A family friend was a lawyer and economics professor specializing in competition law and was fully booked at $800/hr. He owned a dozen luxury condos all over the world but had No wife, no kids, and didn’t tell his clients when he had cancer, he worked right up to the end.
Expert Networks: A Secret World of $500 per Hour Consultations
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Re: Expert Networks: A Secret World of $500 per Hour Consultations
#22I've gotten messages on LinkedIn a few times for things like this. One of the biggest companies in this space is GLG (https://glg.it/)
Usually the client is like a hedge fund or private equity fund, and they are trying to get info on an industry/sector to make an investment decision.
Re: Expert Networks: A Secret World of $500 per Hour Consultations
#23I am finding myself reminded of a lawsuit in Hong Kong over a divorcing couple who were paying their dance instructor millions and millions of dollars. We're talking above ten. Why? because this power couple wanted to rock the world of their elite friends with their chassée turn and tango style.
There are seriously people out there who want what is in somebody's head, legally, and even though you or I might do "wait..what?" the price can go north, if they want it bad enough.
Re: Expert Networks: A Secret World of $500 per Hour Consultations
#24>By the third call I was in beast mode, nailing every question
Was beast mode from doom 2 or quake ? Love it when people Let these little things slip that tell you a bit more about them.
Re: Expert Networks: A Secret World of $500 per Hour Consultations
#25That website though!
I like the website. It's simple and loads fast.
Re: Expert Networks: A Secret World of $500 per Hour Consultations
#26Hey, that's me, might as well answer questions here.
I[1] do performance tuning for Microsoft SQL Server. The licensing costs on MSSQL Enterprise Edition are $7K USD per CPU core, so a typical single high-performance server costs $250K-$500K. Factor in hardware, multiple replicas (high availability, disaster recovery, scale-out reads) and it's not unusual for a company to have spent millions of dollars on their database server. (I know, I know, you think you can get a 4-core MySQL VM to perform the same. Let's set that aside for now and just focus on the article & the work.)
My basic sales pitch is that in 2 days, I can tell you why your queries aren't going as quickly as you want, and how to make them go faster. It's $5K USD done during the week, $15K weekends. Aside from the Christmas & New Year's weeks, I'm booked out until mid-January (with a couple of weekend gigs already scheduled.) For my clients, $5K is an irrelevant rounding error compared to how much they're spend on software, hardware, staffing, and how much revenue they're losing when their web site or enterprise app goes down.
I don't subcontract, I don't wear suits, I don't network with executives. I just have a very clearly defined product, sample deliverables online, a blog with a couple thousand posts dating back to 2002, and a very active community presence: I present at a lot of conferences. (I'm speaking at Data Saturday Holland this weekend.)
The linked post talks a lot about short calls and canceled gigs, but that's easily avoidable in this market: just require nonrefundable prepayment. In this high-value tier, clients tend to understand that they're buying a specific window on your calendar. If they don't show, I lost that time and can't get it back any other way, so to lock that day down, they have to prepay.
The best resource for this kind of work is the book Secrets of Consulting by Gerald Weinburg. Can't recommend it highly enough.
Feel free to ask any questions you want - I'm really transparent about the business. I'm on vacation in Amsterdam this week so my answers will be a little delayed during the day.
Re: Expert Networks: A Secret World of $500 per Hour Consultations
#27https://getwisdomapp.com is a more user friendly expert network designed for experts if anyone is interested in monetizing their spare time
Re: Expert Networks: A Secret World of $500 per Hour Consultations
#28I used to get those requests all the time, however I thought they were just advanced sales techniques to seed you with ideas on products or to make you say flattering things about products, followed by a sales guy contacting you.
Re: Expert Networks: A Secret World of $500 per Hour Consultations
#29The actual world of super-high paid consultant would be interesting to hear about. This is either a niche-within-a-niche or a scam, depending on whether you believe the page. The thing is, maybe there are circumstances when someone who's just quite well informed about an otherwise boring industry can get an "information download" gig as described but I'd also guess those are very occasional - only so many investors n…
One of my cofounders has been the consultant a few times. Someone reached out on linkedin and didn't care what it cost. They were considering an acquisition of a competitor of one of his former employers, and wanted an insider's view on things.
We've used them once or twice. We needed guidance on major strategic initiatives. If you're paying $1-2m in payroll to make something, spending a couple thousand talking to senior execs in neighboring businesses is a really good use of money.
Think of it like Gartner, just way cheaper :)
Re: Expert Networks: A Secret World of $500 per Hour Consultations
#30The actual world of super-high paid consultant would be interesting to hear about. This is either a niche-within-a-niche or a scam, depending on whether you believe the page. The thing is, maybe there are circumstances when someone who's just quite well informed about an otherwise boring industry can get an "information download" gig as described but I'd also guess those are very occasional - only so many investors n…
“Information download” is a genius term. In the right industry a company can save years of failure by paying the right person for X amount of hours to glean a ton of knowledge very quickly, assuming they can’t just outright hire them.
What does it take to become this kind of person in less than 10 years?