[tptacek]

"Amateur" isn't the word I would have used, and I think the author sabotaged his point by using it. What I would say is, you're leaving a lot of money on the table and donating a lot of cortisol to entities that don't need the money or the cortisol donations, because they're not spending their own money, and the high order bit of their success criteria is "I was able to plug money into this interface and make a business thing happen within the planned time period, without adding any headcount".

The other place I disagree strongly with the author is about the utility of flat-rate projects. I've had good luck with flat rate, but it was never the project structure we'd have used by default. Rather: for any project we did, we'd have quoted a full project, broken out into billable weeks, with a final sticker price and a paragraph below the pricing table with "additional work needed will be billed at our pro rata day rate".

I think the attitude that says "all the risk should be borne by the client, not the struggling independent consultant" is bad business (for high-end tech consulting, you should start seeing your practice as being in part in the risk mitigation business!), but that doesn't mean you need to take on extra risk just for the hell of it.

That said, there are clients who are so valuable, because they're going to be repeat-business house accounts or because their reputation is so strong that they'll bring in word of mouth business automatically, that you should definitely consider just doing flat rate projects for (if that's what they want) and just eat the overages.