Now that is quite the markup.
Can you provide details on what categories the billing would also cover? I'd imagine it would be flights, hotel rooms, equipment, transportation, meals, remote offices, etc.
Can you provide details on what categories the billing would also cover? I'd imagine it would be flights, hotel rooms, equipment, transportation, meals, remote offices, etc.
Here's what that billing had to cover:
* My normal work hours [the thing we billed for]
* My overtime hours
* My annual bonus
* My benefits & retirement savings & overhead & employer-side taxes
* My time spent on business development & sales (most of which don't pan out)
* My time spent in training & development (probably ~4 weeks in the first year)
* The time of managers spent training & developing me
* My support staff (industry analysts, Powerpoint designers, internal experts)
* Multi-million-dollar IT investments to build tools and databases to support me in my work
* A couple first-class flights a week
* A few nights a week at expensive hotels
* Lyfts & Ubers everywhere
* All meals expensed
* The firm's partners working the case
* New employees for whom we don't bill
* Fees for market reports
* Fees for expert interviews with industry executives
* Office overhead (rent, power, insurance, etc.)
* Office support staff (HR, finance, janitors, etc.)
* Profits for the firm's equity holders
(Now a few of these expenses were billed separately I believe, but it shows the wide breadth of costs that a firm has to cover.)
Lastly, none of this opportunity would have existed without the firm, the network, the brand, and the partners. It's amazing to think that all I had to do was show up and work, and in exchange, I would get paid a high salary, get experience working with senior executives, get a prestigious brand on my resume, and accelerate my career relative to most career tracks. I don't regret the job, nor do I think it's surprising that there are crowds knocking on the door trying to get in.
Looking at other industries, I wouldn't be surprised if a cashier at a grocery store made less than 5% of what they put in the register each day. And I wouldn't be surprised if a oil drilling engineer got paid 5% of oil that they extracted each day. Even if we're the ones touching the revenue, we're still a small part of what it takes to run a big business.