My company has been doing exactly that for decades. We don't work like you suggest; we charge by the hour and the price is based on the tech, difficulty and urgency. For cases like this it would be €1000/human/hr probably. We also ask intake money. We generally don't work on-site but we can and have been flown in, as far as Australia (we are in the eu); those add a lot of costs. We usually have a handover to the existing or new team, so projects are usually a few weeks to max 3 months (we refuse longer; we specify this in the contract; if it runs over, it's their problem, we are out; it helps getting large companies to cooperate and cut red tape as they tend to find it enough we are there and paying the fees for years if it keeps it all running; I hate that so not doing it).
The reason why my idea is just an idea and yours is a business is yours is a lot more realistic, but I'm happy to hear that something like it exists. I had lost hope that I could find real challenges in my work but now I see that I must look harder.
It is not even hard to find these things, especially if you have some contacts; we definitely cannot handle the work and it's visibly accelerating. There are so many systems where the original team is no longer there and everything 'runs'; especially with VPSs, ec2, docker, kubernetes etc, things are just running blackboxes and when there are changes that don't automatically work and break things, no-one has a clue what to do. A lot of bitrot as well; we had a client who use codeigniter ancient version in 500+ internal and external applications running on ancient php (not supported) etc and with IT demanding updates to the infra, things started failing fast ; a lot of these systems were manually installed on servers that are basically forgotten until something goes down. There are 100s of 1000s of companies in the world that have situations like this and I cannot even attempt to estimate the costs of downtime, hacks, 'must rewrite' new consultants coming in, 'must rewrite' resume driven new employees etc.
We are looking yes, but you have to like screwing around with a lot of tech; from Clipper to C# and from Cobol to k. We are overloaded but we try to get full utility for all people on what we like.
Any chance I could be contacted too please? username at gmail.
I used to find my niche in contracting for banks always actively seeking the opposite of “greenfield” projects (usually to the utter surprise of recruitment agents) but this market has not been the same in the UK recently.
