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As part of a signup as an advisor, Guidepoint Global asks for the hourly rate (Consulting Rate (per hour)), but nowhere is it specified what the minimum billing period is.

Google reveals that most of these interviews last for 30 minutes.

What would be the appropriate way to set a good rate with them? Do they round it up to an hour? In other words, should one 4x or 8x the normal rate to achieve the standard 4-hour minimum, or is there an altogether different approach that should be employed at setting up the rate with this firm?

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  • This is very specifically asked. Can you please edit your question to make it relevant to users that aren't in this exact situation?
    – Memj
    Jun 19, 2016 at 4:25
  • @Memj, can you elaborate, or maybe even make an edit suggestion?
    – cnst
    Jun 19, 2016 at 15:26
  • You're asking about the billing period of a specific company. Only those who will work for this company will find it relevant. You should edit your question to phrase it in a way that could be useful for anyone in a similar situation but not the exact situation.
    – Memj
    Jun 19, 2016 at 16:34
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    Waste of time, make sure to get paid for full-hour or nothing.
    – user21702
    Mar 19, 2019 at 10:57
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    Sadly, I agree. All of these by-the-minute consulting firms keep sending these requests, but never any actual offers for consulting, so, even if you get paid for a full-hour, it's kind of meaningless if there's no actual hour/minute to be paid for — only the waisted unbillable minutes to keep sorting their plentiful emails.
    – cnst
    Mar 19, 2019 at 16:05

1 Answer 1

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By default, Guidepoint Global appears to utilise a per-minute based billing, but does allow the consultant to round up consultations on a 5-minute basis. There are no minimums on the platform.

However, as a special case, they do let you set up your profile for a 1-hour-based billing, although that does appear to require a manual pre-approval, and might also limit your consulting opportunities.

However, as far as the rates are concerned, it appears that it's mostly used by the medical professionals (partly owing to their origin as pharma-investment consulting), for whom 15-minute-based interruptions are more of a norm, and thus, it appears that as a Software Engineer consultant, getting our industry's standard of 4× the regular hourly rate, together with the hourly-based billing, is not an accepted a practice at Guidepoint.

It appears that most sources suggest that the hourly rates the consultants get from the platform is 200—400 USD / hour (billed in 5-minute increments, with no minimum, and most consultations being under an hour), which does seem to be on the lower end of the Software Engineer consultants, which ordinarily charge 100—200 USD/hour with a 4-hour minimum.

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