[ezl]

the anatomy of a great comment, provide actionable advice, in an example, of how to respond.

one extension requested -- MOST contractors for $BIG_COMPANY are not in a position where they have had sufficient ownership of a project to be able to attribute specific company bottom line gains to their work.

For example, if you're in the practice of doing conversion optimization work, split testing landing pages, or doing SEO work, you might be able to measure conversion or added traffic and make claims about how that impacts the bottom line, which puts you in a MUCH stronger negotiating position.

Do you have specific advice for contractors who might be part of a team or contributing in less measurable ways (writing internal code, building a new feature)?

[evanderkoogh]

There are numerous ways your work may be valuable. The easiest to measure is increasing revenue, but there is improving margins (reduce cost, but keep revenue), decreasing risk, improving retention etc etc. Always try to figure out how what you or your team are building is contributing to the companies bottom line. And when you are in a team, you are part of that.

[Travis]

I'd like to add that an hours_saved calculation is a great hack for building internal projects/tools. Even moreso if you are saving the time of expensive personnel.

E.g., I build a medical data entry system that is used 10x per doctor per day by the ER doctors in a hospital. There are 10 doctor-shifts each day. Each time they use my tool they save 5 minutes. My ROI calc would be 10 shifts * 10 usages per day * 5 minutes = 500 minutes of doctor time. At $200+ per hour, each day my internal tool saves $1,667 in doctor time.