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Q. Do you need to be a big company?
A. They don’t come much smaller than mine.
The larger the company the bigger the projects or the more projects it can tackle at a time. On your own, you can manage two, possibly three at most. They would all need to be at different stages - one being planned, one being worked on and one just in the process of beta trials and testing. Having a bigger company means that you can attempt more ambitious projects. Bigger that is, in terms of the asset base and resourcing required.
There is another, and what I think is perhaps a somewhat cynical reason for being a bigger company. That is, you can charge larger fees because you apparently have more credibility. It is a perversity of business that you can call in consultants from a very large management consultancy company and pay £2000 or more per day for the benefit of their expertise. Yet, would you pay one of those guys that amount of money if you had engaged him directly on his own? I think not. Likewise, a moderately large Web development agency is able to command upwards of £500 per day from a corporate client and farm out the actual work to individual freelancers at around £200 per day. Or better yet pay permanent staff at under £100 per day. I find this quite extraordinary and of course it’s an over generalisation to say that all business is conducted like this, but the fact that it is allowed to happen at all, says a lot about the credibility gap between large and small companies. I do not for one minute believe that the quality of the finished product is materially better for it having been produced by a large company vs a small one. In fact in a lot of cases, a small company or an individual is producing it and the large outfit is simply factoring the cash flow.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
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