[Sigia-l] Short Term freelance

[Listera]

"Sheila Dehner" wrote:

> And, sadly, I have been paid a great deal more as an
> IA and they still didn't "want" me to affect their
> projects or business!  The client was the only person
> that was ever right, no matter how wrong, and it
> didn't matter what I knew, or proposed, to help make
> it work better.

Pricing is a '"science" by itself :-) In the software business, for example,
there's the seemingly counterintuitive notion of sales going up as you raise
the price of an application beyond a threshold or sales going down as you
lower it. People seem to *perceive* more/less value in an item depending on
the price.

In the long run, businesses do not tend to continue to pay more for services
they think they are not befitting from. And the converse is true as well,
within the limitations of marketplace elasticity. Price becomes an arbiter
of value, in most business transactions.

When you need a doctor for something serious, you don't go looking for the
cheapest doctor as your principle criterion. But you may very well do that
in the case of standardized/commoditized items like packaged cereals for
breakfast.

So in the value chain, if the IA's "price" is commoditized (to $30/hr),
there's not much future in it for the independent practitioner.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba