The secret is: Hire to train. Experienced people want too much money. They are getting paid for their time up front, but they get no stake in the result. Programmers on staff at big organizations is the most common form of this. Success with the training depends on limiting the scope of what people have to learn. The way you to that is....HAVE SOFTWARE that you own and sell to clients. The big bucks come from supporting the software sold to the clients. No one can beat us on our stuff, so it's easy for us. Others can cut us out only if we fuck up large. It has to be state of the art, valuable to a lot of businesses, owned by us. Beginners can learn to effective in just a few months and they are as good or better than veterans at that point, especially on our technology. Account people, like my friend here, are essential. They are out front handling client relationships. As programmers, we have to sell ourselves to our own account persons(s), proving our capability to them, because they stake their reputations on the commitments they make to clients on what we are going to do. For a long time, I expected you to become an account person, but you have proven to me you are a techie at heart. You get excited about the problem solving, how things work. There is a feel to it. You are as much a techie as anyone I ever met. I cannot tell you how much it pleases me to see your appetite for tech being satisfied by what you are doing with me and our software. 99/100 people will say you are nuts and getting used. 99/100 times, they would be right. Our mutual association with Holly is as good a protection from that as you are going to find, except cash starting to flow to you. fwiw, people say I am getting used by Holly. I don't worry about what people say along those lines, except those are legitimate warnings of pitfalls that still could overwhelm this situation. The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions. Cash is freedom. Copied from another post in another forum