Outsourcing Your Freelance Work Is Not a Services Business

Some freelancers make this mistake and think they are running a services business.

In yesterday’s post, I explained how freelancing is entirely different from a services business. I hope you guys understood the points I wanted to make. Moving forward, in today’s post, I will talk about a common mistake many freelancers make and think they are doing a services business. Let’s start.

When freelancers start their freelancing journey, they have very few clients to work with. But as their career progress, they start getting more work. As I mentioned in my last post, as a solo freelancer, there is always a limit on the amount of work a freelancer can take. So when they start getting more work than their bandwidth, they go with either of these options: Stop taking new work, start outsourcing some of their work, or convert it into an agency business.

If, as a freelancer, you don’t have the bandwidth left to take on new work, you should stop taking on new work from clients. It is better to focus on a certain number of clients as closing more clients will disturb your focus, and you may end up getting in a burnout situation. I have personally been in a similar situation back in 2021 when I had so many clients that I couldn’t focus on any of them.

Next, there are some freelancers who built an internal team and start outsourcing some or most of their work. But what they do wrong is they never inform their client about it. They tell their client that they will do the work. Clients see the portfolio of the freelancer and give them the work, and then instead of doing the work themselves, they outsource it. They think of all of this as a services business.

This is the misconception they have. In my opinion what they are doing is nothing but cheating their clients. Sooner or later, clients will analyze the delivered work, and they will find it poor in quality. In that situation, they will immediately stop working with such freelancers.

So, I highly suggest everyone not follow any such practices where you get the work on your name and then get it done by hiring beginners. This is the worst thing one could do to their freelancing career.

Instead of this, what freelancers should do is they should convert it into an actual agency business. They can come up with a name for their business, and instead of getting the work on their name, they can take the work as an agency. It is possible that some clients may say no to working with them, but at least they are not in the business of cheating someone.

If you are finding it tough to successfully convert your freelancing into a services business or start a services business from scratch, don’t worry; in tomorrow’s post, I will share my input on starting a services business.

That’s all in this post.

Thanks for reading.

Have a great day!