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

- have you ever built and maintained a large codebase/project over several years?

- have you ever sold or marketed a product rather than a service?

- are you ready to compete with the whole world, as opposed to locally?

In my experience they are completely different skills, that agencies and freelancers do not have.

One approach is to develop internal "products" that make you more efficient. The bar drops from being something a customer can buy and enjoy right off the shelf, to being a productivity multiplier.

I persnally actually accepted the opposite. If everyone is obsessed with passive income and not doing work, to the extent that they are accepting tiny margins with artificially low discount rates, I want to maximize the value of the time I do concrete work.

Another is to find organizations that have individual contributor (IC) promotion tracks that are at least as lucrative as the management track. (Of the highest-paid, most respected people at my company, most of them are not in management and are simply really good at what they do.)

Judging by all of the comments from people saying this matched their experience working either inside or with agencies, I don’t think it’s inaccurate.

> What you call grift is actually sales. Most business in the world are incentivised to grow and scale, so that's a given if it's done ethically.

I think you’re talking about something else. I’m not talking about a sales process being done ethically.

If I was talking about ethical sales with aligned incentives, I wouldn’t have used the word “grift”. That was, literally, my whole point in using that word. :)

I’m specifically talking about the huge incentive that exists to unnecessarily balloon the hours as much as possible.

It’s simple, really: As a solo dev with a mostly full pipeline (assuming this for simplicity) your incentive is to finish work efficiently so you can impress the customer, build trust, and build a reputation to overcome the challenges of being solo. If you sandbag your efforts and deliver inefficiently, they have nobody to blame but you. You also burn your chance of a good referral. It’s bad all around.

As an agency, the situation changes. You now can scale up to as many people as you can convince to work with your agency, but now you need to force them into as many projects as possible. You’re no longer limited by the number of hours you have in a week because you’re selling other people’s hours. Hiring inefficient people will actually get you more profit.

When the client catches on, you can remove the inefficient people and apologize for the “bad apples”. You temporarily assign some superstars to the team to impress the client until they’re not looking again and then you slowly go back to the inefficient people when they’re not paying attention again.

Like I said in my post, not every agency does this. However, as someone who has done a lot of hiring of contractors and agencies I can say it’s almost like most of them are operating out of a hidden playbook. The headcount always gets inflated over time (including their assigned project managers who they require to work alongside our internal project managers) and the revolving door where the good devs get pulled off to other projects and then they try to substitute lesser devs.

It’s gotten bad enough that we have a framework for bullet points to negotiate away from agency contract proposals. We reserve the right to aggressively dismiss anyone they assign who isn’t doing work up to par. Agencies hate it, but it’s a necessity these days (at least until an agency has proven themselves)

I think that it is unabashedly a pro, because whenever you are adding value to the business and can defend it in an invoice, you're able to get value for it. Unlike when you are a salaried employee and the extra hours don't get you anything material (maybe noticed and provided with a raise. maybe).