If you’ve read my last post and have been following my business of freelancing series, then you either took the red pill or the blue pill after the last post. Full disclosure: I’m not sure which pill is which. But let’s assume you took whichever color corresponded to “I want to stop selling hours of labor and not become a managing director.”
You’re going to move toward profit and away from hourly billing.
That’s all well and good, but you’re going to need to know what to do instead. What should set your sights on as a new business model?
In case you haven’t caught my recent posts, I’ve sort of inadvertently started an ongoing series. I’ve now given it a category tag, so you can read the posts in sequence, if you’d like (though the tag shows them to you in reverse order). This is another post in that series.
(Quick editorial interlude: you don’t see it in the comments, really, but A LOT of people are writing me direct via email/social media to comment about the series or ask questions. I want to say that I really appreciate the feedback and enthusiasm. And I also want to pre-apologize if I miss some things from you all. There are dozens of you and one of me, and I do my best with the responses, on top of running our growing business.)
I’m mentioning this because so far I’ve basically just given you background information. Don’t get me wrong — it’s important background. But background nonetheless.
Time for Your First Concrete Action on the Path to Profit
So, I figured today I’d switch it up a little and give you a bit of decisive action: the first step along the path toward business ownership and profit.
It turns out the action itself is easy to summarize. I’ll do it right now:
Decide whether or not you want to own an agency and have a “managing director” kind of role.
If the answer is “yes, then,” great! You have your business plan.
If the answer is “no,” then you need a business plan. And the first step toward having that plan is recognizing that you need to stop billing by the hour.
The agency vs. non-agency decision is simple to conceptualize, but it’s important to mull it over for a while. So much so that the only actionable ‘homework’ I’ll ‘assign’ here is to make that decision. For the rest of the post, I’m going to explain why you have to make this decision.
Hey, it’s been a while since I did a slow travel digest. I think that’s because, until this spring, we did more fast travel than slow. We spent time in Dubai, Thailand, the Bay Area, and midwest locations over the fall and winter months. But those trips were 1-3 weeks in nature, rather than months-long.
But hey, we’re back at it.
So I’ll talk about my experience in Spearfish, South Dakota, where we spent a month. If you’re just in it for the video content and picks, though, you can skip to the bottom.
Spearfish: The Black Hills Experience
Amanda and I tend to move around a lot. But early March saw us in Michigan at our house, so when the world battened the hatches, we battened down along with it. After all, our normal lifestyle is already fairly distanced from everyone, so in a lot of ways, minus the lack of mobility, nothing much changed for us.
But after two months of that, we grew pretty restless and decided to head somewhere more open/remote and less touched by the whole COVID situation. The “somewhere” we picked was South Dakota because of a combination of the appeal of the Black Hills and its relatively laissez faire approach to lockdown restrictions.
And, man was it good to hit the road after two months of being stationary.
Cats on the road.
We headed to Spearfish, South Dakota, which was about 16 hours driving from our lake house. Spearfish sits in the Black Hills of South Dakota and is maybe an hour and a half from Mt. Rushmore and very close to motorcycle Mecca, Sturgis. It’s a town with probably around 10,000 people and was a fun mix of the rural and the surprisingly cosmopolitan.
A deep dive into the nature of profit, which I heuristically described at money that you could make while asleep.
I want to follow those up by closing a loop I’ve kind of left open.
Throughout those two posts, I talked about the freelancer simultaneously (and inadvertently) occupying two roles: owner and employee. They excel as employees, who earn money via salary. But given their zero-profit model, they do terribly as owners, who earn money via profit (or appreciation).
Today, I’d like to delve into the owner-operator concept in a lot more detail.
I’ve talked about how you can reason about a freelancer’s profitability (or lack thereof) by trying to backfill everything the freelancer does. But if you’re a freelancer or an aspiring freelancer, this is precisely backward. Why take action and then hope it makes sense, when you can figure out the sense before taking action?
Understanding the owner-operator dynamic will at least help you avoid blundering into a situation with a low ceiling, and, ideally, give you a sense of how to create a profitable business from the outset.
Owner-Operator: A More Appropriate Job Title Than You’d Think
When I first hung out my shingle to moonlight, a decade ago, I gave myself a new job title as the owner of my “consultancy.” You guessed it. Owner-operator.
Proud of this, I told my dad about it, and he skeptically pointed out that this made me sound like I drove and owned a truck. He suggested that I change my title to “founder and principal,” which I did.
To this day, I’m not sure why I conflated that title with something that independent contractors called themselves. But I do think that, in my corporate naivete, I stumbled into a pretty good term for what they are.
Someone that buys a truck and makes a living transporting freight is certainly an “owner-operator,” by convention. But I’d argue that so, too, is the freelancer. Both not only have businesses where the owner is the operator, but also where you’d be hard pressed to separate the roles.
But let’s forget about trucks and freelance app dev, and consider a different owner-operator setup.
As I threatened in my last post, I’m starting something of a loosely collected series. Maybe I’ll even get organized and give them a WordPress category at some point.
If you missed the last post, it’s not exactly required reading, but it would help with context. In that post, I explained that freelancers, however they describe themselves, aren’t business owners. Not really.
And I went on to say that the primary distinction between business owners and freelancers is that the former reason about profit. Freelancers simply plunder every last dime from their “businesses,” not understanding that this is salary, and thus a business cost, rather than profit.
But I didn’t dive too much into the nature of profit itself.
I would understand if you read that last post and said, “I get what you’re saying, but I’m not sure I grok. Couldn’t I just arbitrarily say that my salary is 80% of what I bring in freelancing, and then 20% of it would be profit? Problem solved, right?”
The answer is, “no, definitely not.” But I can understand if you don’t understand why that’s the answer.
In the most abstract sense, think of profit as money your business can make while you sleep (or, in general, while you don’t work). And you, as a freelancer literally selling your hours of labor, can’t make any money while you don’t work, 20% or any other percent.
But let’s clear things up in this post by examining a concretion. I’m going to walk you through a very realistic app dev freelancing situation and talk through the ideas of cost, salary, and profit. Hopefully that drives the point home.
