I've found the most useful books are not business books per se, but biographies of and interviews with successful founders. I learned a lot of useful stuff from the interviews in Founders at Work for example.
The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald M. Weinberg. It showed me how to deal with, and get true value out of consultants. It also helped me become a better consultant myself and scale my service to bigger projects & customers. Also the book has great advise on how to sell your service. It's not only what you sell that sets the price but how you "package" your service. In a nutshell it's a book that can help leap from external contractor, who works only via agents to become a "true consultant" where you pick your own clients without a middle-man, create a pitch, draft the offer, and also carry the full commercial risk.
There was another HN thread some years back linking to a fascinating blog post of somebody who pointed out not to charge hourly rates and invoice per week. It was giving really solid advise on pricing strategy for individual consultants to increase the rate from 100/hr to 6-8K/week. It argued to never compromise on the price but see what parts of the project could be left out, etc ... If somebody here remembers this site/article it would be fantastic (I can no longer remember where to find it unfortunately).
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 23.0 ms ] threadhttps://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Consulting-Giving-Getting-Suc...
There was another HN thread some years back linking to a fascinating blog post of somebody who pointed out not to charge hourly rates and invoice per week. It was giving really solid advise on pricing strategy for individual consultants to increase the rate from 100/hr to 6-8K/week. It argued to never compromise on the price but see what parts of the project could be left out, etc ... If somebody here remembers this site/article it would be fantastic (I can no longer remember where to find it unfortunately).