Comment by nickelcitymario | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickelcitymario | Hacker News Reader

nickelcitymario

The same holds for marketing and advertising, which makes sense if you consider an agency to be a consultancy.

The pattern I've seen repeated everywhere: A genuinely knowledgeable expert sells their expertise via online content, books, and seminars. This attracts the clients. The expert will attend a few key client meetings. But then, unbeknownst to the client, they disappear and leave the work to juniors.

This is so ubiquitous that, earlier this year, I decided to change my career aspirations. I'd long wanted to be an agency leader, but the pattern above was repeated at every successful agency I came across, and it's not something I can stomach any longer.

So, I decided to put myself out there as the expert. I write a newsletter. I published a book. I'm pursuing speaking engagements. Just like the other consultants do.

However, I don't pass my clients onto anyone else. They're hiring me. They were sold on my expertise, so my expertise is what they're going to get.

When a project grows too big for one person to handle, or when there are aspects of the work that don't justify my high hourly rate, I transparently inform my clients of my intention of bringing on freelancers for those aspects. It's all done out in the open.

And while I do charge a markup on the work my subcontractors do on my behalf, it works out to far less than my hourly rate, and my clients are fully aware of the markup being charged and what value I'm providing in return (i.e.: supervision).

All of which is to say: I think consultants can provide incredible value. (I know, I know... a consultant who believes on consulting. Shocking!) But you do have to be careful, and oddly enough, the bigger and more reputable the consulting firm, the less I would trust them. The business rewards bad players.

You're still overseeing other subcontractors. My next step is likely in a similar direction but I want to start out with a couple of former colleagues in more of a partnership role.

IMO being responsible for other people is tiring and unrewarding, I just want a structure to tackle interesting projects without a middleman.

You run into scalability limits pretty quickly. Unless you are truly the world expert on weird ball bearing failures or whatever. Or can genuinely speak or do consulting days that clients will line up to pay you $20K+ per day to do. (And even that isn't all that much absent a pretty full dance card. Just how the math works.)

> IMO being responsible for other people is tiring and unrewarding, I just want a structure to tackle interesting projects without a middleman.

You're not wrong, but that's also only a problem to you, not the client. So it's not an ethics question, but a matter of what you enjoy doing. All the power to you if you sort that out.

If I put myself in the shoes of my clients: They want their problems to be solved in a cost-effective way. They don't mind paying a premium for genuine expertise, because they see the value. But they WOULD have a problem paying that premium if it turned out that I was quietly passing on the work to people without the same expertise.

Most projects don't need expertise for every aspect, or can't justify the budget needed for true expertise at each level.

For example, let's say you're building a website. There are several functions involved in that:

- Planning

- Information Architecture

- Copywriting

- Design

- Front-End Development

- Back-End Development

- Infrastructure

If your client is a major corporation, there's an argument to be made for expertise at every one of those levels. So they pay for that expertise. But what's galling is how rarely they actually receive that expertise, because even though they get face time with the experts, the work is being done by juniors, often without the client's awareness.

If your client is a small company, the problem isn't with getting the expertise they paid for, but with only paying for the expertise they actually need.

The advice I give to my clients is to focus on the planning and copywriting, because those, in my opinion and experience, are what make the biggest impact on whether or not your website will be an effective sales tool for your company. Invest there first, and if you need to hire juniors for the rest, hire juniors for the rest. Or hire me and I'll hire the juniors so you don't need to worry about it.

What agencies and consulting firms do, however, is charge expertise-level rates for every aspect of the project, even though 80% of it is being done by junior-level people. This, to me, is dishonest, and is what I'm trying to avoid as a consultant.

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