As a W2 employee, your bill rate is not really your problem and only a secondary factor in how much your total comp will be. Given the same set of delivery staff, a strong consultancy might generate high bill rates, and a weaker one lower rates. The work is the same; as a full-time employee, your point of reference for your own comp isn't what the company earns, but rather what full-time people like you earn elsewhere. If people with your skillset and experience and capability generally earn $170/hr, it doesn't matter that the consultancy only makes $165/hr. Similarly, if they tend to make $90/hr, it doesn't matter that their firm makes almost 2x that in bill rate.
I'd also caution that people have weird ideas of how bill rates correlate to salaries. If you strike out on your own to do a solo consultancy (strongly consider doing that sometime!), you should know that whatever your FT salary was in your previous job, your bill rate should be drastically higher. It should account for:
* Your increased cost basis w/r/t taxes, facilities, vacation and "PTO", expenses, and benefits, which you'll now be on the hook for
* Your ample downtime --- a well-managed consultancy running in steady state at reasonable scale might expect 70% utilization across its staff, and a fledgling consultancy might struggle to break 50%
* The work you'll be putting in to source and close consulting engagements
* The substantial extra risk you're taking on by being a technical delivery person that can be "fired" (you're never really fired, just released) on a whim with little notice, which risk is something you as a consultant are selling.
People sometimes use a rule of thumb of 2x your full-time salary as a target consulting rate. I think that's lowballing it.
Always, these specific questions are best answered by consulting the market directly, not by asking for an axiomatic derivation of what a skillset is currently worth.
I'd also caution that people have weird ideas of how bill rates correlate to salaries. If you strike out on your own to do a solo consultancy (strongly consider doing that sometime!), you should know that whatever your FT salary was in your previous job, your bill rate should be drastically higher. It should account for:
* Your increased cost basis w/r/t taxes, facilities, vacation and "PTO", expenses, and benefits, which you'll now be on the hook for
* Your ample downtime --- a well-managed consultancy running in steady state at reasonable scale might expect 70% utilization across its staff, and a fledgling consultancy might struggle to break 50%
* The work you'll be putting in to source and close consulting engagements
* The substantial extra risk you're taking on by being a technical delivery person that can be "fired" (you're never really fired, just released) on a whim with little notice, which risk is something you as a consultant are selling.
People sometimes use a rule of thumb of 2x your full-time salary as a target consulting rate. I think that's lowballing it.
Always, these specific questions are best answered by consulting the market directly, not by asking for an axiomatic derivation of what a skillset is currently worth.