What’s the Career Path for Ambitious Freelancers?

I read the above article on the freelanceswitch blog. This is a topic I had touched upon earlier. I figured I would link to that article and write my comment in this blog. It made sense to visit this topic again as I have made some significant progress on the path I had mentioned in my last post.

I have made progress in setting up my own company now. With two full time employees aboard and going up to four full time employees by the beginning of next month, it has been an amazing year for the business. Having a team naturally means the capacity of what we can do is now far greater than what I was able to do as a freelancer.

My initial thought was to staff the company with freelancers. But, unlike in the US, freelancers are a rare breed in Sri Lanka. And it seems that it is next to impossible to attract freelancers to a job here. Everyone wants a "job", not a "gig". But I can totally relate to that as I went through the same growing pains period.

Then, with the not so great experience of working with a bunch of freelancers from eastern Europe, trying to work though three timezones and dealing with people who claimed "excellent English Communication skills" but never ever came on Skype for a voice chat and instead insisted that all communication should be through text chat, I came to the realization, that if I wanted to be more than my individual capacity for the clients, there is no other way but to recruit people on a full time basis.

SO we bag our recruitment drive. It has not been easy finding the right candidates. I have recorded my thoughts here, here and here. Persistence paid off and now we are on the verge of becoming a 4 (5 including me) person team and have come to the point where we have out grown our original dig.

Pretty soon we will be moving to a office which will enable us more leg space and would allow us to get more people as the need arises. Personally for me, this would also mark a significant change as this would mean that I am moving back to an office environment and somewhat of standard hours from my current work from home arrangement. I plan on discussing this in detail in a future blog post.

So now even this blog will naturally change focus from the ranting of a freelancer to a ranting of a journey of running a company.