The best approaches I have found: - Don't bill hourly. This has the side effects of allowing you to charge a higher effective rate while serving your clients b

The best approaches I have found: - Don't bill hourly. This has the side effects of allowing you to charge a higher effective rate while serving your clients better. Do this without doing any fixed-bid work if you work in software development. Retainers work great for this, but you really need to be clear about responsibilities before assigning a price. - long-term contracting at a high rate. This looks like full-time work building a complex system over e.g. 12-24 months at an hourly rate (if you earned $100k at your last job, this rate will be over $100/hr). This work often looks like staff augmentation and will have you embedded in a team at the client. Then just work a normal schedule. Take an hour or two a week to reach out to other prospects for when this project ends.