Doing tech related stuff as a full-time freelancer, countless other business like mine have started up and failed over the years. I had total freedom, wake up whenever I want, talk as casual as I want to customers, watch the world cup on my pc. I've never seen anyone do even half as well as me in this space. The only ones that survive became a slave to their own business, becoming nothing more than middlemen salespeople and have to work 8am-6pm because everyone else does. I go to see them in their shop and there they are, filling out express delivery receipts, calling suppliers while wearing a suit and tie. Some 'be your own boss' that lifestyle is.
It's done well enough but as I get older, bills get bigger, new insurance and rent increases and medical expenses, I just cant scale it up. I can't raise prices because of constant competition, even if I handled more jobs it still doesn't scale enough, a mortgage will never be possible.
The only question is, for the sake of owning my own business, should I sell out and become a generic store? Is it worth turning my 5 year creation into something I find professionally dishonest (salespeople lie to me all the time but they need to to make more money), if I keep my name as the owner? The way I see it, if I'm going to be forced to get up at 7:30am, it better be for a regular paycheck that I can rely on. Being a wagecuck and fighting for every sale seems like a painful existence.
Hire other people, my dude. Turn your self-employment into a consulting agency with you as managing partner. You have the connections, scaling requires scaling manpower too.
Asher Butler
I basically do advertise myself as a consultant and in fact a significant part of my revenue is from straight consulting, probably 25% or so. My problem is I can't scale it. There is a finite amount of people in my city who can use consulting. Its the sort of thing which companies need as a one-off, once I teach them what I know, they can do it themselves.
The remaining part of my business, the typical freelance sales can scale on account of simply doing more work and taking market share back from competition. It hurts though, ever tried talking to a bank about a mortgage and they say you should try to earn more money and you remember that one customer who said a competitor would do 6 hours worth of work for $40 and you turned it down? Should I have done it, how many $6/hour jobs do I have to take to afford a mortgage. Its too much.
I feel like the only solution is to charge a shitload more for my consulting. Straight up double it. It doesn't make an overall massive difference in my revenue (100% to 125%) but it can keep it going for longer until more opportunities arise...
Isaiah Clark
I feel your pain. My business is suffering this year too. I thought I was getting close to doing it full time, and then everything tanked. I hope you figure something out.
Ryder Thompson
Cute Lucario.
Juan Clark
OP, this is a crypto board, what the fuck are you going on about? See if Jow Forums cares.
Joseph Morales
It seems like your issue is a lack of clients, which is either a problem in how you're marketing yourself or a problem with what you're marketing.
Do you regularly check in with the companies you've helped? In my consulting experience I find the biggest laugh of the industry is that it's soooo common a company actually does not follow through properly and could use continued guidance. You may find some of your clients are not succeeding based on what you gave them, they might blame you when it's probably their fault. If you were to foster relationships and up front say "This is a really common thing so I like to do checkups after 3 and 6 months", when you meet up w/ them again they may have additional work for you. That's at least something.
Outside of that, you need to do more networking. Maybe start a referral program for your clients - if they feel like you were of value, tell them if they recommend you to another company and you get a job you'll kick them back some of the money or give them free consulting time down the road.
Anyway, I help companies scale for a living, but lack of customers is the one thing I don't touch - that's a marketing or a product issue. If your problems were efficiency or cost there's always solutions for that.
Maybe you need to try some paid advertising and see if you can get ROI positive. Also, offering free talks or classes which just wet the toes of the people who attend may get you some customers. Go to networking events (find meetup groups since they're often free) and talk to EVERYONE and be super charismatic.
What do you consult on specifically and what size companies stand to benefit the most?
Wyatt Green
Ironic, since crypto can't be used in 99.99% of businesses and doesn't work as a financing option either.
Cameron Campbell
You should be charging a ton for consulting work. Typically 3x what an employee would earn for the same work.
Ironically that's how companies decide that your work is worthwhile. In my field, the bottom feeders all charge $60 an hour for something that will break the first time you try to update the data. 'Legit' shops will charge $200 an hour.
Xavier Hill
No, not yet at least. Either way, what that user meant was that this board is mostly full of crypto threads and it's aimed to discuss mostly crypto.
Michael Wilson
I'm in the same boat. I do run an online retail business since 2012. I do get fucked by the chinese lately and I dont know how my business will develope in the next years. But I will fight till the bitter end. I still have to learn a lot about marketing and my company is still a small business so I am very flexible to change my productline if I have to. Also there are a lot of potential customers in my country I havent contacted yet. Till now my company has a good reputation in the niche I sell my stuff but the chinese amazon sellers are 20-30% cheaper than I am. We'll see how it goes the next years. I cant image being a wagecuck after 6 years of beeing my own boss.
Jeremiah Howard
Fair points on checking up on companies to see if my work helped them the way I thought it would, definitely something I've slept on both figuratively and literally. Ugh the more I think about this I definitely should have done more.
I do free talks and stuff like that, sometimes to groups of 30+ people and get a handful of new customers. I used to be borderline autistic in how un-charismatic I was (I have a mild stutter) but running a business has made me WAY better to the point that my confidence is so high and I can talk for so long, its probably creeping into arrogance. I make no apologies though and customers appreciate that I know this stuff so damn well. Paid advertising is always an option, I tried it briefly many years ago and got terrible ROI, never tried since.
I consult on 3D printing, all size businesses benefit from sole traders up to government defense agencies.
Kevin Morgan
Good advise.
Kevin Cox
Its called hiring someone to manage your store.
good luck wagecucking a job at old age when they will fire you
Jackson Morales
That is age discrimination and is illegal in the U.S..
Christian Watson
I feel your pain fellow anons. 7 years freelancing and had to start wagecucking last Monday. Had to liquify assets and investments just to keep the doors open but it Turns out it wasn't worth it and I have no more investments either.. fuckkkk meeeee
Juan Green
>and is illegal in the U.S. HAH like any bilderberg corp would care bro.
Jaxon Jenkins
I don't love paid ads but they work sometimes - typically you have to put in a decent amount of work (testing) and of course $$ to get it right. The beautiful thing about it is if you DO find that magic cocktail, it's beast mode... you can continuously bring in new customers and it's always profitable. Paid is the secret to building a huge business these days, but given your current business size it's probably not necessary. I'd only spend time on it if you felt like you could get there without too much of a financial investment.
Speaking of gov't - how often are you bidding for different relevant gov't contracts? There's a lot of money to be made there. I obviously have no clue what their 3D printing needs are but you should absolutely keep abreast of anything related to your field where you can put a bid in. Your expertise might lead you down a better business path than consulting that way.
I really know jack shit about your industry, so it's hard for me to give specific advice... but I'd imagine there are other networking opportunities to be had and you really need to be taking advantage of that as much as possible and really being the guy who just talks to everyone. Then you need to FOLLOW UP with the people you met... like... regularly... regardless of whether you think they're useful to you now, because they might be later. You're 100% in a business of who you know, getting WoM recommendations & having people think about you when the right time comes. That means you need to be at the forefront of peoples minds as "Joe Jow Forums, the 3D printing guy" so when they have a 3D printing need they think, "let me contact Joe Jow Forums, he's always been a good guy."
I do think a corporate referral program could be useful to set up.
I'm not a huge fan of this idea but it works for some people - you could start a website/blog & an email newsletter with industry advice/tidbits/news you share. You can try to kick that off with paid ads or forum posting..
Jackson Lewis
Also re: referrals in general... the bigger your rolodex is, the more power you have to leverage those. If you have a huge contact list of people who you've had several interactions with over a 6 month period and then just shoot out an email saying "Hey [friend], I happen to have some time which opened up in my consulting schedule so I'm looking to take on some new clients. If you know anybody and want to put me in touch, I'd really appreciate it!"
You could technically A/B test that, one that ends like that, and one that includes you offering to kick them back 10% of the profit.. see where you get more bites.
Also with any A/B test you run (general rule, paid ads, referral programs, what the fuck ever you're trying), make sure you start with a smaller audience size. Learn first, then expand. If you want to message your contacts, you don't want to send 100% of them something because 50% are going to get a worse thing. Send 5% email A, 5% email B. See which performs better. Send that one to the other 90%.
Henry Allen
I definitely think I did the work over the past 5 years to get to the state of being the go-to guy when it comes to my field. I don't bid for government and big firm jobs, they come to me through word-of-mouth. No doubt it made me complacent but cold calling never worked when I tried it. It helps when I used to work in government. Somewhat ironically, I quit that government job on advice from a colleague because it was taking a dangerous toll on my mental health.
Honestly man I'm going to start by increasing the consulting rate by 50%. I expect literally no regular customers will complain, so a 100% rise will come after a while.
I guess I was scared to contact past businesses I consulted before because I would rather not know if I didn't solve their problem, if they never contacted me. I had a few clients in the past who blamed me for their fault, I assumed they were the only ones my work didn't help them with. I'll get on that. Thanks for all this advice.
Samuel Cooper
Sure, hope some of it helps. If you ever get to the point where your problem is too many clients come back to biz, maybe I'll see it & I can more confidently help you work through that.
Now if only the startup I work for could sell I can take my payout and start my own business and be able to join your non-wage-cucking ranks! Good luck to you, I hope you can get your shit together and maintain the lifestyle you want.
