Using Mathematica productively requires some experience.
I am one of the original developers of Mathematica. After several years as professor of computer science at ETH in Zurich I established, in 1996, my own consulting business, MathConsult Dr. R. Mäder, specializing in Mathematica consulting for Finance and other fields.
My consulting services are an efficient way to develop your Mathematica applications into the productive stage. Projects can be of different scales.
Small scale: run-time optimization of your programs, coaching, teaching
Medium scale: program design, particularly OO concepts in Mathematica
Large scale: applications connecting backend databases/datasources with Mathematica processing and Mathematica/Excel/Java/Web frontends