Expanding your freelance business, or turning it into an agency

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Lots of freelancers wonder about whether it’s a good idea to expand your freelance business, or even turn it into an agency! Particularly if you’re in a situation where:

• Clients ask you for referrals to translators in other language pairs
• Clients need more work than you can do by their deadline
• You look at some of your agency clients and see room for improvement

Key questions to ask

This is a topic that I think about with some regularity! Although, to spoil the surprise, I’ve concluded that I have almost no desire to expand my business or become an agency. Why?

• I’m happy with the volume and quality of work I have right now; I make what I consider a healthy income on my own
• I don’t like being responsible for the quality of other people’s work
• I don’t want more constraints on my free time
• I don’t enjoy the management aspects of the business enough to want to expand them; mostly, I enjoy translating and interpreting

However, I don’t think that expanding your business is a bad idea. In fact, I think that, as most medium-to-large agencies move toward, or have already embraced, the high volume/low-margin work of machine translation with human editors, there’s actually an opening in the market for true boutique agencies, run by translators and interpreters who do some of the work themselves and subcontract some of the work to high-quality freelancers.

If this is something that interests you, I would mull over the following:

• Do you consistently have enough work that you could keep more people busy?
• Do clients consistently ask you for referrals to other translators and interpreters?
• Do you enjoy project management, client relations, potentially proofreading, and other tasks that go along with running an expanded freelance business or an agency?
• Would you enjoy expanding your freelance business into an asset that you could potentially sell at some point?

To me, here’s the kicker

Here’s what I bump up against, whenever I think about potentially expanding: quality work is not cheap. There are really only two ways to earn a profit margin on agency-type work:

1. Keep your rates the same as your freelance rates, and outsource work to good translators and interpreters who charge less than you do
2. Raise your “agency” rates above what you charge for your freelance work

To me, this is the hard part. Most people you’d really like to hire, probably charge about the same as you do. Sooooo, where’s the profit margin going to come from? Admittedly, there are ways to do this, such as:

• Find good, up-and-coming translators and interpreters who are at the beginning of their careers, actively looking for work, and willing to work for less than what you charge
• Find good translators and interpreters who might want to give you an attractive rate for a guaranteed volume of work; i.e. you’ll “retain” them for 5,000 words a week, or 10 hours of interpreting, regardless of whether you use the time

Still, make sure you think this through before you dive in!

 

My conclusion: No!

I’ve had a number of agency/quasi-agency ideas over the years. Maybe I should start an “only official documents” agency, or an agency that only does French to English international development? And, in the end, I decided against it, for the reasons I mentioned above. At the same time, I think that, particularly in the translation world, there’s a niche waiting to be filled. Hopefully these tips are helpful if you’re considering this for your own business!