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

Hey, that&#x27;s me, might as well answer questions here.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s set that aside for now and just focus on the article &amp; the work.)<p>My basic sales pitch is that in 2 days, I can tell you why your queries aren&#x27;t going as quickly as you want, and how to make them go faster. It&#x27;s $5K USD done during the week, $15K weekends. Aside from the Christmas &amp; New Year&#x27;s weeks, I&#x27;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&#x27;re spend on software, hardware, staffing, and how much revenue they&#x27;re losing when their web site or enterprise app goes down.<p>I don&#x27;t subcontract, I don&#x27;t wear suits, I don&#x27;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&#x27;m speaking at Data Saturday Holland this weekend.)<p>The linked post talks a lot about short calls and canceled gigs, but that&#x27;s easily avoidable in this market: just require nonrefundable prepayment. In this high-value tier, clients tend to understand that they&#x27;re buying a specific window on your calendar. If they don&#x27;t show, I lost that time and can&#x27;t get it back any other way, so to lock that day down, they have to prepay.<p>The best resource for this kind of work is the book Secrets of Consulting by Gerald Weinburg. Can&#x27;t recommend it highly enough.<p>Feel free to ask any questions you want - I&#x27;m really transparent about the business. I&#x27;m on vacation in Amsterdam this week so my answers will be a little delayed during the day.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.BrentOzar.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.BrentOzar.com</a>

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.<p>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&#x2F;hour a couple of hours a week. The more niche your expertise, the more you are worth.

I&#x27;ve frequently been paid $1k&#x2F;hour regularly for insights on expert networks on how to grow companies, manufacturing know-how that&#x27;s inherently rare based on my specialty, and more.<p>I&#x27;ve had companies reach out from all over the world, but I&#x27;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&#x2F;hour. This post would be incomplete without mentioning that sometimes it takes many failures in a niche to develop great depth in it.<p>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&#x27;m one of a handful of engineers with know how and experience in material flows and operations research.<p>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.<p>When I studied polymer-textile-fiber engineering and operations research though, it was never exotic, I didn&#x27;t want to work in the middle of nowhere, but was utterly fascinated with the subject matter.<p>I&#x27;m thankful for expert networks, my one qualm is that some networks like GLG etc ask for resumes, but I think that&#x27;s the wrong approach. I really love sites like clarity.fm where you can just o-auth quickly and tell your story.<p>Generally, &quot;game knows game&quot; is something I believe in, I also believe marketing and brand don&#x27;t always correlate with substance. I love finding people with performant dark horse talent who should be paid 1k&#x2F;hour on expert networks but never pass the &quot;branded&quot; corporate filter of the sites themselves.

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.<p>The thing is, maybe there are circumstances when someone who&#x27;s just quite well informed about an otherwise boring industry can get an &quot;information download&quot; gig as described but I&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;re wrong and having enough prestige themselves so these rich don&#x27;t feel like they&#x27;ve been insulted too badly.

One man&#x27;s expert consultation is another man&#x27;s industrial espionage.

I&#x27;ve gotten messages on LinkedIn a few times for things like this. One of the biggest companies in this space is GLG (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glg.it&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glg.it&#x2F;</a>)<p>Usually the client is like a hedge fund or private equity fund, and they are trying to get info on an industry&#x2F;sector to make an investment decision.

A family friend was a lawyer and economics professor specializing in competition law and was fully booked at $800&#x2F;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.

Not to be inflammatory, but this article reads like a clickbait ad. I would take it with a grain of salt...<p>If it seems too good to be true it often is.

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.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getwisdomapp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getwisdomapp.com</a> is a more user friendly expert network designed for experts if anyone is interested in monetizing their spare time

I am finding myself reminded of a lawsuit in Hong Kong over a divorcing couple who were paying their <i>dance instructor</i> millions and millions of dollars. We&#x27;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.<p>There are seriously people out there who want what is in somebody&#x27;s head, legally, and even though you or I might do &quot;wait..what?&quot; the price can go north, if they want it bad enough.

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.

&gt;By the third call I was in beast mode, nailing every question<p>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.

Why is this post flagged?<p>Knowing better ways of earning (more) money is one of the most important things anybody should learn.<p>This thread deserves a good discussion, and if not that at least criticism.

When you get bored with $500&#x2F;hr:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jonathanstark.com&#x2F;hbin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jonathanstark.com&#x2F;hbin</a>

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

Interesting little niche market.

That website though!