High end” consultants, what does your day to day work look like?

To give you a bit of an lay of the land before you jump into (or even start researching) consulting.

There's mainly 2 types of consulting: staff augmentation ("staff aug") and engagement-based.

In the first case you simply work for the company the same way FTE (full time employee) would but it's easier for them to lay you off, and they don't have to pay you benefits. You typically would be paid much higher rate than an FTE.

You can either work for yourself, e.g., have a small LLC/S-Corp, or work for a company which matches employers in need of consultants and consultants looking to sell their skills. That company would typically get the percentage of your rate from your customer (this is sometimes referred to as "bodyshop" model).

As others already pointed out, one way to get work as independent staff augmentation consultant is to have an inside knowledge of a particular company and have them pay you for that knowledge. Another way is to specialize in a very narrow technology (e.g., Cobol) and be well known within the industry, and you will have a steady stream of work coming your way (until that technology becomes obsolete or otherwise loses relevance).

For engagement-based consulting work you come into a company to perform a particular project with defined end goals and the budget. You first pitch the project to prospective clients and if you mutually agree on the end goals and the cost, the engagement starts. Engagement-based consultancies have 2 sides to their business: sales side and delivery side. People on the sales side will be working with potential clients, looking for opportunities, pitching projects, and tending to any issues on the projects that they sold if necessary. People on the delivery side will be... well, delivering the service, or running a project.

Once the project is over, you either have to find a new client, or find a way to extend your engagement with the same client by maintaining or expanding the product you built, expand into the new areas at the same client, etc etc.

Hope this helps.

Fixing problems and adding value to the business can pay very well. Much of my freelancing work amounts to unglamorous but essential debugging of code and infrastructure.

The sweet spot for freelancing comes down to providing expertise companies don’t have in-house and can’t easily hire for. That can describe a lot of things. In my case it describes cloud infrastructure and difficult software bugs. In my experience most programmers working full-time jobs have poor debugging skills and limited expertise outside of their domain. Someone who has specialized in mastering, for example, Ruby on Rails likely can’t figure out a SQL database performance problem or how to set up a secure hosting infrastructure. You just have to figure things out quickly and solve problems.

You can’t look at it in terms of cost per hour. The correct way to value yourself its to determine cost or value to the business. That’s summed up in the old joke about the consultant who fixes a broken machine in a few minutes and bills $10,001 dollars — one dollar for pushing a button and $10,000 for knowing which button to push.

Consultant with 20+ years of field experience here. What I get tasked with mostly is code-reviews for security and performance, and fixing elusive (and painful) bugs. My specialty is to be able to rush in and take over from quitting employees and then train a replacement hire, or just help "put out fires". Over the years I've developed an intuition for where bugs hide. I just need an employee who works with the codebase to explain how the bug manifests. From there I can usually nail it in a short while. In short: experience gets paid.

To charge a lot, you need to either have very specific skills, or you need to be engaging at the right level.

A lot of the time you'll find yourself at the extremes - either incredibly technical, no one else knows how to do this.

Or, extremely strategic/high level - fractional CTO/Engineering Director type work.

The danger with the latter type of work is that you are often involved because the exec team does not like what their tech people are telling them. e.g. The CTO is saying one thing and the board/CEO want to hear something different.

Not sure if I am high end. But I am a consultant. All my daily tasks revolve around making sure that what's going on (day to day) on a particular direction is expected, sensible, understandable to the key stakeholders, and (most importantly) contributes to the company goals. I have to use my expertise to get all the information and insights myself, because I am almost never told what's going on and what's supposed to be going on and why. I tally up the aspects of the big picture almost daily, by talking to people, reading docs and code, connecting all the layers, comparing to the desired state, and then inferring the tasks for myself and my team. Which can be very different in nature from this week and the next.

>I now rarely do consulting. I turn down the vast majority of clients. When I do charge, I charge $3,000 an hour.

A 40-hour week at that rate is a cool $120k. Whew.

I suppose I can kind of see it making sense in situations where there's a time crunch, the stakes are high with a lot of money on the table, and highly specialized knowledge and/or exceptional leadership is required—with a very low amount of billable hours.

So basically the plot to Inception.

I run CRFYI, a site that basically operates like levels.fyi or glassdoor but tailored specifically to freelance/consulting rates.

I'd encourage you to check out some of the submissions on the site to see what people are doing when they earn x amount of money per hour. Don't want to spam the link everywhere but it's in my profile.

Like any service, price is a filter, on both sides. If you're hiring a consultant and they're way cheaper than everybody else, red flags start to go off. Why are they so cheap? Same on the other side - if the consultant is very expensive, you wonder why, and generally conclude that they must be high caliber at what they do. If you have the budget for it, you'll almost always prefer the person that seems to provide the "premium" service.

A funny part of it though, to appear as a "premium" consultant, you don't really need to do anything differently than a regular consultant. You just need to have way higher rates, clients make the assumption from there.