Want access to the President? It doesn't come cheap:

[I]t turns out the highest-profile White House grads don’t so much join consulting firms these days; they found them. A boldfaced Obama name can rake in upward of $25,000 per month from a client just by dialing into a conference call and drafting a memo from time to time. Four clients means more than a million dollars a year with virtually no overhead. “You can run a business like that on an iPad and a cell phone,” says the former administration official. The godfather of this approach is ex-Clinton strategist Doug Sosnik, famous for conducting his business meetings in jeans from coffee shops and hotel lobbies. David Plouffe and Stephanie Cutter have both adopted the Sosnik model.

The alternative is to rent out office space and staff up, in hopes of one day growing into a consulting powerhouse. This is the Glover Park Group model, based on the firm a group of former Clinton and Gore hands opened in 2001 and nurtured into a 160-person juggernaut. Jim Messina appears to have ambitions in this vein, having procured office space and hired support staff. Former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs, who briefly flirted with trying to return to the White House, is in the process of launching a similar firm with Ben LaBolt, the 2012 campaign press secretary.