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, but we have always aimed for family first. The business has always been a means to a sustainable, balanced and loving family - and not an end.
I have friends who have taken the growth route. Some are doing ok. Others are desperately stressed. One has split from his wife in part because of the financial burden of maintaining a 5-10 person team.
We've never regretted taking the route we have. We have been here for our kids and we've been able to be flexible with our time in large part because we're able to scale our own work up and down in response to changing times without having to worry about paying salaries.
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!
No disrespect to the previous comment, which is well put, but just to say you shouldn't be hard on yourself there at all - everyone and every company has different boundaries to figure out, and it's great you've found yours.
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.
> Another great advantage is being able to fire bad clients.
That's not an advantage to owning your business, that's an advantage to owning a successful business. When you're struggling to get off the ground or to keep the lights on, you can easily get stuck with bad clients because you can't afford to fire them just yet. In the worst cases this results in a death spiral where the financial hit from firing them would be too much of a risk but the cost of maintaining them slowly starves your business and/or burns you out.
As the old wisdom goes, most businesses die and most businesses that die do so in the first couple of years. If you have to start by bootstrapping your business you already start from a disadvantage. If your financial situation means failure is not an option, bad clients can turn into hostage scenarios.
I mean, this is true for a lot of technologists, but there are a great many professions that allow for the kind of approach mentioned by the GP.
My grandfather runs a quite successful one-man architecture consultancy built on decades of experience and networking in the industry. He gets to pick and choose his engagements, and if he lives long enough I’m sure he can sustain his business for many decades to come.
Together we make enough in 10 hours a week to pay for our tiny apartment, 16 year old car, insurance, and healthy veggie diet. The rest of the week?
Well, this year we're ultra-marathon training, volunteer firefighting, backpacked the first half of the Appalachian trail, crew on a racing sailboat, and running a charity teaching apprentices how to be software engineers (got two into the industry in 2023). I just got asked to come be a helper at our fire academy starting next week which I'm very excited about.
Wise advice indeed. There's a fine line between "working to to live" and living carelessly. I would hope anyone attempting the same thing ensure they have a solid plan for the eventuality of old age and/or broken wrists, blindness, etc.
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.
This is always a temptation for agencies which almost never works out. They underestimate the effort to build a product. They also typically don't have the skill or experience to build a high quality product that can compete with the whole world.
I work with an Iranian guy and he used to be CEO of a ~30 people company. He told me it was too stressful for him as well. He also did’t make much money, as he was concerned about the income of his staff.
During COVID, work dried up and company (more or less) ceased to exist (but website is still up).
He told me he is much happier again as a “normal” developer.
As for me, I also wouldn’t want to manage many people. The stress of dealing with bad employees, sickness, all government related stuff, etcetera, it’s not for me.
Actually I’d prefer to develop full time on my own projects, if I had the financial means. But I don’t, so since May I am an employee at a Thailand based company.
We're in this spot after 9 years, most of which was spent trying to be an "agency".
The pandemic cost us most of our employees and the final one left for personal reasons later that year. Trying to be as non-exploitative as possible (within the constraints of the system) left us without sufficient resources to weather a nearly year-long struggle and the fixed nature of wages meant we ended up sinking money into people effectively just sitting on their hands (to no fault of their own).
We talked about possibly moving to an "associate" or "collective" model before the pandemic hit and it was very clear that people who look for employment aren't necessarily also people willing to run a company or give up the labor protections for a stake in their place of work, especially when they were already with a "good employer" which we tried to be.
Depending on how you actually do it and the part of the world you live in, this model could be illegal. For instance the case of freelancers almost exclusively working for one employer is in some countries interpreted as avoiding to pay all the taxes, healthcare and pension contributions for employees. The penalties might be severe, e.g. requiring to pay all of those things retroactively, which if you do it with enough people ends up being a lot of money.
Where did I say he did? The first word of my post is "depending" and the first part of the first sentence is "Depending on how you actually do it", so it was pretty hard to miss that it depends.
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.
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, but we have always aimed for family first. The business has always been a means to a sustainable, balanced and loving family - and not an end.
I have friends who have taken the growth route. Some are doing ok. Others are desperately stressed. One has split from his wife in part because of the financial burden of maintaining a 5-10 person team.
We've never regretted taking the route we have. We have been here for our kids and we've been able to be flexible with our time in large part because we're able to scale our own work up and down in response to changing times without having to worry about paying salaries.