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.
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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"
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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.
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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.
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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.
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End of conversation
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for all types, but certainly not for lawyers.
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