397: Should I Start a Freelance Business or Build an Agency?

The Side Hustle Show

Nick Loper

Business, Education, Entrepreneurship, How To

4.7 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2020

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A service business is one of the fastest side hustles to get off the ground, and you can scale it by hiring other people to deliver the work.

But is there an advantage to staying a solo operator?

In this Side Hustle Showdown we're looking at freelancing vs. building an agency.

For this debate, I invited a couple members of The Side Hustle Nation community who both run cleaning companies:

Chris Schwab from ThinkMaids.com represented the agency side. We last heard from Chris in episode 294, where he talked about how he’d built his cleaning business to $60k a month in revenue, and scaled back his own involvement to just 10 minutes a day.
Ken Carfango from SoloCleaningSchool.com represented the solo freelance side. Ken’s a former engineer and a father of 5 who’s got his cleaning business dialed in where he can knock out the work himself in just a couple days, and enjoy 5-day weekends with his family.

Tune in to hear both Chris and Ken discuss which business model is best for:

Getting started
Finding new clients
Scaling
Start-up costs
How to exit
And more

If you’re trying to decide which path you want to take, stick around to learn how to avoid the dreaded “valley of despair” that often afflicts service businesses, and how to get started on the right foot.

Full Show Notes: Should I Start a Freelance Business or Build an Agency?

Transcript

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0:00.0	A service business is one of the fastest side hustles to get off the ground and you can
0:06.2	scale it by hiring other people to deliver the work.
0:09.5	But is there an advantage to staying as a solo operator?
0:13.0	To find out, it's time for another Side Hustle Showdown.
0:15.8	What's up, what's up, Nick?
0:20.0	Loper here, welcome to the Side Hustle Show
0:22.3	because you don't want to swim in a roped off sea.
0:25.0	Hat to Jimmy Buffett for that one.
0:26.7	This week continues our showdown series.
0:29.5	If you missed the first couple on podcasting versus YouTube and selling private label products on
0:34.8	Amazon versus product licensing. I encourage you to check those out. Today we're tackling
0:39.5	freelancing versus building an agency and we're doing this through the lens of a couple friends of the show who both run cleaning companies.
0:47.0	Again, trying to find guests in similar industries so they can speak each other's language.
0:52.0	But keep in mind, the stuff that we're about to cover applies to any service business online, offline.
0:57.0	On the agency side today is Chris Schwab from ThinkMade.com.
1:02.0	And when I say agency, I mean basically you're running... Chris Schwab from ThinkMade.com.
1:02.6	And when I say agency, I mean basically you're running the show and other people are doing
1:06.2	the actual labor.
1:07.2	Because you might remember Chris from episode 294, which was a couple summers ago,
1:11.8	discussing how he'd built the cleaning business
1:14.0	to 60 grand a month in revenue without ever doing any cleaning himself and had
1:18.3	scaled back his own involvement to just 10 minutes a day. You can find more about
	...

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