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Comment by colinbartlett | Hacker News Reader

Similar and overlapping as others have said.

But I often liken "consulting" to mean the product you are selling is yourself. Where as "freelance" means the product you are selling is some output (app, website, code, etc.).

It's a lot harder to grow a consulting business beyond 30 to 40 hours a week because a human can only sell so much of his time. But if the value you are providing is an output, you can scale by hiring others to help offload your work. Much more difficult when you have sold yourself as a consultant and the client is expecting YOU.

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> It's a lot harder to grow a consulting business beyond 30 to 40 hours a week because a human can only sell so much of his time.

Good consultants sells access to their knowledge, not their time. A consultant who's selling their time is not going to go far, for two reasons:

1 - You can't sell more time than you have (as you mentioned).

2 - Selling time means billing time (hourly or daily). That means the cost of your services will be compared against other hourly work, like design, data entry, and legal services. That comparison never works out in your favor.

If regular people are selling their data.

Or programmers are selling information.

And consultants sell knowledge.

Who sells wisdom? ;)

That's a good goal and when I worked as an IT industry analyst we tried very hard to steer clients away from time-based engagements/deliverables. That said, if the engagement is something like "meet with our team for a day and give us feedback on XYZ initiative" it's hard not to have some linkage between hours and deliverable. (Though we would also throw in reports/follow-up/etc. to blur the linkage to some degree.) Ditto for giving a presentation. Funnily enough though, these types of engagements were actually the ones that brought in the most money per hour spent because they involved high value in-person interactions rather than just creating a written document.

EDIT: And sometimes, billing has to be done per hour for various reasons. The time I worked on an expert witness report, we had to bill per hour because that's how the lawyers worked. (Which was fine given that the pay was good and it would have been very hard for us to estimate the time in advance.)

This is great! I've always equated consulting with freelancing, in the sense that say if you were consulting as a data scientist, you actually do the model building for the client, but this changes everything!

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