
Expert Networks: A Secret World of $500 per Hour Consultations - WillPontificate
https://highestpayinggigs.com/gig/expert-networks
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BrentOzar
Hey, that's me, might as well answer questions here.

I[1] do performance tuning for Microsoft SQL Server. The licensing costs on
MSSQL Enterprise Edition are $7K USD per CPU core, so a typical single high-
performance server costs $250K-$500K. Factor in hardware, multiple replicas
(high availability, disaster recovery, scale-out reads) and it's not unusual
for a company to have spent millions of dollars on their database server. (I
know, I know, you think you can get a 4-core MySQL VM to perform the same.
Let's set that aside for now and just focus on the article & the work.)

My basic sales pitch is that in 2 days, I can tell you why your queries aren't
going as quickly as you want, and how to make them go faster. It's $5K USD
done during the week, $15K weekends. Aside from the Christmas & New Year's
weeks, I'm booked out until mid-January (with a couple of weekend gigs already
scheduled.) For my clients, $5K is an irrelevant rounding error compared to
how much they're spend on software, hardware, staffing, and how much revenue
they're losing when their web site or enterprise app goes down.

I don't subcontract, I don't wear suits, I don't network with executives. I
just have a very clearly defined product, sample deliverables online, a blog
with a couple thousand posts dating back to 2002, and a very active community
presence: I present at a lot of conferences. (I'm speaking at Data Saturday
Holland this weekend.)

The linked post talks a lot about short calls and canceled gigs, but that's
easily avoidable in this market: just require nonrefundable prepayment. In
this high-value tier, clients tend to understand that they're buying a
specific window on your calendar. If they don't show, I lost that time and
can't get it back any other way, so to lock that day down, they have to
prepay.

The best resource for this kind of work is the book Secrets of Consulting by
Gerald Weinburg. Can't recommend it highly enough.

Feel free to ask any questions you want - I'm really transparent about the
business. I'm on vacation in Amsterdam this week so my answers will be a
little delayed during the day.

[1]: [https://www.BrentOzar.com](https://www.BrentOzar.com)

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jbob2000
Do you think it would be cheaper for these clients to build their applications
on a cloud, rather than buying hardware?

That’s not to say that they wouldn’t have optimization problems if they moved
to the cloud. But I’m stuck wondering why any company would make the decision
to run their own db servers?

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mattzito
I don’t do this anymore, due to my employer looking unfavorably towards it,
but I was charging between $600-900 an hour for my industry advice on spaces
I’d worked in. I could have charged less and done more hours, but I found
there was a lot of cancellation and rescheduling and misunderstanding at lower
rates, and charging more just limited things to high intent clients.

It was never a significant percentage of my income, but it was a nice low
5-digit uplift a year. Separately I met a guy who advised on a very narrow
sector of the energy market and charged $1800/hour a couple of hours a week.
The more niche your expertise, the more you are worth.

~~~
tschwimmer
Damn, what segments did you work in? The firm I'm working with maxes out at
like $100 an hour.

~~~
arcticbull
$100/hr is really low in the bay area; most SWE generalist contractors can
walk in and get $150 no questions asked, anywhere. $200 if you're more
experienced in the specific area and $250+ if you "have a name for yourself"
online.

Rule of thumb at least around here is take your base salary in thousands per
year, and that's your hourly rate. If you're getting $200K base, charge
$200/hr for your contracting time. The extra that yields is to help you offset
the fact you won't always have work and the extra you have to do to keep your
pipeline full. Many startups pay $150K for senior engineers so have no problem
paying $150/hr for contractors.

~~~
jamestimmins
I'm always curious how contractors get hired by startups. Most of my work has
been one-off jobs with non-tech companies, and I feel like I rarely see
contractor gigs for solid technical startups.

~~~
arcticbull
Usually through network. Frequently it's people you've worked with in the past
that end up at startups, have worked with you before and need your help on
something. That'll get you through the door. Management often looks at it as a
potential "contract-to-hire" opportunity and if they like you will try and
sell you on full-time employment.

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kumarski
I've frequently been paid $1k/hour regularly for insights on expert networks
on how to grow companies, manufacturing know-how that's inherently rare based
on my specialty, and more.

I've had companies reach out from all over the world, but I'll tell you, when
I first moved to San Francisco, I lived in my car for ~2 months, then in a
bunk bed in a run down hacker house, and was more than ecstatic to make 30
USD/hour. This post would be incomplete without mentioning that sometimes it
takes many failures in a niche to develop great depth in it.

One area of expertise that regularly has been paying me for 1-2 hours every
month for the past few months is new manufacturing plant startups or
relocations. I'm one of a handful of engineers with know how and experience in
material flows and operations research.

I had one company buy 10 hours of my time and flew me out of the country to
help them navigate a facility location based on an ever modulating set of
market variables.

When I studied polymer-textile-fiber engineering and operations research
though, it was never exotic, I didn't want to work in the middle of nowhere,
but was utterly fascinated with the subject matter.

I'm thankful for expert networks, my one qualm is that some networks like GLG
etc ask for resumes, but I think that's the wrong approach. I really love
sites like clarity.fm where you can just o-auth quickly and tell your story.

Generally, "game knows game" is something I believe in, I also believe
marketing and brand don't always correlate with substance. I love finding
people with performant dark horse talent who should be paid 1k/hour on expert
networks but never pass the "branded" corporate filter of the sites
themselves.

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joe_the_user
The actual world of super-high paid consultant would be interesting to hear
about. This is either a niche-within-a-niche or a scam, depending on whether
you believe the page.

The thing is, maybe there are circumstances when someone who's just quite well
informed about an otherwise boring industry can get an "information download"
gig as described but I'd also guess those are very occasional - only so many
investors need those so often. I suspect most super high paid consultant gigs
are even more boring - just super well dressed, super connected, super
confident, speaking the language of the ultra rich and describing pretty dull
and predictable things, mostly management/investment techniques but
communicating the right way to the right people and having some level of
connection to them. An alternative is a similar someone except a someone who
will to tell the super-rich they're wrong and having enough prestige
themselves so these rich don't feel like they've been insulted too badly.

~~~
josephjrobison
“Information download” is a genius term. In the right industry a company can
save years of failure by paying the right person for X amount of hours to
glean a ton of knowledge very quickly, assuming they can’t just outright hire
them.

~~~
WillPontificate
Mathematically this probably could never be justified as a permanent hire. Not
enough steady demand.

~~~
ifoundthetao
It can be justified in the context of hiring that person keeps that knowledge
resource from competitors. Then it makes a lot of sense to pay them enough to
stay, as it allows you to outpace competition in the marketplace.

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KboPAacDA3
One man's expert consultation is another man's industrial espionage.

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tempsy
I've gotten messages on LinkedIn a few times for things like this. One of the
biggest companies in this space is GLG ([https://glg.it/](https://glg.it/))

Usually the client is like a hedge fund or private equity fund, and they are
trying to get info on an industry/sector to make an investment decision.

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generatorguy
A family friend was a lawyer and economics professor specializing in
competition law and was fully booked at $800/hr. He owned a dozen luxury
condos all over the world but had No wife, no kids, and didn’t tell his
clients when he had cancer, he worked right up to the end.

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0xDEEPFAC
Not to be inflammatory, but this article reads like a clickbait ad. I would
take it with a grain of salt...

If it seems too good to be true it often is.

~~~
stevehawk
Not only that.. if you click on their link to 'expert networks' to talk to..
one of them is apparently completely staffed by 20-somethings that look fresh
out of college. Doesn't inspire the idea of expertise.

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randogogogo
My firm specializes in MnA IT diligence work. We have so many PE firm
relationships and consultants with industry specializations that what we do
sounds like a long term version of this. The rates tend to stay up there on
through post-close transaction work as well.

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parthi
[https://getwisdomapp.com](https://getwisdomapp.com) is a more user friendly
expert network designed for experts if anyone is interested in monetizing
their spare time

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ggm
I am finding myself reminded of a lawsuit in Hong Kong over a divorcing couple
who were paying their _dance instructor_ millions and millions of dollars.
We're talking above ten. Why? because this power couple wanted to rock the
world of their elite friends with their chassée turn and tango style.

There are seriously people out there who want what is in somebody's head,
legally, and even though you or I might do "wait..what?" the price can go
north, if they want it bad enough.

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jmpman
I used to get those requests all the time, however I thought they were just
advanced sales techniques to seed you with ideas on products or to make you
say flattering things about products, followed by a sales guy contacting you.

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generatorguy
>By the third call I was in beast mode, nailing every question

Was beast mode from doom 2 or quake ? Love it when people Let these little
things slip that tell you a bit more about them.

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kamaal
Why is this post flagged?

Knowing better ways of earning (more) money is one of the most important
things anybody should learn.

This thread deserves a good discussion, and if not that at least criticism.

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zeckalpha
When you get bored with $500/hr:

[https://jonathanstark.com/hbin](https://jonathanstark.com/hbin)

~~~
jameslk
[http://www.clickhereyouidiot.com/](http://www.clickhereyouidiot.com/)

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fouc
This seems like a brand-new site with only 3 pages so far. Unfortunate.

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sixtypoundhound
Interesting little niche market.

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cryptozeus
That website though!

~~~
systematical
I like the website. It's simple and loads fast.

