Expert Networks: A Secret World of $500 per Hour Consultations
highestpayinggigs.com
highestpayinggigs.com
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.
That’s not to say that they wouldn’t have optimization problems if they moved to the cloud. But I’m stuck wondering why any company would make the decision to run their own db servers?
I need to find a way to do that for analytics.
It was never a significant percentage of my income, but it was a nice low 5-digit uplift a year. Separately I met a guy who advised on a very narrow sector of the energy market and charged $1800/hour a couple of hours a week. The more niche your expertise, the more you are worth.
Rule of thumb at least around here is take your base salary in thousands per year, and that's your hourly rate. If you're getting $200K base, charge $200/hr for your contracting time. The extra that yields is to help you offset the fact you won't always have work and the extra you have to do to keep your pipeline full. Many startups pay $150K for senior engineers so have no problem paying $150/hr for contractors.
In general, in my very limited experience, if you have experience in spaces they are getting inquiries about, you can make a strong case.
I've had companies reach out from all over the world, but I'll tell you, when I first moved to San Francisco, I lived in my car for ~2 months, then in a bunk bed in a run down hacker house, and was more than ecstatic to make 30 USD/hour. This post would be incomplete without mentioning that sometimes it takes many failures in a niche to develop great depth in it.
One area of expertise that regularly has been paying me for 1-2 hours every month for the past few months is new manufacturing plant startups or relocations. I'm one of a handful of engineers with know how and experience in material flows and operations research.
I had one company buy 10 hours of my time and flew me out of the country to help them navigate a facility location based on an ever modulating set of market variables.
When I studied polymer-textile-fiber engineering and operations research though, it was never exotic, I didn't want to work in the middle of nowhere, but was utterly fascinated with the subject matter.
I'm thankful for expert networks, my one qualm is that some networks like GLG etc ask for resumes, but I think that's the wrong approach. I really love sites like clarity.fm where you can just o-auth quickly and tell your story.
Generally, "game knows game" is something I believe in, I also believe marketing and brand don't always correlate with substance. I love finding people with performant dark horse talent who should be paid 1k/hour on expert networks but never pass the "branded" corporate filter of the sites themselves.
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 need those so often. I suspect most super high paid consultant gigs are even more boring - just super well dressed, super connected, super confident, speaking the language of the ultra rich and describing pretty dull and predictable things, mostly management/investment techniques but communicating the right way to the right people and having some level of connection to them. An alternative is a similar someone except a someone who will to tell the super-rich they're wrong and having enough prestige themselves so these rich don't feel like they've been insulted too badly.
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 :)
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.
If it seems too good to be true it often is.
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.
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.
Knowing better ways of earning (more) money is one of the most important things anybody should learn.
This thread deserves a good discussion, and if not that at least criticism.