As a consultant, there are three ways to raise your income: work more hours, raise your rate, or add leverage (i.e. hire). It pays to take a few walks and think

As a consultant, there are three ways to raise your income: work more hours, raise your rate, or add leverage (i.e. hire). It pays to take a few walks and think about the structural differences between each option. For instance, working more hours is not sustainable, has a low ceiling, has painful non-monetary costs (especially with a family), and doesn't get easier as you progress in your career. But there may be things you can do to increase your billable hours without increasing your working hours, e.g. by selling retainer or support agreements. Even still, as you approach 100% utilization you're making asymptotic improvements. Re raising your rate, I suspect that once you break through the ceiling for general-purpose skilled developers ($100-150/hr?) into the "specialist" range ($200-500/hr), your billable hours actually drop, because to justify that rate you need to spend more time giving talks, publishing papers, updating/promoting a blog, contributing to open source, prospecting for clients, etc. I'm personally contemplating making the jump to specialist work, but I don't have real experience there. So I don't know if this helps you, but I feel like we're in a similar situation, and to me this line of thinking at least helps clarify the territory.