4 ms·
> I already miss running my company You are freelancing now. You are already running your own company. You were doing consulting before, and now you are consu
by gexla 13y ago
> I already miss running my company
You are freelancing now. You are already running your own company.
You were doing consulting before, and now you are consulting in the same space. This is the same space your company was operating in but you left for financial reasons. Now you find consulting is a bitch, but apparently consulting was a bitch with the company you left.
It does sound like something needs to change.
I'm not sure anyone here can give you advice that you don't already know given you have been working in this space with your old company and now as a consultant. Maybe your partner was holding you back. Maybe you will find new inspiration by going solo. Maybe you need to move to a different area of consulting.
Products is probably a good direction to go. The big difference between products and consulting is that you can build a product and sell that product multiple times. With consulting you are limited to the time that you have in one day. If you max out your time and you still aren't where you want to be, then you have nowhere else to go but raise your rates or higher more people. If your customers will bolt when you raise your rates and you can't find more work for your new hires, then you are pretty much stuck. Maybe that was the problem with the old company?
- koevet 13y agoFreelancing in Europe is most of the time very similar to be a full time employee. You have to show up at your customer's premises and work for 8/9 hours with the other employees. No way to deal with more than one client at the time, unless you start working 16 hours a day - which I'm not afraid of - but it's not a sustainable model on the long run. So, no, I don't think that being a freelance is equivalent to running my own company. We had multiple problems in my company. The main one, I think, was new clients acquisition. It is a very time consuming process that often results in lot of (paper) work and meetings and no contract signed. Another mistake, as I mentioned, was not focusing on one or two specific geographical markets. Flying people around Europe, paying them hotel/food and daily allowances it is costly and reduces the margins greatly. Not to mention the language problem: very often, if you want to work in Germany (just an example) you got to speak the language.
- thibaut_barrere 13y agoI switched to "5 hours sessions" per day and I'm focusing on 2 clients, so that I have time for my SaaS, for my family, and as well a bit of margin to handle emergencies. (but I definitely agree that freelancing and running a SaaS or product-oriented company is absolutely not the same...)