| I manage a 2-person remote design and development team that seems similar to yours. We all got started doing individual freelance work, and then we raised some money as a team to pursue building our own software product. When we ran out of money, we went back to individual freelancing. We decided to actually start a consulting firm when we landed a big client that required combining all of our skills. We still actually operate with individual S-Corps which contract with our consulting firm LLC, which we own equally. Sometimes we still do individual freelance work outside of our firm. You may want to talk to a CPA about the best way to set things up for your particular goals. - Look for projects everywhere. Even if someone is looking for an individual freelancer, there's no harm in presenting yourself as a team and trying to get the gig anyway. - Local, remote, doesn't matter. The quality of the project is what matters most in my experience. Burnout matters even more when your team is small and everyone is relying on getting income from a project. - Definitely reach out to other agencies, particularly local ones. Tell them you can help with overload and custom coding problems they might not have the in-house talent to tackle. - I've never had a mentor/coach, so I can't really say if it's worth it. - You should probably start by doing the outreach yourselves. Try subscribing to some paid curated lead generation services for freelancers/agencies. For a couple hundred dollars a month you can get dozens of leads sent to your inbox every day and a few of those might be promising. Follow up with everyone relentlessly. I use a service called Cloze for this. Other thoughts: - Keep expenses other than payroll in mind as they can add up. You can probably start with less, but there are a lot of great tools that can streamline things and save your team a lot of time. We pay for a co-working space, DocuSign, Slack, GetHarvest, UberConference, Google Apps, and Cloze, to name the ones I can remember right now. - It's a really good idea to have a written contract with all of your clients. This is my favorite video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3RJhoqgK8. The lawyer in that video, Gabe, reviews all of our contracts and he really is my favorite person to pay. Best of luck! |