Thread by @patio11

Paraphrase of a sentiment I hear a lot in OSS/etc adjacent spaces: "I do a lot of uncompensated labor. If I were a consultant, I could have charged $100 for this email."

This is probably not the optimal way to run a consultancy. Unpaid labor does not go away if you run one.

Consultants run businesses which are substantially more complicated than being an individual contributor of their core labor. All businesses have unbillable overhead. Consultants are particularly aware of this, precisely because their billable rates are so high.

If one desires to have a boundary between doing paid work and unpaid work, one would generally not say "Here's an invoice for $100 to respond to this email", because if your consultancy is capable of generating $100 invoice its rates are too low by at least an order of magnitude.

The general exchange for value for "free work" is not "You pay me small amounts of money for it", it is "You pay me material amounts of information / attention for it, with the expectation that occasionally I successfully execute on my business and use this to get a gig with you"

This often leads to a qualification dance, because there really is a time cost involved in e.g. speculative coffees, but broadly speaking most consultants would happily take a speculative coffee with someone who can make a purchasing decision at a firm which is solidly in zone.

Consultants have to get really, really good at doing (sometimes oppositional) research of people to be able to tell "Are you a decisionmaker?" and "Is your firm in my practice's strike zone?"

This is *itself* a form of unpaid, unbillable work.

Oftentimes, it is more efficient to simply answer a question than to do qualification work on the questioner, and many consultants (and lawyers, etc) consider a certain amount of public intellectualism part of the ongoing cost for running a business which charges a lot of money.