I’ve heard from several independent consultants lately that prospective clients are pressuring them to cut rates and justifying it with the old fallacy about how your hourly rate should just be your annual salary divided by 2,000 working hours per year. I have written about…
More than 20 years ago, fresh out of school in the 90s, I built artificial intelligence (AI) systems for a military contractor. I trained neural nets, used natural language processing to populate decision support systems, experimented with genetic algorithms, and refined support vector machines. In…
What are the most important pieces of professional advice you’ve ever received? I remember one of mine clearly: It was in late 2004, and my colleague Bill told me that it was “time to have an idea.” I had hired in as the first employee…
People regularly ask, “how’s that consulting thing going?” It’s a fair question, and I don’t mind answering. The short answer is that it’s going better than I ever expected. Conditions were basically perfect when I created my LLC in 2013: I had been employed by…
About 20 months ago, I left a fantastic job at the Broad Institute to strike out on my own as an independent consultant. At the time, I was nervous. I was pretty sure that I could manage the nuts and bolts of running a small…
A few weeks ago I wrote about the distinction between bioinformatics and computational biology. My point in that post was not to be absolutely correct about the definitions. Rather, I hoped to encourage conversation around the differences. I hoped to light up the importance of…
This is a post about money – specifically about how to set consulting rates. It builds on two prior posts about the legal mechanics and some business development practices of my one person consulting shop. People tend not to talk about the specifics of compensation.…
People seemed to appreciate my first post about the mechanics of starting a one-person consulting shop. This post builds on it, talking about the pattern I use as I progress interesting conversations through to closed business. This is offered in the same spirit as that…
Since going independent in February, A few people have asked me about starting an independent consulting practice. This post shares some of my experiences. In order to keep it to a manageable length, I have omitted stuff like developing and maintaining relationships with clients, writing…
I write this from the Northbound Acela, returning home to Boston at the end of – I think – my third trip in as many weeks. Perhaps it’s the fourth. I’ve learned that it’s better to not spend too much time counting the little wounds,…