Expert Networks: A Secret World of $500 per Hour Consultations

https://highestpayinggigs.com/gig/expert-networks

by WillPontificate • 7 years ago

55 35 7 years ago

highestpayinggigs.com

sixtypoundhound2• 7 years ago

Interesting little niche market.

KboPAacDA3• 7 years ago

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

randogogogo2• 7 years ago

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.

0xDEEPFAC• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

joe_the_user• 7 years ago

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.

randogogogo2• 7 years ago

We do similar or related work at the firm I'm in quite frequently. Mostly we have people that understand Mergers and Acquisitions really well, sets of people that understand industries really well, and people that know technology really well (IT operations, business process and applications, infrastructure, app architecture, etc.). These groups of people put together along with methodologies for quick turn-around on analysis afford us higher rates. There's also an element of these types of engagements where clients almost seem to expect higher rates and expense fees; otherwise we may give the perception of a less than serious service provider while involved with high dollar transactions.

josephjrobison• 7 years ago

“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.

HenryKissinger• 7 years ago

What does it take to become this kind of person in less than 10 years?

WillPontificate2• 7 years ago

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

x0x0• 7 years ago

One of my cofounders has been the consultant a few times. Someone reached out on linkedin and didn't care what it cost. They were considering an acquisition of a competitor of one of his former employers, and wanted an insider's view on things.

We've used them once or twice. We needed guidance on major strategic initiatives. If you're paying $1-2m in payroll to make something, spending a couple thousand talking to senior execs in neighboring businesses is a really good use of money.

Think of it like Gartner, just way cheaper :)

mattzito2• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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

arcticbull2• 7 years ago

$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.

mattzito2• 7 years ago

It was just various software spaces where I had first hand knowledge. I just kept asking for more money, and they kept trying to talk me down, and then I would offer to walk away, and we would negotiate something. I also made it very clear to a few platforms where I was unwilling to work with them due to price.

In general, in my very limited experience, if you have experience in spaces they are getting inquiries about, you can make a strong case.

fouc• 7 years ago

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

kumarski• 7 years ago

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.

zeckalpha• 7 years ago

When you get bored with $500/hr:

https://jonathanstark.com/hbin

jameslk• 7 years ago

http://www.clickhereyouidiot.com/

cryptozeus• 7 years ago

That website though!

systematical• 7 years ago

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

generatorguy2• 7 years ago

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.

tempsy• 7 years ago

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/)

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.

ggm• 7 years ago

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.

generatorguy2• 7 years ago

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.

BrentOzar• 7 years ago

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

jbob2000• 7 years ago

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?

sixtypoundhound2• 7 years ago

That's hands down awesome.

I need to find a way to do that for analytics.

parthi• 7 years ago

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

jmpman• 7 years ago

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.

kamaal• 7 years ago

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.

Expert Networks: A Secret World of $500 per Hour Consultations

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