Here’s a temptation that every freelancer feels at some point, “Here’s how I can grow my business and profit more: I can find and hire someone to do work just like mine, but for substantially less money than my clients are paying me—ding ding ding!” I’ll confess, a younger version of myself felt that same urge… and even ran with it. Multiple times, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.
Every situation and individual is different, so if you are seriously considering such a strategy, there are a few points to keep in mind that are worth articulating.
First, the skill set of “doing good work” is completely different from, often orthogonal to, the skill set of “managing.” Just because you’re a great designer doesn’t imply you will be good at managing other designers. This is true for every discipline. And in fact, this observation, taken to its extreme, gives us the Peter Principle: you’re promoted to your level of incompetence. You think you’re good at X, therefore you think to grow by doing Y, but (almost invariably) you suck at Y and you aren’t even the right personality to learn to become good at it. That or you aren’t interested in making the trade-offs necessary to become good at Y.
An alternative strategy might be to follow Steve Martin’s canonical advice: be so good they can’t ignore you. Maybe instead you can just focus on becoming even better at your craft, and thus command premiums for your work? And note that it may be impossible to do both at the same time: learning the skill set of hiring and being a manager is, almost by definition, so time-consuming, as well as emotion-consuming, that it likely leaves little time or energy to improve your own craft. And that’s the second caution: you growing into a manager will almost always come at the expense of growing in your own profession.
The third caution about this strategy is, by merely reselling the work of those under you, you lose the special value you bring. Let’s imagine you solve the first caution and turn yourself into a great manager. Then, suddenly, you’ll have a very different type of firm: a firm that resells cheaper labor for a more expensive rate. But when that is what your firm does, your clients hiring you and staying with you becomes about price, price, price, and nothing more. It’s a cut-throat business. Compare that to doing something unique, high quality, perhaps even so good, it’s almost priceless: your clients will want as much of you as they can afford! Which business would you rather be in?
These three cautions, taken together, build-up to the following: ask yourself what kind of company you want to build and how you want to be living, say, 5 or 10 years from now. Do you want to be a high-end craftsman? Do you want to be a CEO, perhaps making a lot of money but under enormous stress? Do you want to be managing a small but competent team that exists at a balance between the first two extremes listed in this paragraph? My prediction is that you, dear reader, will respond by wanting to build that perfect balance—ah, the dream! But that is the hardest of all. And should you want one of the other two options, I’d just remind you: be careful what you wish for… you may just get it!
