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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

#171

Post by re-thc »

Aurornis wrote: post #91

Respectable move. My primary complaint with solo-turned-agency people is how grifty they get. As a solo, the job is to add value and make the customer happy so you build your reputation. There are definitely solo contractor grifters out there but they usually struggle with the reputation issue. Agencies develop a grifty dynamic where they realize that their job is to sell themselves and as many headcount and hours as…

> their job is to sell themselves and as many headcount and hours as they can squeeze into a contract

Which is the complete inverse of what a client needs. It is what it is, but somehow it feels wrong.

The agency should be providing value and to make the customer happy. It should charge what's appropriate without all this headcount business.

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

#172

Post by drums8787 »

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…

Did exactly this for about the same amount of time. Couldn’t be happier.

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

#173

Post by butler14 »

xwdv wrote: post #158
nickjj wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone explain what the appeal of solo freelancing is in the age of bountiful remote work? Income multipliers, flexibility and being treated like an adult are a few reasons that come to mind. For example, with salaried work your income is mostly fixed (minus a pre-defined'ish bonus or options, etc.). With contract work you might land a $30,000 contract that takes 2 weeks to do because the focus is on providing…

I’m still not sold. How often are you getting $30k contracts that can be done in two weeks? Remote workers can still travel the world and work remotely if they can tolerate the timezone differences. I just got done with a rental in Costa Rica where I lived by the beach for 40 days this summer while working remote. I don’t particularly care if I have to ask permission to get stuff done in a company. This is actually o…

We get it. You do 2 hours work a day from where you want and are paid a sizeable salary (possibly even overpaid).

There’s not much that is going to persuade you that freelance is ‘better’.

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

#174

Post by csomar »

delfinom wrote: post #22
freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upwork. Solely up work.

Wow, I tried upwork but it generally always seems to be entities in significantly cheaper countries underbidding everything. How did you get started to snap up your first jobs on it?

I've tried it on the buyer side and anything less than $50/hour can't speak proper English. It's definitively cheaper but not significantly; and if you add the struggle of going through all the profiles, then the price will match reality.

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

#175

Post by csomar »

arrowsmith wrote: post #93
chiefalchemist wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear if that's revenue or profit. Due to that intentional ambiguity I had to presume the latter.

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.

If you are paying taxes, you should get a new accountant.

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

#176

Post by tcmart14 »

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…

The last two sections is mostly what I want to address. I feel the same way of more stamina doing my projects then what I do at work, but I feel like the blame, at least for me, can't be attributed to school. Here is the reality, at least for me. I got into software engineering because I like to build really cool shit. The problem is, when people hire me, it usually isn't for really cool shit. Its a business application, often with insane requirements because the client has no clue what they want or even why they really need it. When it does get figured out, its often just some boring business application with nothing really challenging to it or interesting. I'll code it out, but there is nothing interesting about. But when I go home, I just do whatever I want. Want to build my own internet protocol built at a lower layer than TCP? Sure, sounds fun! But no one wants to pay me to do that, or the jobs that would pay me to do that are so far and few between.

If anything, school set me up with higher expectations. Here I am in college, doing interesting math problems and programming projects and such. I get out to the real world and boss man is just like, "client just needs an application/feature to do X," and the solution is just fetching the data, putting it in a list, and doing a for loop over it. If anything, College had me expecting to do a lot cooler shit.

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

#177

Post by nirui »

> My non-commercial creative self-expression is equally important to me as my career.

I recently read a Tweet says that, some people dreamed of owning a storefront of the trade that they love, but not just for the money. They also wanting to use it as a place to allow them to express their interests, tastes and qualities in an externalized way (while making money doing it).

I think this is what the author was trying to say there. And in the context of design, I'd totally agreed :)

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

#178

Post by sandGorgon »

there is a middle ground now. There are multiple agency-as-a-service companies (like lifeandhalf.com, etc) which basically give you an agency infrastructure without running it yourself.

where infrastructure means - account managers, talented (but junior) design/copy staff, invoicing, etc

Its an interesting model - where really talented people & studio can still achieve scale up without the uninteresting parts of the scale up.

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

#179

Post by wruza »

re-thc wrote: post #171
Aurornis wrote: post #91

Respectable move. My primary complaint with solo-turned-agency people is how grifty they get. As a solo, the job is to add value and make the customer happy so you build your reputation. There are definitely solo contractor grifters out there but they usually struggle with the reputation issue. Agencies develop a grifty dynamic where they realize that their job is to sell themselves and as many headcount and hours as…

> their job is to sell themselves and as many headcount and hours as they can squeeze into a contract Which is the complete inverse of what a client needs. It is what it is, but somehow it feels wrong. The agency should be providing value and to make the customer happy. It should charge what's appropriate without all this headcount business.

If a client doesn’t care, that means it also internally operates on principles different from just getting the job done. Sometimes it doesn’t even know what the job is. There’s a budget and a general direction, burn the money and hope the wheels are at the right angle. The fact that they spent millions on a simple result only helps upselling it further.

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

#180

Post by quickthrower2 »

re-thc wrote: post #171
Aurornis wrote: post #91

Respectable move. My primary complaint with solo-turned-agency people is how grifty they get. As a solo, the job is to add value and make the customer happy so you build your reputation. There are definitely solo contractor grifters out there but they usually struggle with the reputation issue. Agencies develop a grifty dynamic where they realize that their job is to sell themselves and as many headcount and hours as…

> their job is to sell themselves and as many headcount and hours as they can squeeze into a contract Which is the complete inverse of what a client needs. It is what it is, but somehow it feels wrong. The agency should be providing value and to make the customer happy. It should charge what's appropriate without all this headcount business.

Fixed price then?
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