[swatcoder]

It’s extremely hard to engineer a product, sell a product, support a product, and administer a business all on your own. It really only works if you can escape a few of those hats through luck, unusual cleverness, or the right partner.

The easier road to having a lot of agency in your work is through consulting/contracting as you’ve already started. The more expertise your develop and the more reputation you earn, the more confidence you can bring to your recommendations and the more freedom your clients will give you. Once it starts churning, you make plenty of money and have lots agency and rarely need to look hard for work.

But that takes time. The most valuable advice, besides patience, is to be discerning about what clients you accept and retain. It can be tempting to take any client during a dry spell or to become enamored by a client with cool ideas, but some prospective clients will devour your soul and others will have financial trouble that leaves you with large unpaid invoices and little recourse. You can learn to spot this ahead of time and you want to develop that skill. Too extreme a bad client, or too many bad clients, will burn you out worse than any bad manager at bigcorp. So stay watchful and don’t be afraid to fire bad clients once you see things looking dicey.

Good luck!