Freelancing = Not so great jobs where clients dictate what they want (low pay)
Consulting = Excellent jobs with clients that want you for your knowledge (much much higher pay)
Making the leap is the difference between "building websites" and "building websites for a particular industry with a very specific technology that only a handful of people really know".
Consultants pitch based on their general capability and the value it offers to a client. They probably take ownership of a whole project so the client can just set out their expectations and then give occasional feedback as things progress. You hire a consultant to solve a problem, and what you're paying for is a solution that meets your needs.
Technical freelancers, the kind of people who describe themselves as "$language programmer" or "web designer", pitch based on their ability to do things like hacking in $language or producing mock-ups of the appearance of a web site. However, these things have no direct benefit to a client. They only have value when put in context and combined with the work of others under some implied level of management. You hire this kind of freelancer to build a thing, and what you're paying for is the asset they build, and it's your responsibility to figure out what to do with it and how to make it valuable.
Although consultants may also specialise more, for example preferring to work in a specific niche market, I don't think that is really the defining factor. Most consultants are still just freelancers or small agencies. They just have enough business savvy not to describe themselves as such, because someone who can solve a problem is typically much more valuable to a prospective client than someone who can build a thing.
My point was more that freelancers and consultants aren't some sort of mutually exclusive categories or different steps on a ladder. A lot of consultants who mostly work alone are freelancers, creating a significant overlap in the groups, but neither group is a subset of the other.
With consulting, you are not necessarily responsible for execution. Your job is primarily to make recommendations. That said, much of my consulting work has also been comprised of executing on my recommendations.
With freelancing, the work tends to be either in reality consulting or in most scenarios executing on a spec, or under another developer's guidance.
If I were to put it simply, consulting stems from offering recommendations and direction from a place of knowledge and experience related to your skillset, whereas freelancing tends to be more the application of your skillset.
Do you have an example of that in action? It would be interesting if we could see a freelancer's landing page vs consultant's landing page.
A side by side comparison of what the differences are.
- consulting: http://www.nngroup.com/
- agency: http://www.akqa.com/
- consulting: http://www.cooper.com/
- agency: http://www.elpassion.com/
- consultant: http://andrewhinton.com/
- consultant: http://jessicahische.is/
- freelancer: http://www.danielaa.me/
- freelancer: http://owltastic.com/
You'll see with the examples above that both the agencies (freelancers) and consulting firms (consultants) offer similar services. However the consultants are mostly focused on a small set of skills (research, UX, etc.) whereas the agencies keep it broader.
It would be interesting to know if you gave an agency, freelancer, consultant the same project, what they would do different, what they would charge differently, what the output would be and the time frame.
Is UX = User Experience? How do you self proclaim yourself that you are a UX/UI expert? What do these consultants do that is different from what a freelancer would do (ex. fixing UI, creating UI, using template UI, split testing).
Is there value in using vague languages vs specific activity (ex. user experience optimization vs use a javascript library to split test and measure optimizations)?
Agency vs Consultants is also an interesting comparison. Agencies seem much like Freelancer websites, fancy, artsy, will-do-anything-for-money while the consultants page seem more sane, narrowly focused and use much more business speak.
For developers and freelancers, it would be nice if we can work with a business vocabulary. I think any freelancer can whip up a page like nngroup.com and present themselves as a consultant, or is there more to it than just the surface?
So essentially it's a sales technique.
On one end of the spectrum, highly technical, frameworks, languages, stuff technical people understand, solves technical labor, the value is reduced cost.
On the other end of the spectrum, non technical, business centric, stuff non technical people understand and most technical people shun as 'bullshit' is actually aims to solve business problem or provide business values in a word they can understand and measure.
It reminds me sort of like selling to different market segments with SaaS. On the lower end, you sell to the small guys, with small needs, price sensitive. On the enterprise end, you sell to large guys, with bigger needs, people's career depend on the success of the project, bigger pockets.
So is it safe to conclude that becoming a 'consultant' is essentially you are now selling to people with money, people with business problems or needs, people who don't speak tech, thus the higher command in pay?
I think it would be very helpful for technical people if we could learn the business linguo and training to speak client's language. I understand that not everyone is cut out for this but for those of that are, it would be extremely valuable to be able to speak and write in such manner.
> How do you self proclaim yourself that you are a
> UX/UI expert?
In a practical sense, that is true. Any half-decent web hacker could produce the sites these consultancies use.
However, the point is that it would never occur to most of them to do so, any more than for example they would think to hire someone who speaks the language of their prospective client base to do their copywriting.
There are two distinct skill sets in play here. A technical freelancer might have better technical skills than a consultant when it comes to, say, designing a web site or unit testing a module in a software project. But the consultant understands how to speak the client's language, understand the client's needs, and translate that into technical work that will solve that client's problem. This skill set is much more about various types of management and marketing activities, and it's a world that most geeks never think to enter, and where there's no guarantee that just because you're good at technical work you'll also be good at the other side.
This is why I sometimes disagree with HN posters who advocate becoming more of a consultant to boost your income if you're an independent developer: most geeks don't have the skill set to do that, and plenty won't want to learn the rest and change the type of work they do, or they simply don't have the aptitude for it anyway. However, those other posters are right that the consulting side can command much higher rates for those willing and able to make the jump, simply because it's a more valuable proposition from the client's perspective.
It is extremely rare to find someone who can make good UX right off the bat for a new problem, so I would say that a UX expert is someone who can iterate efficiently and constantly improve user experience (and, indirectly, business metrics) and a UI expert is someone who can make things look exactly like they were supposed to (in their heads or their clients' heads or in the mockups).
> So essentially it's a sales technique.
I've worked as a freelancer and with consultants and I think your problem is that you're focusing on the website. These businesses receive Zero (0) inbounds from their websites. The reason why they even have a website is because, well, it's 2015. It might be a window into how the business works but changing your freelance website to look like a consultancy would make no difference whatsoever.
What divides the two is their professional networks: where they find business, who they're working for, and why. Freelancers try to drum up business by going to meetups, following up on weak leads ("I hear Jim needs a new website") subcontracting through agencies. Their value proposition is that they do an hour's work for an hours pay and they're in business for themselves most likely cause they're just trying to escape the cube farm.
A consultant got into her business because she's realized that she's reached the peak of what she can make as an "individual contributor". She has a big book of business before she even hangs out her shingle and perhaps decided to start consulting because she had too many people wanting to give her money and didn't want to commit to one. Her client list grows organically through referrals being made through her huge professional network. When she enters into sales negotiations the impetus is on the client to sale the gig to her rather than the other way around.
I would like to work for myself again but not as a freelancer. That's a dead-end world. My goal now is to either develop my career to the point where I can be a proper consultant or (even better) develop a SaaS product.
I give you a specific example, I think it makes the point: a graphic designer who went from consultant to freelancer.
When he maintained the consultancy, he also had to keep an office and act as a project manager when third parties got involved. He also had to present for the whole project team. He also had to have a marketing and sales process going and he had to talk to non-technical people.
As a freelancer: none of that, just a laptop and a portfolio website. Of course he had to advertise in his network to get new work and he had to work more for to make the same amount of money. But he had a lot less responsibilities now, which for some is just the better life.
Edit: another thing I notices is that consultant firms seem to deliver intangibles like teaching clients best practices or ideas gleaned from cutting-edge research, while agencies are just focused on delivering the tangible product.
I would say that's mostly true. A lot of the "pure" consulting I've done has been in the form of teaching, critiquing and building reports/style guides that other designers and developers use internally to build products.
I will say that finding consulting work like that is exponentially harder than finding your typical freelancing gigs (which is expected).
Consulting generally pays more because the value lies in creating the solution to the problem, not in commoditized coding time. Clients typically know the problem they have before they call in a consultant. It is less common for them to have the solution completely mapped out.
A contractor is a replaceable cog that does what they're told (though might be an expensive cog). What you're incorrectly calling a freelancer. They get hired at a daily rate and turn up at work and told what to build.
A freelancer will usually have complete autonomy on the tech side, but no say in the business side. A freelancer is not always expensive. Freelancers are sometimes cheap consultants. A guy who builds WordPress sites for mom & pops is a freelancer. They were asked for a website, not a WordPress one. Bit also a guy who makes mobile apps is a freelancer, but it's his choice to choose swift or not.
A consultant is there to bring specific knowledge about a specific business problem or metric. They are always expensive.