I have been an independent consultant for almost my entire career - working with clients large and small, mostly on solo projects. Took a FT job at a megacorp

I have been an independent consultant for almost my entire career - working with clients large and small, mostly on solo projects. Took a FT job at a megacorp a few years ago and assigned a new project - I read the specs/requirements and in my IC mind thought to myself - if I was hired as contractor to develop this tool, how much would I charge? and how long would it take me? - and came up with 1 person, for 2 months, and would have been delighted to be able to bill $40K for it, but probably would have went it at $60K on a fixed bid (I always preferred fix bids). Of course this wasn't a project I was bidding on, I was just the lead dev - the company pulled together a team of almost a dozen people and a budget of just over a million dollars with a 8 month timeframe to get it done - they also budgeted another $120K/year to host it when it was done on multiple big servers in the internal data center. We spent the full million dollars and got it done - I did however have one small win and pushed them to micro-services solution in S3 and Aws Lambda and got the whole thing to run within the free-tier of an AWS account. If you ever start a small software company, don't ever hire people that have only worked in large enterprises - they just don't know how to get things done cost or time efficiently.