Ask HN: How to grow, evolve a freelance business
The positioning works great, because the topic is kind of hyped now with tech like Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus etc. and people offering these services with a decent level of experience are still rare. I never had trouble finding new customers and the business is doing great.
Still, facing the facts, as long as the business solely depends on me, my growth has a hard cap. I will not overcome my limited time, I can only do a few projects at the same time and the market will only accept a certain rate for my services. Also getting ill or more free time for family has direct implications on the business performance. It just doesn't scale.
To overcome this situation I need to evolve my business into something that scales. The easy answer would be just hire some people. This would introduce a lot of fix costs I'm trying to avoid. Also the investment from my side (time + money) is something I can't really define. Before new people benefit the business in any way they would need training, which has direct implications on the time I can spend in projects. I would also face the risk of employees leaving the company for whatever reasons, which would have quiet an impact.
I wonder if you maybe tackled a similar situation or have a tip how overcoming this scalability issue could look like. Do I maybe need to accept that substantial growth requires a substantial investment?