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I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency

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Re: I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency

#121

Post by [deleted] »

makk wrote: post #116
arrowsmith wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but how big can the expenses have been? I've worked as a freelance solo dev (sadly for far less than $500k/year) and the difference between my revenue and profit was close to zero. Expenses included accountancy costs and the occasional new laptop or whatever bit of hardware I could justifiably call a business expense, but it was a tiny fraction of my revenue.

That assumes your time costs zero. But if you assume as I do that your time is the most valuable thing you have, then there’s no way to generate profits when all you sell is your time. You can generate cash, sure. But profits as in selling something for more than it cost you, never. You can never get that time back, and it’s worth more than anything. I would guess many will disagree with this perspective.

[deleted]

Re: I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency

#122

Post by matthewcford »

dmje wrote: post #105

12 years into running a tiny digital consultancy with my wife. We've used an "associate" model for all that time - a posh way of saying "a network of trusted freelancers". We've deliberately chosen not to take on staff. We could have grown at many points along the way but haven't wanted to. Instead we've stayed small, focused and profitable. The benefits to growing would have been being able to take on bigger gigs, b…

I’ve run a 15-person agency for 14 years (bootstrapping), and the stress can’t be underestimated.

I know plenty of agencies who have either switched to products or just sold up / closed.

Using associates is a good option if you have a good network, however, it can be just as stressful if they don’t deliver.

Re: I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency

#123

Post by beachy »

idopmstuff wrote: post #109
dmje wrote: post #105

12 years into running a tiny digital consultancy with my wife. We've used an "associate" model for all that time - a posh way of saying "a network of trusted freelancers". We've deliberately chosen not to take on staff. We could have grown at many points along the way but haven't wanted to. Instead we've stayed small, focused and profitable. The benefits to growing would have been being able to take on bigger gigs, b…

The biggest advantage to owning your business is that you can optimize it solely for what's best for you. If growth is all you care about, go nuts, but if you've got it humming along making decent money with just the right amount of work, there's zero pressure to change it. I think a lot of people forget that and think that they need to push to be more "successful" - kudos to you for doing in the right way for you.

> The biggest advantage to owning your business is that you can optimize it solely for what's best for you.

Another great advantage is being able to fire bad clients.

It's not something I've done more than once or twice but the freedom not to be brought down or stressed by someone else's insane demands is worth gold.

Related is the ability to pick and choose your clients in the sales process. e.g. plenty of small consultancies have formal or informal policies not to bid for government work because of the effort and frustration involved in responding to public sector RFPs.

Re: I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency

#124

Post by tuukkah »

93po wrote: post #111
tuukkah wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billing by the day is not the best for everyone: billing by the hour can give you the flexibility to work incomplete days or switch between clients during the day.

I think maybe the premise is having minimums per day so you can’t be called on a weekend and only bill half an hour for it

It would suck if I was called in on a weekend (without having agreed to be on call). It would suck even more if I was called in for a whole day just because I'd demanded that to be my minimum. Instead, weekend hours could be priced 16 times higher. There could be a quantity discount so that a full day would be somewhat less expensive.

Re: I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency

#125

Post by tomjakubowski »

tuukkah wrote: post #97
jart wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you’re paying someone 50th percentile compensation and demanding a 90th percentile work pace and output from them, you’re just going to have endless turnover as you burn people out. Only if they're a 50th percentile person.

Burnout does not work like that.

I don't think burnout would have been any easier on me if I'd been taking home a 90th percentile salary instead of a ~mean one.

Burnout is also not only a function of workload. Other factors can contribute too.

Re: I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency

#126

Post by gochi »

dmje wrote: post #105

12 years into running a tiny digital consultancy with my wife. We've used an "associate" model for all that time - a posh way of saying "a network of trusted freelancers". We've deliberately chosen not to take on staff. We could have grown at many points along the way but haven't wanted to. Instead we've stayed small, focused and profitable. The benefits to growing would have been being able to take on bigger gigs, b…

Whatever the choice, it has to be deliberate. So many are people pleasers in disguise. They grow not because they actively choose, but because they can't say no. It causes that desperately stressed life when you're not active about these choices and boundaries. They're always in survival mode, chasing more more more, without ever being deliberate and reflective about their actions.

It winds up being the end of a lot of businesses, whether or not they actually did grow. They took on a contract that was just too big for them, despite their intuition telling them not to. Or they hired too many people despite not wanting to but was talked into it by a friend.

So good on you for knowing what you want and being deliberate about it! You and your wife have avoided a lifetime of stress by doing so!

Re: I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency

#127

Post by MisterBastahrd »

Aurornis wrote: post #76
pxue wrote: post #12

As a solo dev contractor who got my business to $500k/year during the pandemic - I echo a lot of the sentiment in this post. An extension to the post I want to touch on is that VC funded startups are not the only way to break free from the dreadful corporate games. Working for yourself at your own pace is. As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this.

> Working for yourself at your own pace is. > As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this. This is great for people whose own pace is reasonable and matched to their compensation. If you’re paying someone 50th percentile compensation and demanding a 90th percentile work pace and output from them, you’re just going to have endless turnover as you burn people out. Conversely, if you’re paying 90th…

> Other people can’t help but wander through tasks, get distracted by rewrites or new frameworks, needlessly refactor working code, or otherwise do a lot of activity without producing a lot of work. Both of these fault modes benefit greatly from the pacing and structure of management.

These are all problems that stem from management, not employees.

Re: I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency

#128

Post by greybox »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #101
Aurornis wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Working for yourself at your own pace is. > As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this. This is great for people whose own pace is reasonable and matched to their compensation. If you’re paying someone 50th percentile compensation and demanding a 90th percentile work pace and output from them, you’re just going to have endless turnover as you burn people out. Conversely, if you’re paying 90th…

How do you know that people are lazy by nature and not because their job sucks? Of course they have zero incentive to get anything done, they get paid regardless of how well the project gets done. Maybe if they had the guts to leave a paycheck for browsing Reddit and started their own business they would have success too. When I work on my projects I have way more stamina than when I'm doing client work. I kind of ha…

As someone who takes pride in their work and who tries to always work the hours I'm paid for (and often regrettably more, but trying to cut back on that ...) It can be surprising to find out that a lot of people, really are, very lazy.

If you've been lucky enough not to encounter them in your day to day, then that's really good, because when you have to work with one of them, boy does it suck.

That being said, I've only encountered this a few times in over 10 years working as a software developer. Most people really do want to do a good job. Even if some of them get distracted easily and need more structure.

Re: I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency

#129

Post by devoutsalsa »

matthewcford wrote: post #122
dmje wrote: post #105

12 years into running a tiny digital consultancy with my wife. We've used an "associate" model for all that time - a posh way of saying "a network of trusted freelancers". We've deliberately chosen not to take on staff. We could have grown at many points along the way but haven't wanted to. Instead we've stayed small, focused and profitable. The benefits to growing would have been being able to take on bigger gigs, b…

I’ve run a 15-person agency for 14 years (bootstrapping), and the stress can’t be underestimated. I know plenty of agencies who have either switched to products or just sold up / closed. Using associates is a good option if you have a good network, however, it can be just as stressful if they don’t deliver.

I had 15 people, including myself, at one point. I wasn’t terribly good at marketing, and all of our business was word of mouth in a cyclical industry. It was always stressful to not know where future business was coming from, and the overhead meant I often kept less, rarely more, than I would have by just remaining a solo entrepreneur.

Re: I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency

#130

Post by setr »

asimpleusecase wrote: post #117

Question: a friend is a great designer and has coding chops. He just got a project with a large company fixing their e-commerce site. The deeper he digs the more farcical the whole thing has become. Nothing works, no one seems able to do anything and the past “agency” appears to be someone who hires developers in a developing market but has no real idea what they are doing. My friend has fixed huge amounts of broken…

Assuming it can be done by a solo dev, then pull on 10 guys out of body shops in India/Pakistan, seek the cheapest possible credentials that they can be called developers, call yourself project lead/architect.

Bill as a fixed price project with milestones — you want the work assignments to be ambiguous. Plan/budget by your own workload, consider using offshore resources as a bonus (keeping in mind you intentionally pulled them on as just bodies).

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