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Business

Keith Doyle
Keith Doyle
25,973 Points
Posted by Keith Doyle
Keith Doyle
25,973 Points

Freelance w/friend or solo?

Just starting out picking up clients aside from my day-job and I was wondering what people's opinions were about starting out freelancing. I have someone that wants to work together and we're both working on a site for his mother-in-law.

Better to start solo or jump right into a "partnership"?

1 Answer

Gareth Borcherds
Gareth Borcherds
9,372 Points
Gareth Borcherds
Gareth Borcherds
9,372 Points

Biggest problem with a partnership in my mind, is basically how you feel the other person will carry their weight. A lot of partnerships end up bad because one partner brings in all the work and the other one gets freelance rates without doing any sales. A lot of the work involved in making good money as a freelancer is based on your ability to bring in clients. There are lots of people that can do the work (treehouse is teaching more and more to compete with you every day :) so the skills that differentiate are sales and client management/relationship skills.

I have 2 partners in a freelance business that has generated now over 500k in the last 3 years and we've had a lot of these problems getting going. Partnerships can be hugely beneficial as there is no way we could be as big as we are without it, but we've definitely gone through our rough patches.

My advice, if I could do it all over again, is don't strike up any agreements in the beginning. Do a couple projects where you bring them in at a set rate to help you out and see if they can bring in any work on their own. You can always find other freelancers willing to do your overflow of work (we do all the time), but finding someone that can land that large client for you is a skill hard to find, but one of the only ones worth partnering with.

As always, take this with a grain of salt. I'm basing this off my experience and could be way off base for what works for you. Good luck :)