That is true, but it also means you really should work towards getting into that position partly by reducing your personal burn rate (ie spending) and partially by charging more since that allows you a longer famine.
Correct - when you can't pick and choose - you're picking to work with anyone so you can pay the bills. Nothing wrong with that. This is for when there is a choice that you can make.
I'm a cynical sort with a lot of experience in the industry consulting, and I can't help but view a lot of these pieces as heavily...embellished. Akin to "fake it to make it". Ala "I'm so overwhelmed with business at 30K per week....but would you like to buy some tupperware?"
I understand the author is here, and hopefully people don't embarrassingly downvote this purely to try to act civil -- I think the embellishment is doing a massive disservice to the entire industry. It is often complete fantasy. I will also say that I found the claims the other day about the 30K+ per week consulting engagements, apparently chosen at whim, completely ludicrous (again, having worked with countless organizations). It has zero verification or believability, but is a nice draw for someone's new initiative.
i can't speak for anyone else - but by the same token, i'm not embellishing anything. verifiable? no, because i'm not sharing my bank account statements. believable? definitely - most of my friends make about what i make a year freelancing, so it's not totally out of scope or outside the norm (i also never said i make $30k/week freelancing - some weeks i do, but others, i definitely don't).
i've built a career and an audience by being very honest, even about my epic failures and shortcomings. i know you don't know me from adam - but luckily my audience and client-base does, and really they're the ones i cater to. my pricing is listed publicly on my website, and i wouldn't do that if clients weren't willing to pay for it (i don't have a sugar daddy or sugar mama to support me).
i also appreciate that you voiced your opinion in an actually civil way! i hope it doesn't get down voted.
The 30K thing was related to a post on here a few days back where an author claimed that they had their pick of "30K / week" engagements. As an interesting contrast with your policy, they claimed that they kept their rates hidden, thus allowing them to magically and endlessly ramp it up.
In any case, I've long come to learn in the freelance industry that the more people talk about their success (which can be "so many clients I turn them away", or "I am now charging 50K+"), the more unlikely that success actually is. e.g. the guy who puts "published author" at the top of his blog likely has an Amazon Digital Delivery PDF book. The guy who talks about "top clients" had someone from Apple visit their blog once. And so on.
The more bombastic about success someone is, the more incredible the claims, the more likely they're struggling for relevance, using the escalating accomplishments to create it. Again, this has been my experience in the industry, where when you look behind the curtain you find Lenny asking you not to tell anyone how he lives.
In no way am I saying that about you, but just in general HN has been awash in "so much success I have to wear shades....now would you like to buy some tupperware?" type posts (I'm not being facetious with the tupperware thing -- it's people claiming boundless success, and then pitching something so petty that it puts it all in stark contrast), and I have to think it does a massive disservice to most of the readership, putting in their notice on this notion that there are endless lines of clients throwing money around for vague needs.
Why do you find it ludicrous? The organization I work for just spent $50,000 for work that many of its employees could have done in about a week. However, since we're all booked up with work for the next 5 years, it made sense to farm it out.
Various flavors of this are probably playing out in those "ludicrous" $30k/week engagements.
Well, I thought like you for a long time because the idea you can make more by turning down some work and markerting yourself in a niche is is very counterintuitive.
Before trying this approach I lose a lot of time racing to the bottom.
I didn't say that it was counterintuitive, or that you can't turn down clients.
I was observing the reality that most freelancers are more likely to find themselves absolutely starving for business, and shouldn't look at this and wonder what they're doing wrong. Telling a client to keep their money because it's an "ego project", when they're your only client over a month period, is a quick recipe for bankruptcy. It doesn't magically make other clients come knocking.
Once you get to the point where you're reaching saturation, sure you start to evaluate engagements for most reward/utility/etc. Many if not most freelancers will never come anywhere close to that.
One alternative is to live below your means and build up some savings so that you are not living paycheck to paycheck as a freelancer because that is even more of a recipe for disaster.
Look, $30k/week does sound ridiculous to me too, but Patrick doesn't strike me as a bullshitter either. He's just a great combination of programmer, businessman and marketer. As far as I remember, he never claimed to have a continuous stream of $30k/week projects lined up, those are words you're putting in his mouth to make it appear more embellished than it actually is.
The very terminology you use—"saturating" one's freelance schedule—is a mindset I've been in before, and I now think is dangerous. If you are overworked and stressed about money and billable hours, there is no free time or headspace to move up the food chain. Even worse, the quality of your work can slip due to minor hiccups like scope creep, unforeseen rabbit holes, or just getting sick for a few days; then you are undermining your future pitches and word-of-mouth!
Admittedly it's not easy to start charging more, you need to find the right clients, and you need to shift to a value-based billing where you take more risk on yourself. This is phenomenally difficult for anyone with expenses and wage-earner's mindset. However I wouldn't write off Patrick as being too privileged, lucky, or any other excuse—those things may be true, but that doesn't mean there aren't lessons that can be applied to people grinding it out at a lower level.
Saturated means that you've filled (or can fill at will) the time you've allotted and targeted, not 100% of your possible time. e.g. 100% of 50% of available time.
>he never claimed to have a continuous stream of $30k/week projects lined up, those are words you're putting in his mouth
He claimed it was his so-called "rack rate". His standard rate. Over a year long period. The prior year his "rack" rate was 20K/week. He didn't say "I put out a ridiculous rate and wouldn't you believe it this one guy bit!", but claimed that it was a ongoing day to day rate that saw continued success. That was sort of the whole, rather odd, basis of that part.
Extraordinary claims, as they say, require extraordinary proof. Yet we don't know a single client, or a single project, that paid these grossly out of the ordinary rates, and I can tell you that I don't know a single organization that would even consider such a rate for an individual freelancer (respected consulting shops -- the sort that you hire because no one ever gets fired for hiring them -- with armies of bodies yield less on their contract). People can wave their hands and say that it's because it saved so much but that sort of argument leaves me agape, wondering if a bunch of people just discovered the business world.
It just doesn't work like that.
I have absolutely no fundamental reason to believe Patrick a "bullshitter", or to accuse him of being so. On the flip side, I have absolutely no reason not to consider that he might be. Because it turns out that a remarkable number of people are -- particularly when they're trying to get attention for something -- somewhat aggrandizing. And we all know how important signalling is, and how if you act the part, maybe, the myth goes, you'll become the part. It plays a part of quite a few HN front pagers.
> The prior year his "rack" rate was 20K/week. He didn't say "I put out a ridiculous rate and wouldn't you believe it this one guy bit!", but claimed that it was a ongoing day to day rate that saw continued success.
But how many weeks do you have to work at that rate to constitute "continued success"? He came off a salaryman job, if he kept his expenses in check he would only need a couple of those jobs per year.
> (respected consulting shops -- the sort that you hire because no one ever gets fired for hiring them -- with armies of bodies yield less on their contract)
The type of companies that hire those consultancies are generally big slow and bureaucratic. They have plenty of money, but they don't have the agility to hire a single consultant and effect quick changes that move the needle. A corollary is that they also have
established tech staffs and probably have some reasonable level of optimization.
By contrast there are a lot of mid-tier companies that have revenues in the 6-8 figure range which are generally not operating their tech with an enterprise level of sophistication. They fly under the radar of the tech establishment because they aren't tech-focused and they aren't really attractive to the big consultancies, but they are profitable because of domain knowledge and relationships in small niches. In these companies a hybrid technical/business consultant can move the needle far more than he can in a large company.
Going 1-2 months without work because you turned down a client and can't find another one can be really shitty.