As I have been chronicling my journey to transition to a freelance, independent business consultant, I must point out that the opportunity to reboot my career as a management consultant came through alums of the firms that I have worked in the past. I was almost in a hopeless situation and if that opportunity had not come, even though I had six-figure savings, I would have struggled to find my footing.
Having said that, the transition has not been easy. I have only had projects from this firm and they have struggled to pay me in a timely manner. Plus, I am realizing that even with my excellent credentials finding paid work has been a challenge. I even wonder if my impeccable bio has become a barrier.
The other consideration is the excessive amount of time that is wasted in sales marketing, up to 70%. I am a critical thinker and a researcher and it breaks my heart to realize that I spent major part of my day and year searching for work than actually doing it. That brings me to the question if I should be doing this long term and I started to do the calculations. So if I am doing paid work about 30% of the time, and getting paid about $60 an hour, it adds up to just $37,440. From this I must pay health insurance and self-employment taxes. Needless to add that I have other fixed costs of having a dedicated phone line. The computer, software, and Internet are probably not a cost for me because that is something we all need anyway.
So at my age and in this part of the country, I must make a minimum of $150,000 to have a decent life. There are two ways to do this. Either I increase my hourly rate, which seems rather hard considering platforms like HourlyNerd are driving the rates down. My understanding that unless you are a star consultant, getting paid more than $5,000 a week is hard. The second option is to increase the amount of time worked. During 2014 and 2015 (assuming that I will not get any additional work this year), I have been lucky to have worked 11 months out of 24 and made $115,000. That works out to just $60 an hour. If somehow I could increase this and maybe raise my rate to even $75, things will be better, but in order to make $150,000 per annum, I must either be billable 62 weeks (impossible) or be able to raise my rates to $250 an hour assuming working just 30% of the time. The conclusion is that none of this adds up and assuming that both of these will go up as I establish myself, I might be able to make around $75,000. This is very uncertain and creates a lot of anxiety.
In other words, I might be better off looking for a full-time job, which does not appear to be easy as a middle aged, overqualified, over-educated professional. I have started to send my resume around for that as well, but doing this analysis clearly made me depressed.
Having said that, the transition has not been easy. I have only had projects from this firm and they have struggled to pay me in a timely manner. Plus, I am realizing that even with my excellent credentials finding paid work has been a challenge. I even wonder if my impeccable bio has become a barrier.
The other consideration is the excessive amount of time that is wasted in sales marketing, up to 70%. I am a critical thinker and a researcher and it breaks my heart to realize that I spent major part of my day and year searching for work than actually doing it. That brings me to the question if I should be doing this long term and I started to do the calculations. So if I am doing paid work about 30% of the time, and getting paid about $60 an hour, it adds up to just $37,440. From this I must pay health insurance and self-employment taxes. Needless to add that I have other fixed costs of having a dedicated phone line. The computer, software, and Internet are probably not a cost for me because that is something we all need anyway.
So at my age and in this part of the country, I must make a minimum of $150,000 to have a decent life. There are two ways to do this. Either I increase my hourly rate, which seems rather hard considering platforms like HourlyNerd are driving the rates down. My understanding that unless you are a star consultant, getting paid more than $5,000 a week is hard. The second option is to increase the amount of time worked. During 2014 and 2015 (assuming that I will not get any additional work this year), I have been lucky to have worked 11 months out of 24 and made $115,000. That works out to just $60 an hour. If somehow I could increase this and maybe raise my rate to even $75, things will be better, but in order to make $150,000 per annum, I must either be billable 62 weeks (impossible) or be able to raise my rates to $250 an hour assuming working just 30% of the time. The conclusion is that none of this adds up and assuming that both of these will go up as I establish myself, I might be able to make around $75,000. This is very uncertain and creates a lot of anxiety.
In other words, I might be better off looking for a full-time job, which does not appear to be easy as a middle aged, overqualified, over-educated professional. I have started to send my resume around for that as well, but doing this analysis clearly made me depressed.