[Jhsto]

I recently started freelancing after moving out from Bay Area to a different continent. I used to network a lot in Bay Area and thus I have had good luck finding people who would be interested in my services. However, I have needed to turn down potential clients because they have essentially said that they would like to hire me as an employee. I am young and it seems like most companies are looking to hire me in order to comb me into something useful for them.

Most people here tend to be parallel entrepreneurs rather than serial ones -- they have a half of a dozen projects going on at the same time. For this reason, I would not want to commit to a project to which even the CEO does not seem to have much time for. Some companies also seem to lack the much-spoken thing in Bay Area of product and/or market focus, which would make my role ubiquitous, which is not what I want. Although, because of my young age and mainly software expertise, I don't want to directly say that I think their way of running the business is bad. I do think that most of the companies are able to make it into a profitable business, but for me to engage into payroll positions, I would want something riskier than that.

Have you found the same kind of struggles early into your service firm? Would you have any tips on how to pitch these companies into buying what they want as contract work instead of hiring me as an employee? Any nice way to tell these people that I don't believe in the way they are running the business?

[bigmanwalter]

I encounter this situation constantly. The economics of outsourcing doesn't always work out for every project. As a consultant, you'll be charging 2-3x the hourly rate of an employee, and the company is giving up the benefit of having in-house expertise on their own product.

If you're okay with working for one client full time for the duration of a contract, my advice would be to work with a few recruiters. They'll take a 30% cut, but as they know about some of the best contracts it is often worth your while. Their clients are using contractors to deal with spikes in their workload, or for projects where they don't expect to need you in 6 months.

Another route is in finding clients who want you to manage the full project. Things like building MVPs or building Version 1 of an app. Usually they have a limited budget and aren't looking to take on the risk of an employee. These clients don't generally have any in-house technical expertise. In order to bag this type of client, I have found that having a solid project template to work from and speed up development is a must. It took me almost 2 months to fully set up my build pipeline and get a start project up and running just the way I like it (don't hate my just because I'm a perfectionist.) But now I can kick off projects with a running start. Deliver a fully functioning app in under a week, albeit with only the first couple features, and your client will be happy to pay your rate for the duration of the project.

Finally, the last route I know of is to specialize in a hot technology. AngularJS seems to be popular in my area. A lot projects were started with the thinking that Angular would do all the hard work for them, and now they are neck deep in spaghetti written by a junior. If you can market yourself as an Angular expert, they will be willing to pay higher rates as well as put up with the fact you aren't sticking around. But you need to have a hard-to-find talent for this power dynamic to exist. A friend of mine is a Haskell freelancer and finds it gives him good leverage.