[cbsmith]

> I think it's trading working on what they like vs doing admin / sales / marketing.

That's certainly one of many good reasons not to run your own consulting business. That said, it's entirely possible to hire/outsource support to do much, if not all, of the admin/sales/marketing work.

> (Good) Contractors are accountable exactly to what they are paid for (no more and no less). Employees are accountable to drinking coffee and it's a damn pain working around them to try to get something done.

In my experience, productivity tends to depend more on the "good", than on the contractor/employee dimension, and a non-trivial part of the "good" stems from how well they are being managed by the business... which yeah, a huge part of being good at managing either contractors or employees is about accountability. Sometimes you get better employees or contractors than you deserve, and that can imbue the contractor/employee characteristic with more causal significance than it deserves, but by and large, you don't.