Pros and cons of working for clients vs working for yourself

When I’ve chatted with more experienced SEO’s, the one thing that becomes clear is that SEO’s start working with clients, but many drop these to work for themselves.

The argument goes that if you’re good at making someone else money, you should be good at making that money for yourself - and much more than you’re getting paid on the marketing front.

Trouble is, making that money yourself is the hard part - I’m not talking about the rankings and marketing, but the general admin work and so on. I work with a lot of ecommerce clients - there’s not a chance in hell I want to shift their own workload onto myself.

Beside, one thing client’s have that I don’t - aside from the time to focus on their business model - is a general passion, knowledge, and experience of their business vertical. Taking on their workload would mean exposing yourself to failings in these areas.

However, despite the fact that I love working with most of my clients, I can see the day when I no longer will.

Some of the pros and cons of working for clients vs working for yourself:

Pros of working for clients

- Clients provide a safe income, which you can reinvest in your business
- Clients may sometimes provide tips and tricks you can reuse elsewhere
- Clients show you where the money is
- Clients push you harder, via targets & deadlines
- Clients don’t let you sit on your arse all day

Cons of working with clients

- Clients require you to focus on their goals, not yours
- Clients can prevent you building a business in the same or related market
- Clients can demand evening and weekend work
- Clients can require a lot of time in general communications

Pros of working for yourself

- Profit margins are much bigger
- No concerns about non-compete - go for the markets you want
- Work at your own pace in your own time
- Complete focus on your own goals and objectives

Cons of working for yourself

- You can end up working blind, ie, not learn where the real money avenues are
- You have to learn all the tricks yourself with no easy fasttrack
- You could get lazy without meaning to
- No safe income - if your business starts failing, you have no simply fallback

Overall, it’s a bit of a mixed bag - if money and profits are what you want, and you’re prepared to invest all your time into chasing very specific business models, then to hell with clients, embrace the risk, and reap the rewards as applicable.

I’m not one for chasing money, but I am concerned about too many eggs in one basket - ie, client work. So what I’m trying to do at present is diversify my income streams as much as possible. Ideally, I want to see myself moving towards 50% income from clients, and 50% income from other sources.

The difficulty is, although I know where some of the money is, I can’t cash into that without competing directly with clients. So what I’m doing instead is building the resources and assets so that, in the event of losing clients in specific verticals, I have the opportunity to expand into them myself.

Until that time, it’s a case of pushing my Adsense earnings, setting up affiliate pograms, and even some revenue sharing programs with a couple of ecommerce sites.