make businesses money. In a little more detail, I (personally) work mostly for B2B SaaS businesses and know a few things which tend to work for generating incremental growth in revenue. If you've followed my blog or HN posts they won't sound all that impressively new: write drip email campaigns, do A/B yet, redo pricing tiers, optimize conversion funnels, etc etc. There are many other consulting spe…

Just to be clear: This is different than "freelancing" or "contract development". This is more traditional business consulting. You're going in and changing processes and structures more than anything else. It might be around a specific goal like "make our signups more effective", but you're not just writing some code. You are going in an helping them to change their mindset by incorporating feedback (A/B testing) an…

If I might humbly disagree: The only thing you need to do to sell consulting engagements is to sell consulting engagements. There is no licensing department, no exam, and no Client Cabal which requires that you be blessed by a gatekeeper prior to doing this. I spent years coming up with reasons why I could not sell consulting engagements. In retrospect, that was sort of silly.

You know what I did when I was a Systems Engineer and had business cards saying it? I read stuff, talked to people, went to meetings, produced computer code which compiled, and wrote stuff. You know what I do for clients? I read stuff, talk to people, go to meetings, produce computer code which gets interpreted, and write stuff. I'm just really, really picky about what I'm working on. (See sibling comment by Thomas.)

Re: How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

#49
post #44
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So what do I do if I don't have a blog or any real friends to refer me? I don't know anyone at all here in SV and no one seems to want me anyways." Change that. Go to conferences. Go to meetups. Leverage whatever professional network you currently have to expand it. Start a blog. Post to it. Establish yourself as an authority on something. If you can't do the above yet (because you aren't an authority on something),…

> Go to conferences. ... Find conferences that relate to it and attend... later, speak at said conferences. Well, I'm screwed. I can barely speak in private or deal with people. Perhaps someone else can use your advice, though.

There was also a time you could barely walk.

Even if you have social anxiety, or are somewhere on the autistic spectrum, you can still improve your social skills. Because they are skills, not traits. You can improve them through practice. It will be difficult, of course, if you have a problem such as social anxiety. But consider seeking help for that, if it is a problem. It can improve your life immensely - and not just professionally.

Re: How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

#50
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consistently meet people who earn > 200 $ / hour, without much programming experience (but know an open source project of interest very well). I see this quite a bit as well. People can "luck into" something that gets hot and ride that wave into decent money in the short term. But a decent programming background is what keeps that ship floating because you always have to stay on top of the next thing if you want to…

On the other hand, if you can pull in $200/hr consistently (i.e. your yearly income isn't far from $400k before taxes) for at least half a decade, you can save up enough to retire early with a modest standard of living. But as has been said, consistency is harder for these things. What open source projects have you seen people make good chunks of change from just knowing how to work them? http://www.pentaho.com/ is o…

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