This is really impressive! I'm especially impressed by the landing page for his consulting site: https://burke.services https://burke.services This is so much b

This is really impressive! I'm especially impressed by the landing page for his consulting site: https://burke.services https://burke.services This is so much better than just listing some of the technologies you've worked with. It's really great to talk about the problems you've solved, and have some customer testimonials (especially from big names.) I've been doing almost the complete opposite for the last ~4 years. I always charge by the hour, and I use a time tracking tool that tracks every minute. I never ask anyone to pay up-front. I've used services like Toptal and Moonlight that handle all of the billing for me. I've never talked to a lawyer or an accountant. I haven't registered a company specifically for my freelancing, but I've started doing everything through my startup's company. (My startup now offers a SaaS product plus consulting services.) I live in Thailand and have a work permit through Iglu [1], so they handle all of my invoicing and taxes. I also don't have insurance. I don't set up separate GitHub accounts for everything, and I don't really see the need for that. But I do usually work for one client at a time, and I find context-switching very difficult. I think the main reason I haven't taken my consulting work super seriously is because I don't really want this to be my career. I've always treated it like a part-time thing to just pay the bills while I work on my own startups. No offense to people who take this seriously, but consulting has always felt like a bit of a dead end. You can make a great living, but I get really depressed when I enumerate all of the hours I would need to work. A salaried position is nice because it hides these details. You come to work in the morning, go home in the evening, and then your paycheck is transferred to your bank account. You don't have the option to stop working at any time, so you never really have to think about it. When you're a freelancer who wants to do this as a career, you suddenly have to convert your retirement goal into a fixed number of hours. Say you want to save and invest $2 million before you stop working, and you earn something like $200 per hour. You're able to save 50% of your income. You have to work at least: ($2000000 / 200) * 2 = 20,000 hours. That's 2,500 full days of work. Maybe you are able to book 80% of your time, and you only work 5 days a week, so each year you can work: (52 * 5) * 0.8 = 208 days. It will take you 2500 / 208 = ~12 years of almost full-time work before you can safely retire with $70k of investment income. Maybe more like ~9 years to account for investment returns. I think I'd rather join a few early-stage startups and get some significant stock options. It's much more fun to be part of a team member and have a vested interest. It will still take an average of 10 years before most startups have an exit. But you can leave after a few years and work for a few different startups to diversify (or start your own.) Having said all of that, I'm really impressed by https://burke.services https://burke.services and would love to hire him to work on my startup in the future. [1] https://iglu.net/ https://iglu.net/