As a counter-point, I spent about 5 years pretty miserable between 3 different jobs - my complaints where the same at each organization. The profit motive was being put above all else, including employee well being, an actually high-quality service, and in some cases baseline ethics. People were constantly pressured into working more than they should, both in the short term (too many hours per week) and in the long term - vacation time that was hard or impossible to actually take. Overpromising and understaffing/tooling led to constant crunches, corner cutting, rushed low-quality deliverables, and constant fear - either that a client would be lost and blame would be placed, or that a bad client that should go would be retained to the teams detriment. Often all of this was paved over by toxic positivity. You point out the problems and they say "Look on the bright side. You are being too negative. It'll all shake out". Just pure gaslighting bullshit.
After the 3rd such place, and a complete inability to effect change - I threw in the towel and started my own agency 2 years ago. From the outset I made the purpose of the company to be quality of life, not profit. Fewer clients/hours per team member, more time to execute and put out work you are proud to hang your hat on. No assholes (teammates OR clients).
For the entirety of the past 2 years, including the hard bits of actually getting it off the ground and getting those first few customers, the difference has been night and day. My stress levels are the lowest they've been in years. My relationship with my wife is better. I never dread Monday, and rarely pine for Friday. Sometimes it really is the environment, and sometimes that environment is pervasive in a particular industry.
Had a very similar experience to you and have often dreamt about building my own company that would work the way I want it to.
But how do you get started? I have tried a few times and every time I got discouraged and it didn’t pan out. It’s just overwhelming, and I don’t know where to start. Then I’m doubting my abilities and thinking whether I really want to work like a dog for very little pay for months/years to start the business? Or maybe I’m just better off doing another 18 months stint followed by 6 months off to recover.
I know I’m not alone in this, but haven’t figured out how to get out of it.
Any insights on the above, or a blog if you’ve written about it already?
I'll try to answer this as fairly as I can by starting with the things that lined up to make it possible for me:
- I've been working in my industry for over 12 years and have amassed a decent sized network and twitter following along the way
- I don't have kids, so my costs are lower, and my time is my own.
- My wife makes good money and was supportive of me taking a hit to pay while I got things going (I didn't draw any money from the biz for the first 6 months, enabled by the next thing on the list)
- I had a close friend be willing to give me an essentially risk free, low interest loan of $30K to get things going. Enough to cover me for those 6 months. Loan was structured to be forgivable if business failed in the first 2 years, 5 year terms @ 5%, with no payments or interest accrual in the first year. Obviously a loan like this is a rarity, but if you are sitting on some savings that could be a good stand-in.
- I ran a business once before many years ago and learned a lot of the hard lessons that time (taxes/accounting/entity structure/hiring)
- I do digital marketing & WordPress dev - which means the service I sell is also a skillset most founders need (ability to market their service, set up a website). I'm also pretty comfortable selling to both a technical and non-technical audience, and I'm comfortable pitching directly to and managing the expectations of C-suite folks.
All of that combined is a pretty great place to "start from zero". Success wasn't guaranteed but I certainly wasn't going about things the hard way.
Anyway to get first few customers I started being pretty active in places where people who might need my services gathered - Slack communities, subreddits, et cetera. I tried to give insightful advice where good answers could be given in a few paragraphs. I offered to look at peoples issues directly or to solve really small problems for free + an ask to consider me for larger projects or retainer work, or to just say nice things if someone was asking for the types of services I offered.
I also pitched 2 customers who normally would have been below my going rate/retainer size as basically a "I need some case studies, someone has to go first, you'll get a bit of a deal if it's you". Once I had those first 2 customers as a base and a nice referral pipeline as a result of them and the presence in those communities I was able to grow from there.
When I had around 4-5 steady retainer clients and a bit of padding in the business account (about 4ish months in?) I started hiring help. I had a lot of previous experience hiring and working with international teams so I leveraged that to save some cash early on by hiring in the Philippines, Romania & South Africa. By the end of year 1 we were a team of 4 (myself included). Total revenue was around $200K, of which I managed to pay myself around $60K before taxes.
At the end of year 2 there is about 8 of us now including our first full time US hire. Year two was just shy of $600K in revenue and I was able to get myself back into 6-figure territory compensation wise, give everyone raises + Christmas bonuses, and still keep several months of runway in the business account. I don't expect the biz to make me a multi-millionaire any time soon (and that's not the point anyway), but things feel pretty stable at this point and growth remains strong. Results probably not typical.
I'll counter this counter-point: I started my own consulting (and later, hosting) business and they've been a slog.
The parent comment glossed over "the hard bits of actually getting it off the ground and getting those first few customers" -- it's really hard. Five years in now things are going okay, but it took a while to get back to the came total comp I had pre-starting-my-own-biz, and even now the level of work is much higher (but so is the comp...).
If I had to do it again I'm not sure I would, and would definitely do a lot of things different. The big one would be going hard on biz dev from day 1 (or even day 0; start prospecting before incorporation), with #2 and #3 being talking to an accountant and lawyer ASAP once I could afford them.
My anecdote was about finding what's important to you and making a change to that specifically. For me it was a bigger focus on quality of life and quality of product, not compensation. Sounds like compensation is more important for you so my path would not be your path. As to the hard bits - I'll be covering that in response to another commentor who asked how I got started.
Agreed on accounting & legal - though this is easier now than ever with services like Bench.co - which I set up on day 1 right after spinning up the business entity & bank account.
I won't say I'm not, but I will say it's probably a bad fit if you are in the US and a developer. It's a marketing agency that also does some custom WordPress development. For US based developers it's a combination of doesn't pay awesome + PHP rather than the latest shiny thing. Our hiring focus is mostly either outside of the US, or if in the US on people who've already gotten their bag from elsewhere and are more interested in chill work than a big paycheck. We win them over not with total compensation but with things like ability to only work 20 hours a week or leeway to rabbit hole down some interesting bit of code or try out a new marketing tactic that goes well beyond what the customers budget would normally allow, merely because it scratches an itch.
Not inappropriate - but no not currently. We're a Marketing agency that also does custom WordPress dev. We're working towards diversifying a bit by also launching some internally owned monetized content sites or small software products (such as a useful paid plugin for WordPress) but that's about it at the moment.
After the 3rd such place, and a complete inability to effect change - I threw in the towel and started my own agency 2 years ago. From the outset I made the purpose of the company to be quality of life, not profit. Fewer clients/hours per team member, more time to execute and put out work you are proud to hang your hat on. No assholes (teammates OR clients).
For the entirety of the past 2 years, including the hard bits of actually getting it off the ground and getting those first few customers, the difference has been night and day. My stress levels are the lowest they've been in years. My relationship with my wife is better. I never dread Monday, and rarely pine for Friday. Sometimes it really is the environment, and sometimes that environment is pervasive in a particular industry.