How to charge for your expertise.

My brother and I have been bartering lately. He’s been solving some technical problems for me, and I’ve been working with him as he expands and grows his career path.

Patrick (brother) has been working as a software developer since he was ~9. Like actually charging for services at a young age, so he has a couple of decades of experience for someone still in their 30’s.

As he gets older and his breadth of experience continues to grow, his real value to clients is as more of a Chief Technical Officer these days than just a coder. Over the years, he’s helped launch and exit several companies, knows the ins and outs of raising capital, and has experience building and leading engineering teams.

But even with all this experience, he kept talking to me about his hourly rate for serving as a fractional CTO.

Of course, I said, “Dude, if you have a ‘C’ at the beginning of your role/title, there is no hourly wage. You are no longer a fee for service. You are a fee for outcome.”

Now, my brother is much smarter than I am. And intellectually, he understood this.

But years of programming (pun intended) have left him in this mindset of an hourly wage earner. And I have no problem with hourly rates, but that’s not what he wants to do anymore. To be trapped in that Matrix of clocking in and out. He wants a seat at the table, helping founders solve their biggest problems. It’s literally just a mindset shift, but not always an easy one when all you’ve ever done before was hourly.

My point here is that as we evolve in our careers, it’s easy to stay stuck in these old industrial-era mindsets that no longer serve us. Mindsets that can actually hinder us from making the jump from where we are to where we want to be.

We need to evolve our thinking from this transactional, task-based work to solving problems. It’s less linear, and the boundaries are less clear, but that’s why they will pay you the big bucks.