You would be surprised... also don't rule out middle market companies ($50MM - $500MM in sales) in low-tech industries. Suspect these could be highly profitable clients (yet potentially infuriating, details below).
Examples from my day job:
- Transaction pricing, trade system setup, and item costing is effectively controlled by Excel VBA (written by one guy who left, and maintained by a third-string developer who moonlights from his job at another company)
- Was told we couldn't do something on our site because it was "an old WordPress site" and had to be totally rebuilt for over $50,000.
- Apparently PhotoShop is too complex for mere mortals, thus everything must be outsourced and under no circumstances should we invest in our copy and do anything in house.
Oh - and I should mention that the process owners for these areas are usually technically clueless and utterly paranoid about anyone else touching their baby. The fastest way to get anything done is to pay up for OT and let the existing insane clown posse do the additional work at overtime rates. Rates are ridiculous - my spouse and I run a digital business on the side and our equivalent total project costs are 1/10th (if that!) what these guys seem to shell out (then again, we're both ex-IT / developers, so we know how to design and buy things correctly...)
I've flown past most of this crap since I've been retained to deal with a slightly more fundamental problem (aka: Dude, Where's My Sales?)... but there's probably a lot of money sitting in these kind of messes if you do some networking.
> but there's probably a lot of money sitting in these kind of messes if you do some networking
Possibly, but you may just be stuck doing donkey work (almost regardless of rate, that gets boring after some time). You can identify problems and offer to 'fix' them for businesses, but they need to be willing to actually change their processes. If there's political turf wars over "don't touch my pet project", no amount of money thrown at the problem will make it better. And yes, you possibly can siphon some off of those for a while, but I think for many people it's going to end poorly (political types will turn on you, etc).
You already mentioned some issues in that scenario above - never do anything inhouse with the talent you've got there - people need to set themselves up as middlemen. When the answer to the company's inefficiencies involves "remove the middlemen", it's a major battle.
> Was told we couldn't do something on our site because it was "an old WordPress site" and had to be totally rebuilt for over $50,000.
Interestingly tho, I can possibly see that. I might not tell someone $50k, but if I see some old WP site, and someone's asking for moderately complex functionality, I do not want to touch the existing site. It'll be a rebuild, or a separate service, and then integration work between the two. The $50k price may have just been a "we don't want to do this but this is our 'happy' price" sort of deal. If a new piece of functionality may cost, say, $10k of service work, I don't want to have to tie it to whatever legacy stuff came before, as I'm now responsible for supporting everything on it, because I was the last one to touch it ("it never used to do that before - you broke it!")
Examples from my day job:
- Transaction pricing, trade system setup, and item costing is effectively controlled by Excel VBA (written by one guy who left, and maintained by a third-string developer who moonlights from his job at another company)
- Was told we couldn't do something on our site because it was "an old WordPress site" and had to be totally rebuilt for over $50,000.
- Apparently PhotoShop is too complex for mere mortals, thus everything must be outsourced and under no circumstances should we invest in our copy and do anything in house.
Oh - and I should mention that the process owners for these areas are usually technically clueless and utterly paranoid about anyone else touching their baby. The fastest way to get anything done is to pay up for OT and let the existing insane clown posse do the additional work at overtime rates. Rates are ridiculous - my spouse and I run a digital business on the side and our equivalent total project costs are 1/10th (if that!) what these guys seem to shell out (then again, we're both ex-IT / developers, so we know how to design and buy things correctly...)
I've flown past most of this crap since I've been retained to deal with a slightly more fundamental problem (aka: Dude, Where's My Sales?)... but there's probably a lot of money sitting in these kind of messes if you do some networking.