The unfortunate math behind consulting companies
blog.asmartbear.com
blog.asmartbear.com
What the author is doing is adding up all the worst case scenarios into one big ugly pile of bad.
It reminded me of an mp3 player I designed once. I had to allocate z-height for the LCD. An LCD can have a lot of subcomponents (EL Backlight, FPC cable, rear reflective film, glass, front polarizing film, plastic protective lens, etc. All of these have min/max dimensions on the spec sheet. An inexperienced engineer, such as I was, would just add all the max dimensions to get max z-height of the LCD and design for that. But I also needed it not to rattle around, so I needed my design to also work if all the dimensions came in at their minimum. Woops! It's thickness could apparently vary wildly. I didn't want to burden my product with the complexity it would take to handle so much variance in one component.
I then learned that tolerances are never added up "worst case" or you'd never get anything built. Instead, you do a root mean square of them. The chances of every component in your subassembly coming in at it's absolute maximum are minuscule. The root mean square method accounts for this.
Anyway, I felt that the author of this piece was doing a little max tolerance stacking.
1. He's losing 32 hours a month (almost a week a month) because people work "less" then 8 hour days or take personal time. This is true perhaps on some months. But most consulting teams will work long hours come crunch time. Salaried employees make that time back when they do overtime to get a project done. I know a lot of interactive shops who burn through talent because they are working 60 hour weeks. This extends to the lost days
2. Then there's lost time to due to down time between projects AND time put into 10% time. Don't do this, this is a worse case scenario he just killed 4 days a month with this (or 48 days a year, really?). If you want 10% time and have down time between projects then use the down time between projects for 10% time. Most folks I know hire when they can keep someone busy full time and then back fill with contract help.
Similarly: 80% utilization is a totally sane rule of thumb for a consulting shop.
The thing that makes these points somewhat misleading in an HN context is that most HN people wouldn't start consulting companies where bill rates are so low that these things matter all that much. It's the same problem, writ large, as Cohen's analysis that "just giving clients a 10% discount can crater your profits". If 10% discounts are cratering your profits, find a better market to work in.
Yes and if I wasn't clear I wasn't saying that. The point was some weeks will be 30 hour weeks, but some will also be 50, while you will lose some time you will also make it back. Your industry seems different from mine. Ours don't tend to pay overtime or "aggressivly" balance vacation days (this happens but only maybe 2-3 days a year), but we have larger and faster burn out rates. We do tend to have significant bonus structures however.
The firms I know that have a culture of semi-frequent 50-60 hour weeks pay OT rates for the off-hours work, regardless of prior utilization rates for those consultants. This is a manifestation of the classic consulting problem of "sales vs. delivery". It is not the consultant's problem if sales stuffs the calendar full of too much work to staff in a 40 hour week.
Remember, in business there is no such thing as "cheap" or "expensive". There's "worth the money" or "not". A decision maker has decided that paying a consulting firm $250/hr/consultant is cheaper than it would be to do their own SAP implementation (and in turn, that SAP is worth more than it costs...)
FWIW a consultant as a rule of thumb would probably see 1/5 of his billing rate, tho' I have seen some get 1/3 and some as low as 1/8.
"Clients by and large are fine with it." --Only big companies are fine with it. If you're a web designer for local business, they would not be fine with it.
That's kind of the definition of "clients that are not worth having."
I can see the attraction in that. I've seen it up close. It's not worth selling your soul for. Broken systems that lack accountability will destroy your soul, one way or another. You might even be warm, fat, and happy all the while it's happening.
My typical client has less than 30 employees, the ability to react to issues fairly quickly by the standards of large corporations (i.e. squash a consequential bug in minutes, do a complete site revamp in weeks), more than enough money to pay any conceivable consulting rate for something with predictable ROI.
Sounds like you've hit the sweet spot!
EDIT: My comments on this article are railing against firms like Accenture, not against folks like Jason.
Jason has extensive experience with consulting companies, as you would know had you taken the 20 seconds necessary to read his bio before starting your argument with ad hominem. Congratulations on following it up with a straw man argument that replaces 99% of companies with the 1% that he blatantly wasn't targeting.
sigh
A gigantic slice of the economy is services work. This blog post is not that slice's Rosetta Stone.
Again, it's irrelevant if you redefine "typical consulting company" as one of a clearly atypical group of big-name firms with tens to hundreds of thousands of employees.
> Secondly he asserts that consulting doesn't scale.
He makes two assertions. First, that with all the details accounted for, your profit will likely be half of what a naive assumption would find. And second, that as a founder you'd end up doing a lot of stuff outside your core competency or interest. At no point does he say, "Given these facts, it's clear that consulting cannot scale." If he had, sure, you could take two seconds, point out a single point to the contrary, and feel good about "demolishing" an easily refuted argument. He didn't, so we're back where we started.
If you had five of these employees you’d be clearing $300,000 per year, which sounds more like it. Except not because scaling brings more time and expense:
It was obviously worth it for the partners at the old Andersen Consulting, or VPs at Accenture or any other consulting firm. These were small companies once...
This is not a joke. When it isn't your money, your incentive is to make a decision that cannot be second-guessed. Imagine you do five projects. Accenture come in and have a big heavyweight process and they follow the process each time, and four of the projects are ok but cost 2x what they could have cost, and the fifth project is late and over budget. Well, the fault clearly lies somewhere other than your decision to hire Accenture, they have a process and a brand name! So you blamestorm a bit and it turns out that there were unknown unknowns that couldn't have been foreseen and so on, and you keep your job.
But if you decide to hire BoutiqueCo and things go wrong, your head is on the block. If you do this five times and four times you save money but the fifth time things blow up, you're fired. BoutiqueCo don't have any credibility when blaming unknown unknowns with their "agile process" and what-not, and nobody remembers the fact that you saved so much money on the first four projects you could fund the fifth and sixth projects with the savings.
Small boutiques cannot get gigs with the companies that can afford to pay the rates of the big firms unless they manage to create a very unique brand or find other markets.
Anybody who can afford SAP can afford to pay the full freight, in which case they want the full package including insurance against being blamed for problems.
I was going to add that boutiques can charge the same rate as the big firms, but they do so in different markets. One example: Above I noted that the person buying the service has downside of being blamed but no upside for saving money.
That isn't always the case. When the person making the decision is also under a lot of budget pressure, boutiques can make the same hourly rate by being more productive. That productivity often comes at the expense of insurance against blame, for example you can't have as heavyweight a process.
But if you are working for someone who cares about the money, being more productive can get you the gig and the rate.
Your information about what share of revenues individuals receive is wrong in my experience. They way this business works is that a project gets staffed with a few who know what they are doing (and are often not employees), who may get 100% or more of their nominally billed rate, filled with the 1/3 to 1/8 people you mentioned whose main task it is to look busy and not say too much.
Yes, some consulting firms do charge a premium for their brand†. But all consulting firms charge a premium for shouldering project, scheduling, and employee retention risk on behalf of their clients; those factors alone, before you even factor specialization into the picture, seem likely to be worth more than $50/hr.
I think you may be falling into the same trap Jason Cohen fell into (which would be weird, because, aren't you a consultant?).
† On the other hand, note that some big shops, particularly in the big 4, offer huge discounts on consulting rates that they make up on audit works.
LOL.
I'd be very surprised to see this in 2011.
Giving discounts to ensure audit work was one of the evils at the core of the Enron collapse and led directly to the _Big 5_ becoming _Big 4_ [1].
Even before Enron, the writing was on the wall. The Big 4 were very cautious about the conflict between highly paid "consulting" and audit work. How can you audit the effectiveness of the financial controls built into someone's SAP deployment, if it was you who implemented them!? This was partially the reason some of the Big 5 spun off their consulting arms [2] [3].
Don't forget, a large chunk of the Big 4 brand is their "independence" and "impartiality". How can you win audit work without those? (OK, doesn't work _exactly_ like that).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgemini [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture
The company I am right has people who spend all day looking at "risk-reduction" in the engineering effort. They map the process and anywhere there is a question mark, they bundles of money to turn it into a check mark, especially if it is on the critical path. As an engineer you definitely don't introduce question marks for silly reasons like "lower billable hour rate", you would get chewed out for even thinking about that.
When you pay $250 an hour for a major consulting firm, you get $50 worth of consultant, and $200 worth of "Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM/Accenture/CGI/Thoughtworks."
The assumption above is somewhat flawed. Here is why.
Most large companies have department budgets, project budgets etc and are usually sensible enough not a pay $250 for a huge team of developers etc. Most of the time, they hire a couple of devs at that rate. And usually when they bring in contractors, these contractors work with an existing team of in-house developers, project leads, PM's. Very rarely, they bring in a whole team of consultants/developers to run the whole show within the company. If they do that, the company better fire the whole IT or software department.
So it is ludicrous to think that when a project fails, the blame should go to the consultant or to the choice of the consulting co. and that is why people choose to use 'the big 4" to be safe. That assumption is flawed. Like i said, consultants usually work with a team of in-house devs, leads, PM's etc. So it wrong to think that your head is on the chopping block because of a small number of consultants working on the project or the consulting company that you choose to bring in. If the project fails, it is mostly due to mismanagement of the project by whoever is responsible. Not the small number of consultants or consulting company you choose to bring in.
I can vouch this is not rare at all, from my experience.
Only because they don't know better. When I was working for a language/IDE vendor, we saw project after project that was 3 to 10 times larger than it had to be. (The project that actually needs more than 12 people in a language like Smalltalk is very exceptional.) Why is it like this? Because they are structurally motivated to waste the client's money.
Such companies facilitate a transaction. (Charging hourly for a consultant.) They siphon a little money off of this transaction. Naturally, they are motivated to hire as many consultants as possible. Basically, big consulting company sends people who give off the right competent business-suit vibe. They talk their to the customers, who are usually suits themselves and know almost nothing about making software first-hand, into thinking that their problems are deadly rocket-science and that they are just the uber-competent people to solve the super-hard problem. Then, they turn around and hire the cheapest resources they can (often fresh out of school) herded by a few politically adept managers, and hire them out for the highest mark-up possible.
I've also worked at a software product company that actually made most of its money from body-shop consulting. I know it was body shop consulting, because most of their people were hired (by the hundreds and housed in several football-field sized floors) out of local podunk community colleges and didn't know any better than to rewrite doubly linked lists every time they needed a collection. Yes, the product had probably hundreds of doubly linked list implementations in it. It was so bad that one client's IT group wrote what they called "super-link" and heroically rammed it through against amazing amounts of push-back from their management and from the body-shop vendor. What was this controversial thing? A linked list library.
[cue dramatic music]
Paying for junior programmers to fix their newbie linked-list implementation dozens of times -- this is "the cost of doing business?" I think there's opportunity to disrupt an industry here. On the other hand, the fact that it's this bad indicates that there are very powerful forces maintaining the information asymmetry.
EDIT: Let me put it this way -- what if someone tried to bill you big company hourly consulting rates for a dozen newbies repeated debugging their linked-list programming project?
Yeah, sure, you and I would hate that. Anyone spending their own money would.
But consulting companies target the publicly traded. the guy making the decision, there's no upside in it for saving money. It gets done or it doesn't. If he hires a big name, he doesn't get fired if it doesn't get done. If he goes with a no-name, that's not so certain.
I think this is a natural inefficiency that happens when the decision makers spend other people's money. they spend a lot of that money on insurance.
Of course, I'm just bitter because I failed as a body shop, in spite of having very good people who were able to immediately move in to other body shops, getting paid quite a bit more than I billed out retail.
There are other companies that focus on quality and delivering actual and not just perceived value. Those are not mere "body shops."
>There are other companies that focus on quality and delivering actual and not just perceived value. Those are not mere "body shops."
If so, they are providing actual value that I can not see. I have never seen such an agency consistently deliver good people.
Or maybe I haven't seen the right agency? as far as I can tell, only the very best of them pay contractors on time.
The very best body shop I've ever worked for or seen was one guy who never actually met me in person. But he paid me on time, and the guys he sent to the client were consistently technically better (and socially worse; or, at least, more weird. Remember, this guy hired me.) than other body shops.
I think the main problem with quality is that all other things being equal, people prefer safe jobs with benefits. Even the really top end body shops that give benefits usually don't pay you for bench time, so a full time job is safer, and generally more desirable, so the people who end up working for the body shop (or contracting house or whatever you want to call it) are people who, for whatever reason, can't hold down a full-time job. the inexperienced or otherwise less desirable.
Yes, there is a premium paid for contractors by the client, but that is nearly always entirely taken as overhead or profit. So long as the contracting house doesn't pay significantly more than full-time work, this disparity will remain.
"One of the things I like about this business," he explained, "Is that I make money while I sleep." Yes, he really is smarter than the average bear.
This is why I love software and services. Your time isn't directly related to your money, which is the only way to get rich.
Are these people (who own the above mentioned firms) any less "smart" than the "genius" engineer who sits in a cubicle and makes 100k and is at the mercy of his mortgage banker?
There is a curious form of homeostatis in consulting, where both "too many clients" and "I'm too tired" are signs that you are not charging enough money. You should charge more until they cease being problems.
The scary part about this advice is how freaking hard it is to actually chase away clients by raising prices, if you have a habit of delivering.
Rand Fishkin, whose SEO consultancy used to get up to $1k per hour (and was almost certainly underpriced given the class of client they worked for by the end), has a very instructive comment on the post about how they kept walking up rates without chasing anyone away. Basically, there is an unknown "true cost figure" in the client's mind which includes both your bill rate and risk of the project going totally haywire. As you lower the client's perception of risk, you can capture more of the "true cost" before getting "ugh, too high" feelings from the client.
That is a profound way to put it and certainly accounts for a lot of the premium that clients are willing to pay.
It's yet another potential source of both great profitability (when you do something THEY think is hard in just 10 hours) or loss (as what you described).
Almost everything here is double-edged...
They smile! Those 10% are 'free hours', but of course I worked it into the fixed bid. Anyway everybody wins.
About six months in now and I think it is going to work. Even in the middle of nowhere you can find good talent, one of my local devs is amazing, he'll be fantastic in six months and absolutely bad ass in five years.
Do it, it's fun, it's not that expensive and there is a huge need in these countries for people to come in and show how its done.
Thus the lack of leverage - there is an absolute cap on what you can bill per year.
One of the worst place charged companies a flat-fee per month for tech support (some had 300 or 400 employees). There were about 10 of us that had to take on everything.
It resulted in customers calling us up for things that weren't even really problems..mostly just preference (IE: location of icons on the desktop).
The most fundamental problem with Cohen's analysis is how he arrives at bill rates. "Everybody knows", he says, "that your consultant isn't worth $100/hr --- you only pay him $30/hr!". Well, no, Jason. Nobody knows that, because it's not true. Companies that engage consultants pay a significant premium to: (a) retain talent for the exact duration that they need them, (b) on often little-to-no notice, (c) with the flexibility of picking and choosing the right consultants for the right jobs (d) with no obligations on benefits and severance. And the consulting market is more liquid than the employment market (full-time jobs are "sticky"), so prices more closely track value.
So it is the case that an hour of Rails/jQ consulting might bill out at $140, while the talent delivering that work might effectively make $40/hr. The talent is, in addition to base comp, also getting a stable job, experience working alongside iPhone developers sharp enough to start a successful consultancy, health, benefits, and all the other things that are the reason that big companies have to pay so much to staff projects.
This model works so well that there are branches of the industry that are difficult to staff outside of consulting. For instance, the very very high end of software security bills north of $400/hr. Even discounting for FTE benefits, nobody can afford that person full-time. This sets up a virtuous cycle whereby consultants amass expertise, drive scarcity in their field, and increase their comp.
It should also go without saying that when your bill rate is very high, you don't need to add consultants to make time for product development. You can work half-time and still beat a bigco salary.
The rest of Cohen's arguments are somewhat blunted by the fact that the underlying economics of consulting are way better than he thinks they are. To wit:
* The cost of fully loading headcount isn't scary when you're priced properly.
* Similarly, if you price with the market, the cost of "scaling" isn't scary. Offices are cheap compared to salaries.
* Most consulting firms deliberately aim to keep utilization below a threshold, and recruit to "cool off" when things get crazy. 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year isn't desireable even as an owner.
* Lots of consultants have written blog posts about firing dysfunctional bigco clients. Yeah, in the real world, you have to deal with the 25 page MSA contracts; that's what you pay lawyers for. Yes, being in business is annoying. If it wasn't, everyone would do it.
* Yes, it's hard to build and ship products in "off hours". But you don't have to do that. Instead, you can scale to the point where it's cost effective to hire full time developers. Most YC companies get to market with 2-3 team members. It isn't a stretch to scale a consultancy to the point where it can fund 2 developers.
Against all these concerns about consulting is the unbelievably huge upside of bootstrapping a company this way: you get near-unlimited lives. It is the JUSTIN BAILEY of startup plans. In virtually every other model of bringing a product to market, product failure ends the company. That's bad, because most products fail. They really, really do. There is no reason that a product miss should zero out all the hard work you put into building a team and a business.
If anyone hear ever starts wondering "Why can't I find a full-time dev with SEO experience...", suffice it to say that the reason is quite similar. (With the added wrinkle that pen testers cannot generally lock themselves in a room away from clients and make large amounts of money without running afoul of the law, and good SEOs can.)
I basically do a work up where I put together a bunch of SEO landing pages and then optimize the landing page to get the customer to a conversion page which will actually convert them.
The basic process is like this:
Install Google Analytics
Install Google Website Optimizer
Install Google Webmaster Tools
Establish baselines for metrics
Optimize SERPs and ensure targetted SERPs are bringing high quality traffic (or volume)
Create landing pages or buy keyword domains and establish landing pages.
Optimize landing page conversion rate to a conversion page
Optimize conversion pages (funnels)
Rinse wash repeat.
I think the most important thing I stumbled upon is the separation of concerns between landing pages and conversion pages. High conversion pages usually don't rank well, but high SERP pages don't convert well so you have to separate them so each can do it's job most effectively. I have this feeling and idea that clicking on more links somehow establishes trust between the customer and the vendor. The more pages a person views the more likely they are to buy, and having a lot of pages allows you to slowly sell them on the idea.
I also evaluate options like building forums, wikis or other properties that are good for lead gen.
(Please, freelancers: have something in your profile that helps people hire you. HN is teeming with VCs, founders, and other people who want to hire you but you make it so damn hard.)
I've updated my profile, not sure how the email was removed.
I'll be in touch sachinag.
Example: Duplicate content is bad. Truth: If you're copying wikipedia it probably is, if you're optimizing a local company that serves multiple areas, it's probably best to duplicate that page and change the location name. If that company serves a thousand areas it might be bad.
eg. areas-served/mission-district is better than the dup content penalty because you get your keywords in the URL.
SEO is like Kenny Rogers in the gambler, every hands a winner and every hands a loser. It's all in how and when. Sometimes putting a sales pitch in your description is better than putting the keywords in. Sometimes jamming your description with keywords is better. And it varies from page to page even on the same site.
I'd actually say that you have a better chance not knowing anything, take ideas, try them out, see how they do. You'll do better figuring out your own stuff because you'll be optimizing in ways that others aren't. When Google changes their algorithms to defeat what everyone else who reads SEOmoz is doing then you may get better rankings. Also, you'll have the edge for 12 months while SEOmoz figures out what Google did.
If you want to learn SEO, find a bunch of terms, use a difficulty ranking to find the easy ones, and then try to rank on it. If you figure it out, put AdSense on the page. Also, don't try to rank on it with just one page, use multiple domains, etc. And it's not just ranking, use the tools to optimize your AdSense revenue. Also, don't confuse optimizing AdSense with conversions for a product you're selling. It's a different approach.
SEO is a little bit zen, it's not something you learn, it's something you practice.
Thomas, you didn't even come close to quoting him accurately or in context. Here is the real quote:
If you bill out a so-called “$30/hour” employee at $60/hour, you’ll only break even. You really need to bill out at $100/hour to make any kind of profit.
Which is hard, because the client you’re billing knows this person doesn’t really cost $100/hour. And when that client thinks about what’s “fair,” they won’t go through the computation I just did; they’ll base it on the person’s nominal rate plus a little profit for you. This caps the amount you can actually re-bill before client feels ripped off.
You are also right (I considered editing my comment to reflect it) that there is a huge market of sweatshop commodity consultants for whom this analysis is completely true. Yes. Avoid this work. The nice thing about being the kind of person who participates in online forums where every other week there's a thread like "Ask HN: What New Technology Should I Learn This Month" is that you tend to be flexible enough not to fall into that trap.
Huh? You just said you are dinging him for making a relationship but then admitting that there is a relationship (albeit partially).
Let's pretend a consultancy is the equivalent of rent-a-center and an individual consultant is a rented out TV. I'm a consumer and I want to rent the TV. I know the TV cost (I searched it on Amazon) and I know I'm just renting it for x amount of days. I know exactly what I'm getting for the price I pay; I get to watch TV for a certain period of time. When building a consulting practice this concept is a bit harder to achieve because the customer has no idea what they will get for $150/hr or $400/hr. They may get a TV that only works for half of the day or for a quarter of the day or half the screen only works sometimes. If it was that easy to assess a person's talent then the customer would just hire single contractors out.
I don't think Jason articulated what he meant by "worth" correctly. You're right in saying there are other values (hence worth) attributed to paying for consultants. However, I think what he is addressing is the fact that potential customers have a very hard time deciding what value your second, or third or fourth consultant is in your newly established consultancy practice. Who are you (as the consulting director) to tell the potential customer that your employee is worth $X/hr? Doesn't the customer ultimately assess the value of what they are buying?
* An hour of talent
* A committed hour of talent a week from now
* A committed hour of talent a year from now
* Any number of commited hours of talent from the same person
* An hour of talent on 1 month's notice
* An hour of talent on 1 day's notice
* An hour of talent from a problem domain specialist
* An hour of talent from someone intimately familiar with your company's business processes
* Hours of talent rotated through a small group of people to keep them fresh, at less than 3x the cost of a single person
* Total scheduling flexibility over talent/hours
* A candidate for internal career development (management, architecture, etc)
* An A-player who poses no political threat to the company's org chart
Some of these are benefits of full-time employees and some of them are benefits of contractors. Some are benefits of staff-aug contracts and some are benefits of project-based consulting and some are benefits of transactional one-shot consulting/advisory gigs. It's naive to suggest that only a raw hour of exercised talent is worth money.
EDIT: I just realized I did actually say "let's pretend a consultancy is a rent-a-center". I should have probably worded that differently - hence the confusion.
I very much agree with your points, especially that "billable hours" is not the point, that expediency or rarity of talent can easily be more important.
A fuller, more accurate treatment of the concept has to include that. Perhaps it's still useful for folks to (sometimes!) think about optimizing the person/hour, since that is of course an important part of the equation, and optimizing it does help.
This is also not exactly correct. The client probably knows the person they're getting doesn't get exactly $100/hr but they probably don't know what they do get. There are usually agreements in place where the firm will not tell the person what rate is being paid for them and the firm can't ask what rate the person is actually getting. The only person in this Ménage à trois who knows what everything costs in the consulting firm, and they make their money by keeping both parties in the dark as much as possible.
This is actually pretty difficult to do (been there, done that). It is extremely difficult not to polarize the company into the guys building "the product" (who will expect the lion's share of equity) and the guys bringing in the money, who will bitterly resent being "the grunts" while the cool kids get to play with whatever cool tech you all started out to make.
I've found that most medium-sized companies are practically impenetrable for consultants around here; everyone has a contract with Robert Half, or has a policy against contractors, or doesn't want to pay anything above $50/hr, which is barely acceptable for a single developer, and practically useless to someone trying to run a company.
I'd really like to know how I can get my foot in the door somewhere where the client won't balk and I won't feel like I can't charge the full time because the company is always talking about how strapped they are. It seems that nepotism is the only way to get in there without resorting to dirty tricks.
The only issue that presents itself in my industry regarding consulting is that it's basically a linear scaling revenue model, and the pitfalls around scheduling engagements.
My company's hourly rates for consulting are now about half of what they were 7 years ago, but it's still both immensely profitable and significantly cheaper than what the client would pay to hire someone to perform the requisite services.
On the other hand, some of the problems of being a contracting company and being a product company cancel themselves out. You have time you can't sell to other people? work on developing new features for the product. Hiring someone new who you aren't sure about or who needs training? Pay them trainee wages while training them up as they work on the product, then as you know their capabilities, rent them out.
But overall, I agree with the "renting yourself out at exorbitant rates is easier than renting out your underlings" advice, though this is at least partially due to a lack of sales skills on my part; but yeah, there are a lot of less obvious costs to renting out an employee.
Some of these shops are very profitable and successful, and some of them aren't.
Either way, the person who's got the most to complain about this situation is the grunt, not the customer who imagines they could get the work for cheaper. The grunt is very aware that he could produce a lot more value for someone, and capture it, if he can get rid of the middleman. Although the work in a consulting shop is varied, and can keep you on your toes, the need to bill 40 hours of project time every week leads to a lack of self-investment and eventual burnout.
There clearly is abuse (everything that can be abused in industry will be abused by someone). But you can't necessarily spot it from a simple comparison of bill rates and wages.
I saw the firm rapidly expand, we went from 15 people to 50. At first it was fun, and games. Some pizza + beer here, and some ping pong there. Bam we're working until 9 or 10 at night. But after a few years, I was burned. You can't work a person that hard for a long period of time.
I'm almost better now, but in terms of energy, I'm NO WHERE near where I was when I first started. The abuse is not in how much we make per hour, its in how we're worked.
There are some H1B Visa holders who pay into a business entity that sponsors them. When times are good, they pay more. When times are bad, they pay nothing. Since an H1B visa requires a sponsoring company, this is sometimes a safer solution than being (literally, in some cases) an indentured servant of BigCo.
I know tech folks love to reinvent and learn things on their own and sometimes it yields new and better results but in other cases we'd be better off to look at how BigLaw has been billing out hourly associates for hundreds of years very profitably.
Instead of setting up business models that encourage people to break their backs finding billable hours, why not the model where consultants have no idea how many "hours" they billed because they don't care? Give people roles where their projects are meaningful and interesting, their comp is stable, and their career paths make sense. Recruit the best people from the vast pool of candidates who want sane jobs with interesting work. Staff them at companies that will pay a premium both for flexible staffing and for top-caliber work. Call it a day.
Scale -- Bingo! The goal is to make the fixed overhead (incl employees) an increasingly smaller percentage of revenue. But to handle the increased revenue (ie, workload) you have to concentrate on increasing efficiency/productivity. This has a lot of influence on decisions about process. Obviously, the more routine those processes are, the cheaper (and more easily replaced) the labor can be. Also, if the work is done under a fixed price contract, you can achieve a greater effective hourly rate if you are efficient and manage risk well.
Charge more -- "charging more pushes away your existing client base". This is not such a bad thing if you have your eye on 'scaling' (ie bigger projects). Bigger clients have deeper pockets (although they also have more unique needs, which introduces more risk).
Build a product -- See Nassim Taleb's discussion about 'scalable work' in "The Black Swan". The odds aren't good that this will pay off.
I don't see the value for a customer in an hourly rate. If I am charging you by the hour, I have an incentive to be slow. If I am charging fixed price, I want to be fast, and if we are "liable" for bugs, we have an incentive for bug free code.
I see it as putting our money where our mouth is. I'm confident that even if your scope changes we will still deliver for this fixed price. Why is this not the norm?
For example, you can provide a skill that is not otherwise generally available on the market. Or perhaps by doing consulting but on a closed source product (by doing a per project sale instead). It will be great to brainstorm other such ideas and approaches.
So is that 15% number accurate?