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Comment by fastbeef | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if I’ve “made it”, but two years ago I started a small consultancy which increased my per-hour billing to almost triple compared to when I was an employee doing the same thing. I use this extra cash flow to work 25-30 hour weeks.

Recently, I started to offer this setup “as a platform” to previous co-workers taking a 20% cut of their billing. If I get to five I can stop working all together.

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The platform you’re referring to: is it software for managing time tracking and invoicing? Or is it something that helps capture new clients?

It’s not a software system, but rather me figuring out and abstracting away stuff like payroll, taxes, bookkeeping, client acquisition, insurances , pensions and everything else that makes developers’ palms sweaty when they think about going freelance.

Right now this doesn’t eat up all too much of my time so all is done in Excel basically. But if we’re, say, 10 devs I’d reconsider building something.

Do you specialize in an area?, or what kind of consultancy are you running?

Where I’m located (northern EU) consultant is a fancy word for contractor. However, due to the shortage of people I can charge 95€/hour where the fully loaded cost for an employee is around 30-40€/hour.

We’re all run-of-the-mill .Net developers, but we all have a niece (mine is finance and pension funds).

> but we all have a niece (mine is finance and pension funds)

I'm not familiar with that phrase. What language is spoken in your northern EU country?

I believe they meant niche.

Correct, curse you autocorrect!

Ah! That makes much more sense.

Are consultants/contractors going to increase as a side-effect of the new German working hours laws?

.Net will still remain the bread and butter for years to come.

If you're hiring, is there a way to reach out to you?

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