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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

#141

Post by progmetaldev »

mkl95 wrote: post #87
mig4ng wrote: post #81

Regarding this topic, I know many people (myself included at the moment) that do not want the burden of freelance, starting their own business, etc. For these people, there are other alternatives. For me, I have been working 4 days work weeks for multiple years now, and love it. The experiment went so good that the rest of the engineers in the time have Friday's afternoon off now. You can do this, even if your compan…

> have started the process of working 4 days a week in 2 companies, a big (unicorn) one that is part of NYSE, and a small one of less than 20 employees. This works on all scales (not guaranteed it works with all companies). Don't take it as whataboutism, but many companies love adding clauses to engineers contracts that forbid them from working for other companies or starting their own business. In some cases they wi…

I realize that this comes off as a very American way of thinking, and apologize if you are not, but things are starting to move towards employee rights in regards to striking down non-compete agreements or anything where your livelihood would be affected by signing an agreement. Of course the biggest changes are starting in more "progressive" states, such as New York and California, but the movement is spreading. You might see trouble if you are so specialized that whatever you work on, it would touch your day to day tasks, but moving towards another path of development could provide you with more creative output in a manner that your business couldn't touch. Your business may decide to fire you, but you should be free from legal obligations if you aren't directly releasing the same type of code that you write for the business.

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

#142

Post by boredemployee »

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…

Had a similar experience for 6 years. But the downside of not being big is that your business can die in big crisis , as happened to mine when covid started.

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

#143

Post by brightlancer »

manicennui wrote: post #56
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an industry we're surprisingly very behind in normalizing this. Given the fight we’ve seen over WFH, I’m very inclined to believe that this is intentional by the industry. By focusing on paying top dollar for FTEs and demanding incredible amounts of time and energy from them, companies maintain a level of control that they wouldn’t have by working with a fractional engineering team.

I find it humorous that anyone thinks they are capable of forcing talented people to do more than they want. Most of the people who feel pressure to make their corporate masters as happy as possible are either desperate or barely competent. All one must do is appear to be slightly better than all of the dead weight in the corporate world. No need to work hard. * I wanted to add that I am referring to software develop…

> * I wanted to add that I am referring to software developers. Creative types like the author of this article are always shit upon by corporate types unfortunately

Ish. It's complicated.

IME, most folks have a low standard for "good" and don't differentiate well above a certain minimum. Someone with an MFA and 150k in debt may expect to get paid more than someone with no degree and no school debt, but that doesn't mean the buyer will rate the MFA higher -- which means they won't pay them more money.

The MFA may also expect to spend X hours on a project without _explaining that_ to the buyer.

That's not corporate types being stingy or such, it's a mismatch of expectations. At the end of the day, buyers value the work much lower than the sellers, so the sellers are going to be disappointed far more often.

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

#144

Post by lmm »

beezlewax wrote: post #68
manicennui wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it humorous that anyone thinks they are capable of forcing talented people to do more than they want. Most of the people who feel pressure to make their corporate masters as happy as possible are either desperate or barely competent. All one must do is appear to be slightly better than all of the dead weight in the corporate world. No need to work hard. * I wanted to add that I am referring to software develop…

Maybe I'm doing it wrong but I feel I work harder than most people on my team. I always go for stories in areas that are more complex than the rest or areas that are new to me. I'm always trying to learn more to keep ahead of the rest. My performance reviews are always "exceeds expectations", but I haven't seen how this benefits anyone other than the company so far. Maybe I should just take it more easy but I feel li…

How much real progress have you made towards that promotion? And do you even want the position you'd have if you got promoted?

Honestly it does sound like you're doing it wrong. If you want to get paid more there are more effective ways of doing that. If you enjoy tough tasks that's fine, but be honest with yourself and make sure you're doing it because you want to.

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

#145

Post by manquer »

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.

> VC funded startups are not the only way to break free from the dreadful corporate games.

Do people really think this ? VC funded startups are as corporate as it gets, probably worse, just a different kind of corporate.

The second you take funding you have a new boss[1]and have all sorts of constraints which become more and more rigid with more rounds .

There are only few well understood models of scaling and governance that VCs know to work, if you deviate too much they are going to fire and replace you.[2]

It would be rare to have the kind of corporate control Zuckerberg enjoys today for a founder and neither are valuations and preferences terms generous to founders larger you raise .

Whether small business or a giant startup the power dynamics is the same . how much money you need to make payroll(including yours in a solo op) and who is funding it , if you don’t need any money at all then you are the king , if you cannot afford even a small short fall everyone else who can bring that money is your boss

[1] until you raise funding, there are many bosses you cannot afford to piss off : early users/customers , employees, vendors and so on you don’t have the money to attract the talent you desire or runway to say no to capricious user demands

[2] I am not even including the class of funds like a16z who early on will bring in dozens of experts who are on staff and have done scaling many times , imagine part of management, the -1 team reports to your boss also

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

#146

Post by jonas21 »

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.

If you're a solo freelancer, there's no difference between paying yourself for your time and paying yourself out of the profits. The money goes to you either way.

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

#147

Post by makk »

jonas21 wrote: post #146
makk wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're a solo freelancer, there's no difference between paying yourself for your time and paying yourself out of the profits. The money goes to you either way.

And either way, you’re not paying enough cash to cover the value of what you’re selling, so the net result is not profitable.

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

#149

Post by qudat »

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…

Totally. I worked for a consultant agency for a year and this resonates with me.

Every project was all about forcing the customer to pay for PM, designer, and two engineers.

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

#150

Post by doctorpangloss »

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…

> It doesn’t work for many people whose idea of a workday is to put in 1-2 hours of focus and then browse the internet all day, which is a larger portion of the developer population than I would have guessed before becoming a manager

Yeah, but not necessarily for any malicious reason. It may not matter to you. My impression is that these people are burnt out from high school and college. But they fit a superficially, stereotypically identical profile to like, the one person you know putting in 80 hour weeks, so they keep getting hired. This is not a fringe idea, it's common enough to be made fun of in movies.

My point is that there are a dozen commenters litigating all sorts of irrelevant issues, when the explanation for how people who want to work 1-2h weeks keep getting $200k/yr+ jobs seems obvious to many non-industry laypeople.

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