Making $500k/yr With Only One Client

A story of a consultant who made $500/yr for 5 yrs from a single client

$500k/yr is a life-changing amount of money for most folks, including me.

Here’s a short story one of my friends on LinkedIn told me the other day.

How did a consultant make $500k/yr with a single client?

Let’s call that friend of mine, John. John had this one coworker who was a consultant at one of his previous companies he’d worked at. Let’s call this person, Blake.

Blake worked at this place with John for 5 years as a consultant. The position was NOT about building the entire data infrastructure for the company or building LLMs. It was rather a business analyst/data analyst role.

He worked on a niche proprietary financial system, implementing logic and configuring the system. He charged $250/hr. If you do the math, it’s rather simple: 250*40*52=520,000.

John saw him work and earn that much money. And he told me, “It’s not rocket science“. He also said, “Blake negotiated hard“.

It is so inspiring somebody has done this kind of gig and kept it for 5 years. And realize that this story was 10 years ago. $500k/yr meant much more back then.

Summary

When I first heard this story from my friend on LinkedIn, it was an eye-opening experience. I know a few consultants who make that kind of money, but they all have multiple clients. You can argue being dependent on one client is risky, but the fact Blake did that for 5 years tells me something.

This story gives me the idea that being specialized in a tool or domain gives you leverage. Not everybody can charge or is willing to pay $250/hr. But when your skills and market demands meet, that surely happens.