Every Billable Hour is Amateur Hour

I know a bunch of you already have your pitchforks out, so let me start out by establishing some goalposts for my premise.  When I’m done, you may still want to skewer me, but at least it’ll be for the right reasons, if you do.

Through the rest of the post, I’m going to draw a distinction between amateurishness at craft, and amateurishness at business.  Understanding my premise hinges on understanding that someone (a technician, in particular) can simultaneously be a craft professional and a business amateur.

Oh, and incidentally, I’m not overloading the definition of amateur — I’m using it in the most literal sense.

1. Taking part in an activity for pleasure and not as a job, or (of an activity) done for pleasure and not as a job

2. Someone who lacks skill in doing something

Professional Craftsperson, Amateur Business Owner

For ease of illustration, let’s imagine someone following my own career arc.  This person spends years employed as a technician.  In my case, a software engineer.

This person, in their salaried capacity, becomes a professional, non-amateur, generalist software engineer.  Specifically, they become professional at maintaining a generalized, diverse skillset that allows another party (the employer) to deploy them in a wide variety of ad hoc situations.

The professional software engineer becomes agnostic about things like tech stacks, implementation particulars, and, crucially, business outcomes.  They hyper-optimize for versatility and feature shipping efficiency, abdicating on any true study of the business, beyond off-the-cuff opinions (“this feature is stupid, no one will buy this.”)

Now let’s assume this software engineer decides to hang out a shingle as a freelancer.  Almost without exception, this launches them into a pupal state between employee and business owner.  They become amateur business owners.

You can recognize this by the continued focus on matters of technician craft and navel gazing about how they work, rather than for whom or why.  They continue to abdicate on business outcomes for their clients, even though delivering client/customer outcomes is the absolute backbone of business professionalism.

So this formerly professional craftsperson becomes an amateur business owner.  And the billable hour is, quite literally, the currency of amateur business ownership.

Every hour they bill is thus an amateur hour.

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Don’t Throw “Consulting Services” Onto Your Website

It’s been a decent run banging out my SEO for Non-Scumbags series, even if there might well have been an audience mismatch.  I had fun with those, but they were fairly trade and theory heavy.  And I’ve found that kind of discouraged me from my writing habit as a whole.

So, if only for today, I’m going to dust that habit off and resume ranting to whoever happens by, like some kind of internet busker.

Today’s topic is on my mind, both because I did a livestream Q&A about it (it’ll be up on the Hit Subscribe Youtube channel in the coming weeks), but also because I see it everywhere whenever I’m poking around freelancer or small, boutique service provider websites.

What I’m Talking About: We Do Labor and Consulting

If you can’t picture what I mean, I’ll default to a hypothetical custom app dev shop for example.  If you hover over their “services” menu on their website, you’ll see a list like this:

• Custom WordPress Website Builds
• Monthly Site Maintenance
• Custom Plugin Development
• WordPress API Integrations
• WordPress Consulting

Emphasis mine.  (Well, I mean, of course it is, this is a hypothetical I made up, not a quote.)

The service provider enumerates a series of different kinds of labor they will sell you, and then, almost invariably at the bottom, they’ll throw in that they also offer consulting.

This is what I’m saying you shouldn’t do.

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