Not going to lie: Most of my clients come from my network and their referrals. Most of my freelancer friends’ clients come from their network and their network referring clients to them. While it is possible to find clients organically through advertising, it’s much easier if you can build a network to pull from.
You can start by simply contacting people you know and asking if their companies need any help. Let them know you’re available. Then, when they ask, be available and solve their problems ASAP.
It’s actually quite a challenge to hold down a full-time job and to freelance at the same time. You might be lucky enough to find clients who don’t care much about how long it takes and are fine to communicate asynchronously through e-mail at your convenience. However, most clients will want to get on video calls throughout the day and will expect the work to be done quickly. Realistically, it will start competing with your day job at some point. You should decide now how you’re going to handle that.
Whatever you do, don’t use your work computer for any freelancing tasks. Neither party may ever find out, but if you get into a situation where it matters then it’s terrible to have intermingled the two.
Finally: Don’t underestimate how good a stable, big company job is right now. Freelancing isn’t really the easy money that some people make it out to be, especially if you’re not actually free during the day because you have a job. If you’re looking for something different, consider just getting a different job.
> Don’t underestimate how good a stable, big company job is right now.
This, but also don't underestimate the personal satisfaction of "eating what you kill". I feel far less alienated from my labor than I did as an FTE. When I get a tough new task, I get excited thinking of those hours piling up. My reward is directly tied to my efforts and success in a way it never was before, and that has improved my quality of life tremendously.
> This, but also don't underestimate the personal satisfaction of "eating what you kill".
I love that expression and mere words cannot describe the sense of satisfaction one gets when the sale is made and the checks are cashed. It’s not for everybody. Honestly, it’s not for most either. But if you do pull it off, the feeling is fantastic.
I second this. The fulfillment of doing work as a contractor and being the owner of my future is invaluable.
I have been working for 15+ years as consultant and contractor for a SP500 company and I have several friends that are FTE there. Over the years I realized I'm much more motivated and overall happier with the work I do than they are - at the same company and in similar positions.
I'm also much more productive because my only measure of success is the quality of the output of my work. If it isn't good, then my contract will not get renewed. So I have to produce something of value 100% of the time which keeps me in check at all times.
In their case there's politics, promotions, new roles, new bosses, performance reviews and so on.
The saying "eating what you kill" really resonates. Thanks for that.
I'm the exact opposite. I enjoy the cushy FTE positions in European companies where I can automate my work away to the point where 1-2 hours of actual effort is all I need to put in. I don't find any satisfaction in doing a good job for a company not my own, and spend my focus and energy doing my hobbies, socialising, living my life in bliss. Most workaholics I knew my life were miserable people who hated their life and didn't sleep enough.
This comment is a nice reminder of how good my current clients are - especially regarding their comfort with asynchronous communications.
Finally: Don’t underestimate how good a stable, big company job is right now. Freelancing isn’t really the easy money that some people make it out to be, especially if you’re not actually free during the day because you have a job.
I am acutely aware of how much more money I could be making if I chose to work at a big company at the moment. Much better benefits, too.
I've ended up taking the perspective that consulting is a route where I can trade earning more money for having more control over my time. My current clients don't care that I dedicate half of my working hours to building and marketing the job site I'm working on. I get their deliverables done on time, on budget, and (importantly) right the first time. That's something they've had a hard time finding, and it shows in their willingness to accept my (relatively high) hourly rate.
Aside from non-compete and generally unenforceable "ownership of work during your own time" clauses in my employment contract, I'd say I have quite a bit of control over my time. Nobody cares what I do throughout the day as long as I deliver my stuff on time.
As an employee I continued to run into people assuming I should be available from 9-5 and that I should take a similar number of vacation days as the rest of the team.
It seems like there was always some resentment toward the guy who leaves the office at 2:00 and take 30 days of vacation as an employee regardless of his salary or productivity.
> This. Also don't underestimate how hard it is to get the money from a client if they decide not to pay you, even if you did a good job.
It's not too bad in my opinion. I've been freelancing for close to 20 years on my own with no 3rd party platforms. I've had assorted clients from around the world.
I've only been legit ripped off once out of issuing hundreds of invoices and working with a bunch of individuals and businesses.
The amount I got cheated out of was 2 hours of work where the client requested work, agreed to pay but didn't pay. Other than that one time it's been smooth sailing where mostly everyone pays on time without issues. I've only had a handful of cases where someone forgot to pay within 30 days and a single follow up email resulted in them apologizing and paying. In some cases they even gave an unrequested tip because they genuinely felt sorry for missing the first email. These were all cases of people being busy and forgetting by accident.
I'm also very lax with how I request payments too. I send out an invoice at the start of every month because it's more convenient for everyone involved. Sometimes with new clients this means doing let's say 5 hours of work on the 3rd of the month but not invoicing them until the following month.
Both your examples mention single digits hours, ie very small amount of money.
The problems tend to happen if there's larger amounts of money involved. So it's important as a contractor not to enable a situation where they owe you a lot of money, especially if you have no leverage.
> Both your examples mention single digits hours, ie very small amount of money. The problems tend to happen if there's larger amounts of money involved.
I've had lots of 100+ hour month contracts, some of which have spanned for years.
At some point you have to use your judgment to figure out what to do. If an individual with no registered business emails you asking you to put in 150 hours worth of work in a month, has a lot of grammar mistakes, seems weirdly aggressive over video calls or won't do video calls and tries to haggle down your prices then yeah it wouldn't be a good idea to wait until the end of the month to bill them.
But usually you'll have a chat or 2 with someone, get a good feel for them, propose a single page contract with a clear set of deliverables and compensation, then do the work and collect your money.
If you're doing project based billing with a new client it wouldn't hurt to ask for a decent chunk (33-50%) up front or at least earlier than your usual billing cycle for the first time.
re: ...no registered business... etc. I would typically take that as a "don't engage with them" sign.
One of the challenges of being professional is to know when to refuse clients and their work. Both for potential clients and on-going clients gone bad.
I did a bit of asking around last year and I found several opportunities where companies have small average quality engineering teams who need someone to lead an effort in something like a product manager and engineering architect role. Those sounded interesting, though I did not follow up.
My main fear is pay. Ideally, I'd like to be able to make at least $300/hr. I have no idea if that's realistic. Maybe not at first?
> I did a bit of asking around last year and I found several opportunities where companies have small average quality engineering teams who need someone to lead an effort in something like a product manager and engineering architect role.
Interesting. It’s not exactly common for companies to want contractors to be in leadership roles. Leadership roles generally warrant full-time employees who can be more invested in the company.
Unless this was a company that tried to treat everyone as contractors while expecting them to behave as full-time employees. That’s not true contracting/freelancing. That’s just companies abusing labor laws.
Those companies were willing to hire me. Hopefully this doesn't arrogant, but those companies can't hire someone of my caliber. They're mediocre companies that can only hire average/mediocre people. I wouldn't want to join a company like that full time, but I could see it being fun to hop in and help them out with a big project.
For example one company was a media company that you've probably heard of. For their next growth phase, they have two separate legacy PHP systems that they need to integrate and they need to modernize their front end. Their development team isn't capable of doing that project. They've been spinning their wheels for a few years. I thought it might be fun to go in to that company, understand their systems, architect the new solution, lead/coach their team through building it. I could also help them set up automated build systems, introduce React and coach them through learning that. Maybe help them hire some more modern developers as well. That kind of thing.
I've got a lot of experience doing complex architecture and also training up junior developers, so it sounds like projects like that could play to my strengths.
You may have to prove yourself by building your own successful product or a stellar reputation of doing similar heavy lifting at other companies before a company will trust you with that kind of role as a freelance gig.
There are folks who become “fixers” but they have a long history of being fixers and have usually worked in multiple different orgs achieving similar results regardless of org structure, strategy and cruft. It sounds like you are itching for such a career, but it requires starting somewhere. Many fixers also take full time leadership positions at the company for a period of time and then move on once the problem is fixed. The leadership position also gives you direct authority over the process and resources, which you will need as both likely need to be tweaked. That the project is failing is likely a combination of poor process and some bad apples, and both usually need fixing. It’s rarely that “everyone on the engineering team is incompetent.” Without the leader title you will not have the organizational authority to fire/hire or change process.
You may want to consider the offer of the leadership position seriously: The company sees the problem within itself, sees you as a fixer and is willing to hire you to do your magic. This is how you build your reputation in this market space. Give yourself three to five years to implement the changes, then move on to a different company with a different problem to fix. It’s also a great way to find out if you’re truly as awesome as you think you are :).
> Hopefully this doesn't arrogant, but those companies can't hire someone of my caliber.
Well obviously if they can’t pay market rates, and you didn’t even think it was worth asking, then it’s not exactly a great example of a consulting client.
I’m not sure what these hypothetical contracts that you didn’t even pursue because you don’t think the companies could have afforded add to the conversation, though.
It doesn’t sound like these clients were typical or even remotely competent.
I’m not sure why you think a company that wanted to hire you for a leadership role would pay you as a free-lancer to do that role. Generally consultant and full-time hiring pipelines and roles are fully separate, for a variety of reasons.
Also, just in case it wasn’t obvious, this comment does read as extremely arrogant. A company wanted to hire you, you didn’t want to work there because they’re “average/mediocre”, so you’ve decided w/o engaging with them that it might be fun to pop in and just solve all their problems for them.
As parallel comments have pointed out, networking is crucial to contracting, because it’s the primary way that clients connect with you and decide to work with you. If your mindset is that you’re a rockstar saving crappy companies from their mediocrity, you’ll quickly find yourself with a poisoned well.
We would never communicate things like that - that would be arrogant, but if he's giving us the reality, then it's fine.
That said - the 'Red Flag' to me is that someone things they are going to 'contract' and 'help out a bit' and 'fix their architecture'.
This seems worse the a bit glib, it seems upside down.
This seems like someone who might be a good engineer and who has worked on good teams ... but doesn't have the maturity to understand how these projects tend to unfold.
'Fixing a Broken Project' has to be the most scary thing in software and in most cases it's not doable.
Teaching some best practices - yes. Helping to identify problems - yes. Maybe slicing off a few obvious things, sure - i.e. maybe they need a caching strategy.
But when 'Thing are Wrong' there are usually a lot of problems and 99% of the time, someone thinks they can hire a 'Savior' to come in and fix it. The 'Savior', offered a pile of money is likely to buy into their own ability to be the 'Savior'.
But the psychological development from those frothy heights, as the realization sets in that they're crashing on the rock of Scylla ... well there has to be a good German word for that.
We should try to recognize the variety of inputs that may have created what resulted in seemingly an 'architecture problem' when that might not be the source of the conundrum. A team of 'mediocre people' will probably only ever be capable of doing something to a certain calibre. The Winnipeg Symphony will never sound as good as the NY Philharmonic, College Basketball teams are not competitive with Pro Teams etc..
Funny, but in my experience, under-developed problem statement like “fixing a broken project” is the main reason why companies do not (cannot) offer competitive compensation for this kind of work.
What is the monetary value of “fixing a broken project”? Nobody knows, because the root cause is not known - and if they knew the root cause, the problem would have been defined differently from the start.
So what happens is company tries to hire someone to diagnose the root causes. But diagnostics brings no inherit value to the org until problems are actually fixed. Which means nobody is willing to invest into diagnostics. Which means they try to fill in some flat rate position for these diagnostic purposes, position which fits the project budget, with compensation unrelated to the scale of actual problems at hand.
Another issue is that “fixing a broken project” engagements are usually launched by middle management responsible for success of these (already launched) projects. Proper way to approach this as an external consultant would be to go one level up, take a look at the actual company strategy and this project’s goals, and rework the way whole project is launched. At many times the easier way around is to re-setup, re-steer, or kill this project altogether - but this requires a different level of involvement.
In the end you are stuck on an underfunded engagement where actual proper solution likely lies outside of your area of responsibility (you are being hired by middle management, so you cannot effectively go above their head and reach the actual solution).
I think that because that's exactly what I was discussing and doing with multiple companies.
The only reason I never got into serious compensation talks is that I was just testing out the waters to see if my contacts could help me find interesting work.
I did actually do some small and limited architectural design projects / tech leadership projects (think 40 hour total project time over several weeks) and I was able to get a rather high rate for that.
I'm not sure why people are saying contract leadership isn't a thing. My day job routinely hires temporary contract leadership for things outside our wheelhouse. The people we contract are people who would never work at our company because it's beneath them, but they're willing to take some short highly paid contracting jobs.
why is that so hard to understand? this has been a good source of clients for me.
i dont have any faith in your product or your leadership - you really seem to be chasing your own tail, and working for you is just going to be pointless and frustrating for both of us.
however, you want to hire me because i'm an expert in X. actually I am, and if you give me the go ahead I'll basically fix all your X problems in 3 months and be available for ongoing work if necessary later. you really dont need a full time X guy, I promise you I'm going to be bored after that first little bit.
i want the money, the engagement, and the opportunity to grow my network. that works for me. hanging out on slack with your team all day and having a weekly zoom where I remind you yet again that if you dont test you can expect problems later doesnt.
> ...i dont have any faith in your product or your leadership
Sounds as not a good proposition for me as a client. It breaks the trust in your effort being for the best of my interest.
No that different from a mercenary's logic. Even then some loyaly to the payer is expected.
How would you go on supporting the product past completion of your work? Saying that it broke in the part that you did not write? Well, you touched it, you "own" it... at least in client's mind.
Just be mindful sometime adding frosting to a terrible cake doesn't make it taste good. And the failure to pivot looks really bad to you. So your $300 hourly rate is not really deeply utilized. Consider project billing and also think about internal barriers (including humans that might be resentful or threatened) and how you might clear them.
If you're doing strategic work it still needs to get implemented. And you're not doing that work. But the result is what the CEO will convey as your reputation to your next client referral reference check.
Then once you start working with them you discover that the tech and architecture are a reflection of their management structure, and then you find out they really don't want a port/rebuild, they want a new product (but this only becomes apparent half way through the rebuild).
Green field projects are much easier, but you really need to have a great product owner/manager.
I have had several lead roles as a freelancing consultant over the last few years. Product owner, software architect, software lead. I try to communicate a lot, write down my strategies and thereby make myself replaceable. This way I can change assignments when conditions change (project entering new phase, change of directions, or purchasing goes for a drive to cut expenses) and the client gets improved progress, process, culture and way of working in return, without fears of making them too dependent on a consultant.
People reach out to me on roughly weekly basis with new leads, so finding a new gig is easy. I treat new contacts with mild distance and careful interest, and greet old colleagues that know me well with greater warmth and interest. But I also make it clear that when I'm on a contract, I want to leave the current client with some firm usable deliverables before I consider any other options. Typical assignments are 6-24 months.
Typical rate: currently roughly 100 EUR/h, increasing by roughly 10% annually. 12 years experience in my field (embedded software, specialized within automotive). Western Sweden.
For info, labour laws are pretty strict in Sweden, so employing somebody is a great expense and risk for the employer. Contracting has thus become pretty common (often 30% of the workforce; sometimes more).
As a manager, who are you going to pay that kind of rate to?
Why would someone hire a contractor at that rate, when they could hire the top tier Google Engineers?
$200-300/hr rates are usually for 'expertise' style inputs - it's where you have industry leading or arcane knowledge in your field, and you bill for your insight, which might just be a few hours.
A lawyer who specializes in IP, and is intimately familiar with the Texas IP legal circuit and all the judges, would bill some 'very high rate' per hour, but probably only for limited number of hours.
If you have a full time job, and want to do some 'evening consulting' - you could bill $300/hr if you prepare a training package and are training a team on how to do something, i.e. a 4-hour course for $1200. That kind of thing.
Or if you really have some super DevOps knowledge, you're 'The K8 Man' and they call you because they are stuck on a problem, and you always have a solution - you can bill them $300/hr.
But being a bit more senior than their regular devs and helping them out doing regular work, then it's going to be tough to get a huge billing rate.
That's what I indicated: At 'a few hours or a day' there are many problems which need solving, for which rates may be substantial especially given highly specialized knowledge.
But 'leadership' over some project, over any period of time, is not one of them.
A 'consultant to solve our DB limitations', sure.
But in terms of leadership, part time, non-business hours, no 'on site' (aka the OP has a 'real job'.). I don't think so.
$300/hr is a $600K/year run rate - is the relative cost of having for someone for extended periods.
A contractor can log much more than 1K hours per year - or less - it entirely depends on the nature of their work.
Also, some 'hours billed' are de-facto to the firm, not the individual. If you're hiring 'a lawyer' - you're really hiring 'their team' not really the individual, as often you would when hiring a contractor.
$300/hr is more like $300K/year, if you follow the "overhead to a company is basically equivalent to salary" common wisdom. That assumes that the contracting is for fairly large numbers of hours on a fairly long term, otherwise "benchtime" can make that effectively much, much lower.
It's the equivalent from the 'buyers' perspective - that's the benchmark burn rate if they were to hire the person for a 'man year'.
Contractors come in all shapes and forms some may book more, some less, though yes, from the contractors perspective, $150/hour is more like $150K/year.
My day job company pays upwards of $1000/hr to short-term contract leadership people. I guess it's really more consulting than contracting but the lines seem pretty blurry based on what I've seen. Based on what I've seen for senior/principal engineering contracting, I'd say $500/hr is completely realistic, so my goal of $300 feels realistic. Perhaps I'm in a weird sector of the industry or something, but I don't think so.
The 'key word' in your language that is a bit off is 'leadership'.
Yes, usually in a hierarchy, 'leaders' get paid more.
But consultants and contractors are not hired for 'leadership' roles, so I'm a bit confused by that.
I started a new project and our DB guy was young, we were unsure of ourselves, so we hired some Oracle expert to help with that and they were expensive. So 1 or 2 days consulting on our project.
It could have been $1K an hour for all I know, it doesn't matter.
For short bits of key insight, high rates are not uncommon.
Corporate Lawyers will charge $1K/hour - but even then that's going to go to their interns, associates, overhead as well - it's a 'business' not just a person.
Also note that those rates tend to grow exponentially pas a certain point: someone who specializes in international law for mining and gas, who is needed 'right now' because of a flare up between SNC Lavalin and the Peruvian government, can bill $10K/hour etc..
There actually isn't that much of a difference between 'consulting' and 'contracting' but the later usually implies 'work' as opposed to 'expertise'.
If you are providing very specific knowledge that the company really needs to move forward, and the terms are fairly clear that they need it, then you can start billing much higher than contract rates. The bigger the influence (i.e. if it's affecting a giant, $100M contract), then the bigger the rate.
But for 'general leadership' ... that's a much harder thing to put into dollars.
I think some are using leadership to mean the led/lead a project in a tactical sense. My understanding of the term leadership (or leaders as most others are using) is thought/strategic leaders.
Holy jeezus, I was worried I was flexing by mentioning my $200/hr rate. Dude or dudette, if you feel that’s realistic, the half Jew side of me is rooting for you. Godspeed.
$1,000/hr, what the fuck. I don’t think I’ve dropped a legit WTF on HN before. That’s a 40hr a week rate for at least a month, right? Otherwise you’re probably using the wrong comparison to what you want. But still… sure wouldn’t take many hours at that level. What do they do?
> ...Whatever you do, don’t use your work computer for any freelancing tasks.
Depending on terms of your full-time employment, it may even preclude a contracting work in the same field if it overlaps the main work. It may also claim ownership of any IP created while employed.
“Organic” marketing can also just mean writing content genuinely helpful to your immediate network, thus making you the go to person for a given problem area.
Not going to lie: Most of my clients come from my network and their referrals. Most of my freelancer friends’ clients come from their network and their network referring clients to them. While it is possible to find clients organically through advertising, it’s much easier if you can build a network to pull from.
You can start by simply contacting people you know and asking if their companies need any help. Let them know you’re available. Then, when they ask, be available and solve their problems ASAP.
It’s actually quite a challenge to hold down a full-time job and to freelance at the same time. You might be lucky enough to find clients who don’t care much about how long it takes and are fine to communicate asynchronously through e-mail at your convenience. However, most clients will want to get on video calls throughout the day and will expect the work to be done quickly. Realistically, it will start competing with your day job at some point. You should decide now how you’re going to handle that.
Whatever you do, don’t use your work computer for any freelancing tasks. Neither party may ever find out, but if you get into a situation where it matters then it’s terrible to have intermingled the two.
Finally: Don’t underestimate how good a stable, big company job is right now. Freelancing isn’t really the easy money that some people make it out to be, especially if you’re not actually free during the day because you have a job. If you’re looking for something different, consider just getting a different job.