The Army of the New Independents

My CPA in a Midwest/Great Plains rural town of 10K people charges $175/hour. Her firm has 5 other CPAs. The town has around 20 CPAs total.

My attorney charges $90/hour for advice only. Nothing else. $90/hour just to discuss a problem (pro rated per minute) or BS. If there's real work to be done (contract creation/review, legal issues, etc), it's more. He's in a town of 2K people.

Auto dealers in towns/cities ranging from 5K to 200K population are charging between $90-120/hour for mechanic's labor. Not including parts/supplies. Oil changes at many dealerships range from $45 to $70. (Oil changes at mom and pops run $25-30.)

Dentists? I just saw an ad for a newly opened dental office in a metro area. Special for cleaning, x-rays and such was like $75 from a regular rate of around $350.

Electricians? $80-100+/hr easily for a good journeyman or master. Not including service call charge. That was in 2011. ( A good electrician rate thread from 2009: http://www.electriciantalk.com/f15/when-did-you-last-raise-y... )

$40-75 to mow your lawn. $40-50 to clean snow from your driveway.

Technologists make things which can bring in (or save) hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, but seem to consistently undervalue their worth.

I didn't start my business solely because of employment issues. I was still employable, I could've gone and gotten another job. I wanted to be able to provide something to lots of different businesses at the same time, and striking out on my own seemed like the best way to do that.

But, seeing other people lose their job and losing my own at one point completely destroyed any belief I had in job security. I naively believed at first that only "bad" employees get fired; as long as you were valuable to your employer, your employer took care of you.

So launching my own business seemed like better job security. Except, that was naive too. I really didn't understand all of the benefits of employment: paid time off, a schedule, mostly reliable income, all of the resources that a larger business has, and most of all, the ability to leave work at work and go home and live an entirely different life.

I think the social contract between employees and employers is pretty broken in the U.S. at the moment. Employees are spending way too much time at work on Facebook and Reddit and other things; employers largely aren't treating their workers as anything other than human livestock. But I still wouldn't recommend getting into business for yourself to most people. It's tremendously difficult.

A little less than 10 years later, and I'm doing OK and my business now employs other people and is still growing -- very, very slowly -- but I'm still attracted to a stable, reasonably well paying job.

I mostly work for less than that, deliberately work maybe 50% of the time, and consider myself embarrassingly well off compared to most of my peers. I don't think my plumber friend earns as much as I do, but I'm not bothered by the idea that he might.

I am down with the idea that we should avoid racing to the bottom, I don't think "union" is a dirty word, and maybe there's even some kind of argument that I have an ethical responsibility to work full time even though I don't want to. But from where I stand this piece seems a little divorced from (my) reality.

Maybe it's something to do with being called Joe.

The sorts of leads a new consultant gets are more along the lines of can-you-do-me-a-favor personal connections. There's much more "You're a jerk for expecting me to pay money" and "I didn't think a suspension bridge across the Colorado Canyon would cost more than $500."

New independents deal with amateurs more frequently than is typical for established consultants. The race to the bottom is a function of that, not always ignorance. Pricing is a good way to get to "No" quickly.

For a newly minted independent, "no" is still better than bad projects which end with not getting paid. The critical rejection rate for a newly minted independent is the rejection rate over retainers. Sure with your former company, so long as they are not downsizing because of a financial shortfall, then payment down the road might be acceptable. But with amateurs, retainers are critical both in terms of financial safety but for screening the amateurs who will view you as a professional from those who will treat you as a rube.

Closer ties to the market--you are much more employable as a contractor, because you have to be! You have to seek out and sell yourself far more than an employee does, which means you know who is buying what.

The ability spread risk across several clients. This is not always possible in the same week or month, but if you are a contractor and are only working for one client for months at a time, you aren't a contractor, you're an employee with no benefits. Seek out other clients and spread your risk.

The flexibility to work when you want to work. Both in the small (when you want to start working each day) and in the large (when you want to spend down some of your savings in vacation/tech exploration/etc and not work for a while).

The ability to turn down work. Don't discount this as a benefit. If you are an employee, your choices are 'do the work you are assigned', 'ask your manager for different work' or 'walk'. If you are a contractor/independent, you have much the same choices, but 'walking' is far less risky, due to the your awareness of the market and your multiple clients (see above).

Not likely to pass, necessarily, but a sign of the times.

Citizens of countries with Central Banks live in debt-based economies, and thanks to many of the recent gyrations to "correct" some of these economies, more currency has been created. To me, this is another reason to consider raising rates even higher, to offset the weakening currency.

P.S.: I think one mistake many freelancers make is using the word 'wage' instead of 'tariff' - in my mind it has a very different meaning and to me I feel less powerful / in control if I would talk about e.g. a 'fair wage' with a prospective client.

Also, I am compeletely amazed by how idiotically this is handled by management with respect to software development, where the code can have negative net worth without the guy who developed it, and knows its ins and outs. And people put on contract work will eventually leave these untenable situations, especially if they are competent.

Call be bitter, but I am quite disheartened when I see how much opportunity and talend is squandered for some temporary short-term gain, like "reducing" fixed costs by outsourcing.

Nobody should aspire to be a replaceable unit in any case. If Joe down the road can replace you, yeah, it is going to be tough being a small company.

There is another side to this that I think is worth exploring. For a long time capital has had a significant advantage over labour (see rising inequality). I think we might be at the inflection point where the capital costs of so many businesses are dropping to the extent that capital's advantage is eroding. I'm thinking of bootstrappers and so on. Obviously capital still helps, and the relative advantage isn't uniform across all sectors or industries (if you want to do something for consumers you probably need capital; likewise space exploration or bio-tech), but I think a sizable number of people are in the situation where they can own their output.

Shoot for 90%. As long as you keep pumping the funnel with more conversations, a lot of "nos" are just noise on the way to a "yes"

One note here: in most cases, being a 1099 is a much more honest relationship than being an employee. Some of the saddest folks I've seen in my IT career were extremely smart people who thought they had security in an IT job. Such a thing does not exist, no matter what they call you.

Ask a UK based contractor about IR35 and you will get an earful - though of course lawyers and accountants are allowed to continue as before - got to keep those greasy engineers in there place old chap.