My best experience when paying for consulting services has been the most “expensive” one, which involved me paying three figures per hour. Today, I’ll try to explain why.

First and foremost, most of you already know I’m a cheap bastard.

Getting a cheap bastard to pay $xxx/hour is anything but easy but I ended up doing it. You might recall that over a period of 5 or so years, I owned a shared hosting business, I’ve since sold it. Anyway, I was experiencing some awful server difficulties at one point and they had proven to be above my competence level. Now sure, I had a plan for such situations, a plan which involved hiring arguably the best server pros in the hosting business. The main drawback? The fact that their services weren’t cheap, charging $xxx/hour.

Could I have chosen a cheaper service provider? Yes but I wasn’t willing to give my most sensitive login info to just anyone, no thanks.

Naturally, being the cheap bastard that I am, I spent hours upon hours banging my head against the wall before finally caving in and coughing up the dough it took to hire the $xxx/hour guys. Hours that could have been put to better use. Deep down inside, I knew I just wasn’t qualified enough to identify and fix the problem I was facing but stubbornness (just like cheapness) is a disease 🙂

However, after losing several hours of sleep and depleting my already low sanity levels, I’ve finally decided that ok, I’m going to hire those guys.

And I did.

Sent them the details and less than an hour (!!!) later, my problem was fixed. It turned out there were compatibility issues between the server’s RAM and processor. Wouldn’t have suspected such a thing. Not only did they identify the problem over that timeframe, they actually contacted my datacenter to work things out. The result? The problem was fixed within an hour and I got a server upgrade as a bonus from my datacenter. That upgrade alone was worth more than what I’ve paid for the consulting services.

The lesson?

Paying for consulting services can be more than worth it. You’re not just paying consultants for their time they’re spending with you, you’re also paying them for the time (years upon years!) they’ve invested to reach their current level of professionalism.

I’ve relatively recently decided to offer consulting services myself.

I was a bit reluctant at first but at the end of the day, it makes sense: I have a pretty darn unique skill set (domainer + entrepreneur + economist) and it took me years upon years to get there. I’ve added a “Consulting” link on the top menu of DomainingTips and you can also find me on platforms such as Clarity.FM (I charge $250/hour over there or $4.17 per minute to offset their commission, people who know me from DomainingTips are better off contacting me directly via email because it’s cheaper).

I’ve ultimately decided to do it because I tried putting myself in the position of potential clients.

Let’s assume you want to invest $10,000 in domains and pay me $100 for a quick 30-minute consulting session. That session would cost you 1% of your budget and quite frankly, it’s ridiculously easy for my advice to pay for itself. Back when I was starting out, I wish I could/would have paid someone $100 to help me avoid some of the mistakes have made and which cost me multiple orders of magnitude more than 100 bucks 🙂

Or perhaps a startup wants to choose a domain and needs my input. Or someone wants to launch a domaining-related product/service and needs advice from someone who has been there, done that (I’ve sold development services to domainers, hosting services as well, I ran an auction platform back in the day and even an escrow service). Or a domainer just made a lot of money, wants to diversify and put my expertise as an economist to good use (come on Mike, you know you want to!). $100 or $97.5, to be precise for 30 minutes isn’t dirt cheap but it’s not a fortune either. Time will tell how this consulting thing works out but it should be interesting. The decision to start doing it has been made, it remains to be seen how it’ll work out.