This really resonated with me because I definitely felt the same way when I was freelancing. This lack of time to really compete with people who were more experienced than me, and to learn new skills, was a real sticking point for me. It’s so horrible to look at your situation and think…

I love my job, but can’t take a proper holiday, and I know I’m gonna burn out if I keep going on like this in the future. And what if I get ill? Well, I’m royally screwed, if that happens.

Once you get into this ‘hole’ of working 14 hour days as a freelancer and never having enough time, I think you have a couple of options in front of you:

Keep being overworked, and decide that you’re ok with that Figure out how to get better projects and better clients, and bill better for it (freeing up more time) Keep freelancing, but build up some sort of extreme niche expertise that lets you bill crazy amounts per hour (like a security consultant) — I’m sure everyone would love this, but it’s not necessarily an option available to everyone Join someone else’s team Start your own team

I linked to a blog that one of the guys on my team wrote about the whole ’solo freelancer’ thing inside my original blogpost. It’s something I feel pretty strongly about, actually. It might sound a little bit cocky (and there are some exceptional freelancers, for sure), but I sometimes don’t think freelancers working by themselves can actually keep up with a little team like ours that’s learning and sharing at such a fast pace. We are by no means unique—there are tons of even better teams than ours, out there—it’s just the nature of having more heads on a task, and being able to get more done. You don’t get prizes for doing everything by yourself when there’s no need to. Being part of a strong team just amplifies all your of efforts to a huge extent.

From my experience in the last 2 years or so, I can see that we share a crazy amount of knowledge around our team, and are constantly pairing up and teaching each other stuff. Let’s say I decide to learn Vagrant and Puppet—2 months later, the whole team has that under their belt because I’ve shared that learning with them. And others do the same thing to me, too.

I decided to start my own team, of course, but I honestly don’t think there’s any need to for all freelancers to force themselves down this route if they don’t want to. I think the best route for a lot of freelancers is just finding someone who complements what you can do, and deciding to pair up with them to pitch a few projects together. There’s no need to start up an official joint venture with them or register a company right away—that would be a bad idea if you did it too soon, actually. It’s just about finding someone you can get things done with, and pushing each other to achieve more. While a client might be worried about taking on a solo freelancer (it’s very easy for you to get ill and derail a project), that risk is significantly reduced if they’re working with a pair of freelancers. And you’d be surprised at how open clients are to this—it’s not something I think needs to be hidden when you’re pitching a project—just make sure there’s a clear agreement between the two of you, and invoicing and billing is clear for the client, and most clients will be fine with it.

When I was in exactly this position, the biggest thing for me was finding someone to pair up with — I was lucky enough to meet Sergei on that old developer site, Forrst, and for me, that was a massive help. Starting with the occasional little gig here and there, we found that we worked well together, so we built things up to work on bigger and better projects together as time went on. We were both relatively inexperienced back then, but just having someone else to team up with and share the load, helped so much. And it’s way nicer to have a bit of communication—we used HipChat and left that open while we were working—it really helped to reduce some of that isolation that you often feel, as a solo freelancer.

Our team at Hanno is remote at the moment, and I actually think that a big part of the future for freelancers is with agencies which are remote and have a different attitude towards the way they operate—where different people work on different projects, and it’s essentially a group of awesome freelancers coming together to do a great project, then splitting apart again. Brad Frost did something like this on the Techcrunch redesign, which is well worth a read.

So that’s the biggest thing I’d recommend from my own experiences — getting social, meeting people, and finding someone you think you can get into a project with. Figure out where you’re weak, and they’re strong (this is the ideal way to do it, but even just sharing similar skills can help you get 2x the work done, and be more reliable for clients). It’ll let you pitch for bigger projects and also allow you to learn and grow faster.

All I can say is that it worked for me, and it made it a whole lot easier to be self-sufficient. I’m sure it would work for many others, too.

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Photo credit: @tensaibuta