1. Because I'm not billing $250/hr @ 40 hours/week. I wish! I just meant it's considered a normal consulting rate for what I do.
2. I've tried to transition out of consulting and into 100% product company, but have not so far been successful. There's a significant short-term revenue hit in that.
There's plenty of recurring product licencing and support revenue, but not enough to break me even, so it gets supplemented with consulting. And you know how lopsided that distribution is; 75% of the work for 45% of the revenue, or something like that.
Amidst that kind of schizophrenia, it's very hard to hire someone, both for financial reasons and because the hiring decisions that would need to be made are very different in those cases.
3. I've hired numerous people over the years, back when I was doing consulting/project work full time and not engaged in this productisation effort.
The people I could afford were mostly entry-level. In the niche vertical I'm in as well as the high-expertise business model I've created for myself, customers expectations are specifically for domain knowledge and multifarious skill sets. In other words, it doesn't scale out much beyond me and other folks exactly like me, so I couldn't find ways to bill my employees out.
Being a conscientious person who largely blamed himself and chose to view it as an entrepreneurial & management failure on my part rather than on theirs, I kept them on far longer than I could afford to, effectively working 2-3x as hard to keep the lights on and subsidise their salaries.
Clearly, the solution is to hire non entry-level people. But the folks with the expertise to be able to do the work are definitely a high-salary proposition, and I can't afford it.
4. Hiring is very much a question of cash flow. Learned that on hard mode. If someone took my $ANNUAL_GROSS, divided it by 12, and disbursed it to me on the 1st of every month, damn right I'd hire someone again. :-)
