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 perso

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.