This is why I stopped commenting on this thread too, nobody else will even consider the fact that it's at least a bit fishy that you'd do three weeks of boring work to get what you yourself have said amounts to two weeks of your income, which you can get at any time.
This is a really silly subthread. I can make X0k/wk in steady state with a consultancy up and running, at perhaps 70-80% utilization. But to do that, I have to invest Y number of days of overhead to get the consultancy into steady state: I have to prospect for work, I have to write proposals, I have arrange staffing, I have to spend Z hours every week working on scheduling and logistics, and I have to account for all the "breakage" hours that go into keeping a business running†. It is a significant amount of work. From a standing start --- without preexisting contracts to feed me leads on new work, for instance --- it's a tremendous amount of work. Notice how few people do it.
I don't do any of those things right now because, like Patrick, I'm building a pretty complicated piece of software, and don't want to spend the time and energy it takes to get a consulting practice into steady state and keep it there.
We both decided we wanted a break from consulting. Lots of people do that. It's not suspicious; in fact: thinking that it is suspicious is a pretty good tell that someone hasn't ever run a consultancy.
It feels like lots of people on this subthread chose an extreme interpretation of Patrick's story about his consulting practice: that running a practice with an X0k/wk average bill rate means that he also claims to be able to generate X0k/40 on any given hour. Anybody who claims that also probably hasn't run a consulting practice.
I'm not Patrick so it's a bit weird for me to be chiming in like this, but, on the other hand, it's pretty easy for me to point to a pretty big consulting practice that works the way I say it does (hi, NCC US people!), so maybe I can be more helpful in clearing this stuff up and not ratholing on "I've never run a high-value consultancy at scale and all this stuff sounds pretty fishy to me hmmm" stuff.
† Thinking more about why this is the case, it occurs to me that the consultancy running several years in also generates BATNAs for contract negotiations, which makes it easy to walk rates up --- you pay my full fee, or I have my choice of several other clients to give a discount to.
