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>> If I work on my own business alone, I won’t have co-workers until I hire them. There's another, more subtle issue. If you aren't sitting on a million-dollar seed round, there's a _huge_ energy gap between working alone and hiring someone, even for a consultancy, never mind some kind of product effort on which you work for a year before you get any revenue. This is in part because of the additional taxes you have to pay if you're no longer flying solo, and in part because of demands on your own time. Say you're doing something solo and you're super strong technically and can do what you do very efficiently. It's pretty easy to generate a ton of revenue working in this way. It's also much easier to tolerate gaps or reductions in revenue - you could just work on your own stuff and continue to pay yourself from past revenues. Say, now, you want to grow, and hire people. But you can't just hire people. Now you have to pay for their benefits, pay unemployment insurance, etc etc. Moreover you have to manage them, which will reduce your own "technical" throughput to basically zero. I've done a back of the envelope, and for me it doesn't make sense to have fewer than 10 people in my employ, since I can't skim enough off the top to justify my own loss of productivity. And 1 person solo LLC vs a 10 person company are vastly different companies in terms of business operations (especially bizdev and sales), taxation, and regulation. I'd theoretically like to grow at some point. But I don't know how to do it in a sustainable fashion as a consultancy. Being (overly) fiscally conservative, I would not feel comfortable hiring for a more product-oriented business either unless it demonstrates traction and upward trajectory. $1k/mo is not what I'd call "traction". |