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

"Another problem is that the clients are really interested in our specific experience: that means they want to work with me or my partner, not with the company. This bit is hard to crack."

You certainly have a lot more business experience than I do - however I've been working recently on preparing a lots of tender responses. I work at a software consulting firm, with about 10 devs and 20 GIS analysts.

In our tender responses we include the resumes of the people who will be working on the project as an appendix right at the back. At the front we have a section with our 'relevant experience'. In the 'relevant experience section' we NEVER mention which person worked on a specific project. Its always termed as "XYZ corp developed an app to ... " or "XYZ corp worked with ABC inc to ..."

I guess it comes down to a metal shift in always describing things your company has achieved, instead of things you as an individual have done.

After reading the article and the comments, I'm having a bit of a "a-ha!" moment with the billing question (by week, why didn't I think of that).

I have been an independent technology consultant for 12 years now, with a variety clients (big and small) and I'd say "successful" over all. I generally follow all of the good advice principals mentioned in these comments (mostly think long term with a client, don't charge for the small stuff, make the client feel important, etc).

The one item that keeps coming up over and over is that I'm "independent". It's just me. I get hit by a bus and my clients are out of luck. Now I agree that generally speaking they don't want anyone else working on their projects, but at the same time they would really like some backup. This seems like a nearly impossible problem. I'm not interested in hiring anyone for the reasons mentioned here. Plus, acting alone doesn't appear to give me the ability to get the really big projects ($1M+). Clients aren't going to give "just me" a project of this scale, it wouldn't be good business sense.

So, I've been stuck with letting "IT consultancy firms" find me work on several occasions. They get to mark up my rate, often mix me with other techies, and basically get to sit back and collect money for something that I'm delivering. I'm the one at the client, building the relationship, looking for more work, etc. It's always bothered me that because I'm not a "firm", I don't appear to bill higher rates or win bigger projects. Honestly, it's just me delivering the work anyway. Hopefully this makes sense.

The only way I've come up with to reverse this course is to create a firm where I partner with follow IT consultants and we own the firm. Ownership, I think, is the key. If I work for an existing IT firm, I make a nice hourly rate but I have nothing to show for it at the end. Meanwhile, the firm's ownership, who often are not techies and do not have technology skills, gain everything at the end of the day. If the technology staff owns the firm, then that builds in all sorts of interesting incentives. Now the owners actually have a reason to refer other technology people to the firm, builds firm value. Clients see the combined value of the firm, thus hopefully opening the doors to bigger projects and better value. Plus, the "backup" problem is solved since clients understand that there is a team.

I haven't quite figured out how to get this off the ground (really just started thinking about it over the last couple of months), but it's interesting to me that other independent IT consultants haven't done this already. Or, maybe they have and there's some obvious reason why it doesn't work.

Ah yes, but it is influenced by everybody else's salary.

When a business can pay a well established[1] local web agency 5 euro more than me, a single developer, who do you think they are going to pick?

[1] well established meaning they are considered one of the best 3, if not the best web agency around here

Your value will be 1/4 of what the full week of work would be, so price accordingly?

I think this is the key - selling yourself as a 'sysadmin' is like calling yourself a 'programmer' - it's a commodity.

Instead you're a site scaling engineer, or a cloud automation specialist, whatever sounds like it'll solve the client's problems - which these days are frequently that a bunch of developers set up the production environment on the fly and it just about works but isn't reliable or convenient.

I think the future for sysadmin work is definitely 'DevOps' - and it's not really that much different from old school sysadmin. Yeah a pure Chef/Puppet-managed system is more like writing code than hacking away, but behind it all it's the same kind of work.

It is definitely possible to bill US$2k per week or more as a contract sysadmin, but trolling through Craig's List isn't the way to manage it!