Consultants and freelancers should spend half their time selling, not just doing billable work. Working 40-50 billable hours across multiple clients burns you out for low pay. Cut billable hours to 20-25 per week, raise your rates, and hire people to create leverage.
Spend half your time selling, minimum. I talk to people who work 40, 50 hours a week, all billable hours. They're working for maybe 1, 2, backstage 3 clients. These are not people who have consulting practices to unwind. These are people who have a series of part-time jobs. And often these jobs go with multiple full-time jobs that turn out not to be all that well paid as they start to work like 70 hours a week to be making things happen for all these 3 clients who expect to be getting the best part of them. What I find is if you look at from a point of view of you need to be spending more of your time selling than you're spending more time working on your business as opposed to work, that means your number of billable hours you have available to you goes down to something like 20, 25 per week. That implies things about what rate you need to charge. That implies things about what kind of value you need to be providing in order to be able to justify that rate or other people you need to bring in so that you can be gaining leverage on those sales. That's where the big— sell half time.
