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Comment by flimflamm | Hacker News Reader

Please take also the consultancy buyers perspective when assessing the value you bring in.

Are you the only consultant who could figure out how to bring down the cost of the appliance (in the articles example) down by 1$?

If not then your value is not as high as you used in the calculation. The potential client could find other consultants to do the same thing (price optimization of a mass product - service well available in the market). As there are more providers then estimating the "value" should take in to account that there are several offerers of service. It is now a tendering situation. I am now excluding a remote situation where all the offerers of the optimization service would collude in their offers.

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The customer perspective is more "this is my ROI, and thus budget I can request from higher up: should I therefore inhouse or contract, and if contract, how to allocate?" Predictability and quality from high val contractors matters more once you are in the budget green zone than focusing only on $.

We build GPU graph-based visual and automation tech for investigating event and rich (high dimensional) data, and while our ultimate focus is a self-serve product, do project-based and annual fixed support contracts because we can fairly provide that combo of ROI, predictability, and quality. The situation is a bit diff as this mean we offer an effectively discounted product license / services combo, which aids the derisking in a couple dimensions.

Consulting is a relationship business. The quality of your relationships determines how much you can sell your services for. Furthermore, solo consultants tend to specialize in a few specific niches where their services aren't a commodity. For commoditized consulting services, buyers will just go to a body shop.

The same applies to advisory type consulting as well. Even people who are more generalist than others are still fairly specialized in the grand scheme of things. On the one hand, you don't want to be so specialized that almost no one is a potential customer. But get too broad and you're getting out of the realm of having knowledge/experience that people will pay a real premium for.

I've long felt I had to keep pulling myself back a bit from dabbling in too many things at a relatively cursory level.

I was actually meaning it in terms of advisory consulting since that's what I do :)

But my experience has been very similar to yours -- I find myself focusing more and more on product strategy and less on engineering process as I move forward in my career. Clients are increasingly going to body shops for that kind of work, and I have no interest in competing in a race to the bottom.

> Are you the only consultant who could figure out how to bring down the cost of the appliance (in the articles example) down by 1$?

I have never seen another person or company be the competition.

The competition is always "do nothing".

It takes real motivation somewhere to knock a company out of inertia if they can continue to muddle along.

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