Because we're all friends and we only split the money for the projects that we all worked on, projects that need, say, #X engineers, #Y designers etc, and so we

Because we're all friends and we only split the money for the projects that we all worked on, projects that need, say, #X engineers, #Y designers etc, and so we split the funds. If anyone gets their own contract, by all means, they can get paid directly, but usually companies might hire us as a team.