Expenses. ISTR that Patrick did a significant amount of travelling for consulting gigs. (Which may also be a reason for avoiding them now that he has a wife and child.)
He even says at one point, "Spoiler alert: there is virtually no difference in the mechanics of work done between $100 an hour, $200 an hour, and $30k a week — all of the leveling up there is in sophistication on who you go after, what engagements you propose and deliver, and how you package things for clients." which would lead me to believe that he's just charging $30k a week, just as he would charge $100/hour.
I think people need to just take this stuff with a grain of salt. i have worked with quite a few large companies over the years and I don't believe any of them would pay $30k a week for: "I combined a modest amount of programming skill (typically Rails, Ruby, and Javascript) with substantial experience with using engineering skills to move marketing/sales levers, including by doing SEO, email marketing, A/B testing, (light) UX design (typically around high-value parts of a SaaS business like signup flows or purchasing pathways), etc. I turned down essentially any gig which was strictly engineering in character and rather aggressively went after bigger projects which were “closer to the money” every couple of months.". That said, I could very easily see a company hiring someone for a $30k contract to do those things, the weekly rate just seems extremely misleading to people that are struggling to charge even $100/hr (which is not a bad rate by any means).
Yeah, it's not the exact skills you're talking about, but it's similar.
I guess I'm also confused about "I don't believe any of them would pay $30k a week for" vs "I could very easily see a company hiring someone for a $30k contract to do those things". Isn't hiring someone on a contract to do these things for a week consulting?
My point about $30k a week is that if ONE person walked into a room and said, "Hi, I'm Bob, this is what I do and my rate is $30k a week" it wouldn't fly very far. Now, If ONE person walked into a room and said, "Hi, I'm Bob, this is what I do and it's going to cost you $30k" is very different, whether it takes 30 minutes, one week or a year.
From my experience, many people read Patrick's blog and similar blogs to try and understand the economics of how to make more money as an independent developer. At some point this stuff becomes more about luck than it is about actual development economics. The boring companies most developers have the "privilege" of working with just don't have the ability to make these connections and justify budgets like this, worded in the context of "this is my rate per week"
And I do think this advice is applicable to non-training stuff, but Patrick already wrote about it at length so I won't get into that here :)
> whether it takes 30 minutes, one week or a year.
Ah, sorry, I misunderstood. Thanks for clarifying.
I think cityzen mean $30k a week vs. $30k total. The wording was maybe a little loose, but that is what I gathered from it.
I actually think that might be why bootcamps became an attractive proposition; it's much easier when you're selling months at a time rather than weeks or days at a time, in a sense.
I'd guess that "full time consulting" would work out roughly along the lines of
* Average billing per week of consulting: $15k
* Round trip business class airfare: $3k
* Hotel, food, transportation at destination: $2k
* Profit per week of consulting: $10k
* Weeks spent doing consulting per year: 20
* Take-home (gross) salary: $200k
I'd guess this is more than Stripe pays him, but not dramatically more; and if I had a wife and child I would certainly prefer to not spend half the year away from them.
I have never ran a consultancy full-time, and didn't particularly want to start now. It was certainly an option, but spending a few years building Atlas seems much more fulfilling.
Just interested - does that mean that you've never actually been a full-time consultant?
And do you really think that it's within the realm of possibility to pull $30k/week for 35 weeks/year? (ie: $1m+ after your $50-100k in expenses).
A 30k rack rate at those utilization rate is a high number but not an impossible one.
It is not a number you will get for software contracting. It's one you'll get for solving business problems that cost/are worth much more to your clients than that.
Sometimes that involves software.
I've written a ton on this topic, on HN and my blog. So has Thomas, among many others.
Professional services can be very lucrative; film at 11. My lawyer charges $750 an hour and my accountant $600. I have no difficulty believing they have 70% utilization. I know there are HNers that find this difficult to credit. If you take nothing else from the 3 million words I've written, take "you can charge vastly more for your skill set than you do if you connect the deliverables directly to business value." (True for consulting, regular employment, selling products, etc.)
It's boringly straightforward to scale the business after you've done it once. Success breeds success; you ask your newly satisfied client for referrals and follow-on work, you use case studies made with them to target firms at similar or slightly higher levels of sophistication, you turn the one-off engagement into something that you can predictably pitch and execute like a restaurant can predictably cook eggs to order, etc.
How does that work exactly? I mean, logistically -- if you're coming in from outside, you generally won't know what their standard travel policy is.
I also thought, early in my consulting career, this would be a big deal. It never was. Nobody who can hire 10 programmers is surprised what a trip from Nagoya to SF or NYC or Berlin costs.