$100+/hour Multi-Client Contracting + Continuity Income Guide
My last, single client, contract gig was a 10 year engagement with IBM.
Over a 6 month period my rate was cut from $69/hour to $35/hour + hours reduced from 60+/week to 40/week.
After this I started doing multi-client work from home for $100/hour.
If I lose one client, there's a line of others on a wait list waiting to pay me.
My first contact gig was 1982 + with net connectivity, contracting is better now than ever.
Trick is...
1) Work from home.
2) Network big time - Attend Meetups. Speak at Meetups/Conferences. Participate in forums.
Effective/Lucrative Networking relates to providing such massive value to so many people, a few really smart ones will clearly understand your value + keep you on permanent payroll.
3) Target having many clients, rather than one or two big ones.
4) Ensure your hourly work drives to some sort of continuity. Example...
My work tends to revolve around setup/tuning/maintenance of LAMP Stacks running WordPress.
After wrestling with badly broken + outdated hosting setup, I started doing private hosting.
Now I only do hourly work for my hosting clients. Since all runtime setups are the same, I can do in an hour what it use to take me 10-20+ hours in random runtime environments.
So my continuity is private hosting.
Consider services you offer + work out some form of continuity.
Having $1000s/week continuity income, to me, makes the old school contracting I use to do look like a joke.
And thank you IBM, for royally screwing with my income years ago, so I was inspired to dump big clients for multi-client + at home work.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
