[tptacek]

THOSE PEOPLE AREN'T YOUR CLIENTS.

If you want to work with them as "life support" for your practice while you figure out how to find the (innumerable) real clients that pay for business value, fine. But don't kid yourself. Call them "life support", not "clients". And just like a ventilator, staying engaged with life support is going to screw you up.

You cannot, cannot, cannot earn true market rates if your default position on incoming prospective business is "yes". You're going to say "no" a lot, and you're going to hear "no" a lot.

Fear of "no" costs more tech consultants more money than DOTA2 and Imgur ever will.