What Kind Of Consulting Offer Lets Developers Go Solo?

What kind of consulting offer actually lets a developer go solo?

The kind of consulting offer that lets a developer go solo is one that’s high-leverage, focused on clear business outcomes, and designed to be delivered in just a few hours a week alongside your day job. It’s not random “freelance work,” and it’s not glorified hourly contracting. It’s a specific, repeatable, premium offer that pays you as if you were making at least $300 per hour, even though you’re not billing by the hour.

Ever heard another developer say, “Consulting sucks. It’s just like a job, but billing by the hour”?

I don’t mean to be that guy, but if that’s your takeaway, you probably haven’t seen real consulting yet. It’s just like when companies say they’re agile, but really they just renamed their meetings. You’ll hear a lot of devs say they’re consultants, but they’re still acting like employees.

After consulting for over 20 companies myself, I can tell you true consulting always starts with an offer. And for the past two years, I’ve been coaching other developers to come up with their own. But not just any offer—one they can do in just a few hours a week alongside their day job until they’re ready to go all-in.

This article includes the essential eight components of the exact type of offer that sets you up for a successful transition into self-employment as a software professional. There’s an easy way to remember this using the acronym LEVRIDGE, but we’re going to spell it a little differently. I combined the word “leverage,” which is something you definitely want, and “bridge,” which is what we’re building for your career.

These eight pieces are the same foundation I help developers apply inside the Consulting Offer Workshop, where we turn career history into a premium, testable consulting offer.

What does “leveraged” really mean for a developer consulting offer?

A leveraged consulting offer is one where you get maximum income for minimum effort by focusing on high-value outcomes, not selling your time. In practical terms, that means the work you do inside your offer should be worth at least the equivalent of $300 per hour, even though you’re not invoicing by the hour.

Let’s start with the first letter L. It stands for leverage, but maybe not the way you think. It’s a special kind of leverage—the kind that lets you cut the cord from working as an employee. The leverage we want is to get you the maximum income for the minimum effort.

When I coach developers to use this system, what they offer must be worth at least $300 per hour. Now, you won’t actually bill your clients by the hour, but you still want to make sure the work is worth that much. That forces you to stop thinking like, “I’ll do whatever they ask for 40 hours a week,” and start thinking like, “What specific outcome can I deliver that is worth serious money to a business?”

Leveraged offers also protect your energy. If you’re working a full-time job and trying to go solo, you can’t afford to burn all your evenings and weekends on low-value busywork. You want a tight, focused service that gives you outsized return for the time you put in.

When I help people map this out in the Consulting Offer Workshop, we anchor their ideas in business value and work backward to make sure the math on their time and pricing actually supports a future leap into self-employment.

Why should your consulting offer be evolving instead of perfect?

Your consulting offer should be evolving because the fastest path to becoming a premium consultant is to start with a “minimum viable offer,” deliver it, learn from real clients, and improve over time—just like iterating on a software product. Waiting to make it perfect keeps you stuck as an employee.

The second letter E stands for evolving. I’m guessing you’ve probably heard of the concept of a minimum viable product. This is where a company can’t afford to build the entire software product they want, so they build a small version of it first to get feedback.

Well, this is exactly what you want to do, but as a consultant: start with a minimum viable offer. Something valuable but doable that you can build on. You don’t need your “final, forever” consulting service designed before you work with your first client. You just need a version that’s clear enough to sell and solid enough to deliver.

Own your tech career by crafting a premium consulting offer in 4 evenings that’s worth $300+/hr

The way you become a premium consultant is by having an offer that reliably creates super happy clients. And that takes experimentation and improvement over time, just like building software. Every engagement is an opportunity to refine your questions, your process, your deliverables, and even your pricing.

Inside the Consulting Offer Workshop, I treat the offer you design as a first iteration—a prototype that we expect to evolve as you learn from real conversations and real engagements.

What makes a consulting offer truly valuable to a business?

A consulting offer is truly valuable when it clearly connects your technical work to one of four business drivers: growth, efficiency, risk & compliance, or user experience. If the work doesn’t move one of those levers in a measurable way, you’ll be seen as “just another engineer” instead of a trusted advisor.

The third letter V stands for valuable. Ever try to convince another engineer of the value of one of your ideas? You might have found some new coding library or AI tool and you show them how it will make work easier.

But when you’re selling an offer to a company, what’s important is not making work easier. It’s got to be valuable to the business.

If it’s not making them more money, more efficient, helping them avoid risk, or satisfy their customers, you’ll just be seen as another engineer and not a trusted advisor. Businesses don’t buy refactors, features, or dashboards—they buy outcomes like “more revenue,” “lower costs,” “reduced risk,” or “happier customers who stay longer.”

So part of designing a valuable offer is tracing the line from what you do to what the business actually cares about. That might mean translating “improved CI/CD pipeline” into “shipping features faster so product can respond to customers and capture more revenue,” or turning “test coverage” into “fewer production incidents that could damage reputation or cause legal headaches.”

In the Consulting Offer Workshop, I walk people through specific business value categories so they can see where their past work already created value, and then bake those same patterns into their consulting offer on purpose.

Why does your consulting offer need to be repeatable?

Your consulting offer needs to be repeatable so you can become known for delivering one powerful outcome over and over again, instead of reinventing yourself for every client. Repeatability is what turns you from a generalist task-doer into an in-demand specialist with a premium reputation.

The fourth letter R stands for repeatable. When I started consulting 20 years ago, I joined a consulting firm right here in Austin, Texas. They would find projects around town and put me on them. Every project was different.

On one project, I was building a web app. The next one, I was creating business intelligence dashboards. And the next one, I was writing mobile applications. It was fun, but it also wasted a lot of my potential. Since I wasn’t getting paid for things I learned in the past on my current project, it turned me into a generalist.

This is not the kind of offer you want if you want to be seen as a premium consultant. You want to deliver one outcome over and over again to different clients. The way you become in demand is by being truly excellent, and that only comes with practice.

When your offer is repeatable, every engagement gets easier. Your questions get sharper, your documentation gets better, your estimates get more accurate, and your confidence goes up. You’re not starting from scratch each time—you’re improving a system.

In the Consulting Offer Workshop, a big piece of what we do is narrow down from “all the things you could do” to one repeatable business outcome you can deliver again and again.

How independent should your consulting work be from a client’s team?

Your consulting work should be as independent as reasonably possible from the client’s internal team. The fewer internal dependencies you have on approvals, other departments, or long cross-team projects—the more reliably you can deliver results on time and on a small weekly time budget alongside your job.

The fifth letter I stands for independent. I had one career coaching client from Ukraine I was working with about four years ago. He was working with Oracle at the time as one of their lead DevOps people. When he came to me, he wanted to create a premium consulting offer so he could start working for himself.

His first idea was to help companies build CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) pipelines. These are basically complex systems that use custom automation to release versions of the software to customers. Now, I knew a lot about Continuous Delivery, but I wanted to use this as a teaching moment.

So I asked him, “How many other people have to do their job for you to successfully create a CI/CD pipeline?” And he said, “Oh man, it’s like an act of the government. It takes months of approval and there are so many people that get in the way.”

This is great work when you’re an employee and the company can eat all those delays and still pay you. But when you’re a premium consultant, you’ve got to offer work that has as few dependencies on other people as possible.

So ask yourself, Can I do this mostly with minimal interaction with their team? If the answer is yes, you’re on the right path. If the answer is no, you may need to narrow your offer to something you can execute more independently, in a tighter scope.

When I’m working with developers in the Consulting Offer Workshop, we’re always looking for ways to shape their ideas into offers they can deliver largely on their own, especially while they’re still employed full-time.

How can you make your consulting results demonstrable?

You make your consulting results demonstrable by deciding up front how you’ll measure success, and then structuring your work so the client can clearly see the difference you made. That might be numbers on a dashboard, avoided incidents, time saved, or changes in customer behavior—but it has to be visible.

The sixth letter D stands for demonstrable. It’s no good promising a client you can get them value in their business if you can’t prove it, right?

When you create a premium consulting offer, you’ve got to think about how you’ll prove it got results. Is your work going to make them more money? Think of how you’ll prove it to them. Is your work going to make them more efficient? Think of how they can measure the savings. Is your work going to help them satisfy their customers better? What can they measure to know how customer perception is changing?

Now, often your work won’t have instant results. You’ll actually finish the consulting engagement and they won’t see your impact until later. But regardless, you’ve got to give them a way to know when those results come in. That might be a report template they can reuse, tracking you help them set up, or metrics you define together.

This is how you build a reputation as not just a task doer, but someone who creates real value. And when you’re designing an offer inside the Consulting Offer Workshop, I encourage you to bake in at least one concrete metric or demonstration that shows your impact.

Why is a gradual transition into consulting safer for developers?

A gradual transition into consulting is safer because it lets you test your offer, build confidence, and learn how to find and serve clients—before you walk away from your paycheck. You start with small, high-value engagements outside work hours and only go full-time when the process is working.

The seventh letter G stands for gradual. Ever hear someone tell you how they tried consulting but gave up? They probably did it full-time without prior consulting experience. And when they couldn’t find more clients, they crawled back to the employee grind. That’s the exact type of situation we don’t want you to be in.

So, when you’re creating a premium consulting offer, start with something minimal. It won’t be enough to quit your day job, and that’s the point. We want you getting paid amazingly well for your effort and learning how to deliver something excellent at the same time.

And only when you’ve done it a few times and you really understand how to reliably find new clients, then go all-in. That’s when your “bridge” from employment to consulting has real planks under your feet, not just a dream in your head.

The entire structure of the Consulting Offer Workshop is built around this idea: design something you can realistically deliver in 8–10 hours per week so your transition into self-employment is controlled and sane, not a leap off a cliff.

How important is it that consulting clients are happy with the result of working with you?

Your consulting clients should end up ecstatic because their enthusiasm becomes your most powerful marketing asset—testimonials, referrals, and reputational proof that you can deliver premium results. Happy clients turn your first few engagements into a compounding track record.

The eighth and final letter E again stands—this time for ecstatic. The way you become a premium consultant is by having undeniable proof of your ability to get results. That doesn’t happen overnight, but you need to be intentional about it.

You can do this a variety of ways, but the easiest is to get a testimonial from your client when the work is done. If you’re like me, you might have had a hard time advocating for yourself in a company. I didn’t want to look like a showoff. But you’re a business now. You need to build trust with new customers.

So, ask yourself, What can I offer that may be a small effort, but my client is going to be thrilled with how it turns out? If your offer is boring, low value, or “nice to have,” it is not the foundation of a successful consulting business. You want something that, when it lands, makes your client say, “I can’t believe we didn’t do this sooner.”

When we shape offers in the Consulting Offer Workshop, I push people to lean toward transformations their clients will feel—not just notice on a spreadsheet. Asking for a testimonial at the end should feel natural, not awkward.

What framework can developers use to know if they have a good solo consulting offer?

The LEVRIDGE framework becomes your bridge into self-employment by guiding you to design one consulting offer that is:

• Leveraged
• Evolving
• Valuable
• Repeatable
• Independent
• Demonstrable
• Gradual
• And capable of producing Ecstatic clients

When all of those are in place, you have a concrete path from “employee who codes” to “trusted consultant with a premium offer.”

So now you know the eight essential elements of the kind of consulting offer that’ll let you go solo. But having an offer isn’t enough on its own to transition into self-employment. You still have to find prospective clients, close the deal, deliver your offer, and get paid.

The offer is the foundation. It’s the thing that makes every other step worth doing. Without it, you’re just another developer hoping someone somewhere will “need some help.” With it, you’re someone who can walk into a conversation and say, “Here’s the specific business problem I solve, here’s how I do it, and here’s the value it creates.”

Inside the Consulting Offer Workshop, my whole goal is to help you build this kind of bridge for yourself—one client, one offer, one step closer to owning your work instead of renting your career.

Want to go deeper into what happens after the offer? Like how to find those clients, run calls, and put everything together? Read about my 10-step system for becoming a respected premium consultant, which builds on everything you’ve just read.

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