Hey, that's me, might as well answer questions here. I[1] do performance tuning for Microsoft SQL Server. The licensing costs on MSSQL Enterprise Edition are $

Hey, that's me, might as well answer questions here. 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'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's set that aside for now and just focus on the article & the work.) My basic sales pitch is that in 2 days, I can tell you why your queries aren't going as quickly as you want, and how to make them go faster. It's $5K USD done during the week, $15K weekends. Aside from the Christmas & New Year's weeks, I'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're spend on software, hardware, staffing, and how much revenue they're losing when their web site or enterprise app goes down. I don't subcontract, I don't wear suits, I don'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'm speaking at Data Saturday Holland this weekend.) The linked post talks a lot about short calls and canceled gigs, but that's easily avoidable in this market: just require nonrefundable prepayment. In this high-value tier, clients tend to understand that they're buying a specific window on your calendar. If they don't show, I lost that time and can't get it back any other way, so to lock that day down, they have to prepay. The best resource for this kind of work is the book Secrets of Consulting by Gerald Weinburg. Can't recommend it highly enough. Feel free to ask any questions you want - I'm really transparent about the business. I'm on vacation in Amsterdam this week so my answers will be a little delayed during the day. [1]: https://www.BrentOzar.com https://www.BrentOzar.com