Should You Work As Freelancer Or An Agency?

When working as a service-based business owner, for example as a copywriter, you may come to the stage in your business where you’re wondering if you should be working as a freelancer or if you should scale your business to become an agency.

There are certainly many pros and cons to each option and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach so it’s really about looking at your goals and seeing what kind of business you would like to have when determining whether you should continue to work as a freelancer or if you should start an agency.

So, in this post we’re going to share with you some of the main pros and cons for each option so that you can see which may work best for you.

Freelancer:

More profit:

When working as a freelancer, one of the best things about it is that you have very little overheads to be dealing with and since you’re most likely going to be working on your own or perhaps with a very very small team then you definitely don’t have to be paying things out for staff members or other things that you would have to do when you’re working as an agency, so this means that any revenue that comes into your business is going to be more profit than it would be if you were working as an agency.

Less hassle:

When you’re working as a freelancer, of course things can still go wrong and you can have nightmare clients and projects can get pushed behind and all sorts of things that can bring about hassle, but in general since you’re going to be the person who’s fully responsible for everything, including meeting deadlines and projects, then really there’s not going to be as much hassle, and you’re not going to be chasing up freelancers or staff when they’re late or having to deal with hiring and firing people or dealing with difficulties in your office such as office refurbishment or any repairs that have to be carried out, so there’s definitely that as a plus side that you will have less hassle when you’re working alone.

Less freedom:

Of course one of the downsides is that if you’re a freelancer, then you’re directly responsible for working with your clients on a project and this means that if you, for example want to take a vacation or you get sick then you’re going to have to figure out something else whereas if you were working as an agency then you would have other people who could manage this on your behalf.

Agency:

More scalable:

An agency is definitely going to be a more scalable business model, which means that you can scale in different areas, you can add different departments, and you can grow your business in a much bigger way – of course you can definitely do this as a freelancer when you’re growing into an agency, but when you have an agency then there’s obviously more potential for scaling at a higher level since you have people who can help you with this.

It’s a sellable asset:

When you’re building an agency, one of the best things about it is that you’re going to have something in the future that you can sell on, so this means that you’re building assets for your future that could perhaps help you in your retirement years if you chose to sell later on.