Freelancing to staffing, now to services

[f150nl]

Hello and good morning,

This is Casey, a guy nearing his 40s. Following the forums for a long time already and read the books during my self-employment years.

I have been self-employed for 6 years now. Started off freelancing in IT, and invested the surplus into the company and hire people. The idea was to build it into a 50+ person staffing / secondment company specialized in cybersecurity. While I think the idea was not bad, a lot of things happened that delayed my progress (sickness / divorce / but also procrastination because of comfort within the freelancing assignments).

Now that the end of 2026 is close and I reflect, this is the result:
1. 2026 will be the first year that we are actually generating decent revenue + profit
2. But the staffing part is still losing money, all the profit is coming from working an insane amount of hours freelancing.
3. The staffing part hasn't really grown despite 5 years of trying to grow it
4. A massive change in laws around staffing companies around the corner (100k deposit, way more employee protection, a lot more administrative work etc)
5. With staffing, the employees are still not really connected to our company, which makes it hard to build something valuable. And everything is capped at hours * rate = revenue.

That is why I decided it's time to make a change and let go of the idea of growing based on amount of employees.
Instead I took a month off freelancing, went abroad to be in a different environment and refocused on where I want the company to go. I rebranded the cybersecurity company, created a very clear focus audience and a service catalog specifically targeting that audience. Next week I will be returning home and I will actually start testing the response from the audience.

This sounds like I am very sure in what I am doing but in the back of my mind of course there are still doubts. But I will elaborate more on that a different day.

What I would love to bring the forum is some insight in this process and also I can answer questions about secondment/staffing companies. And I hope that I'll be able to gather honest feedback on my plans, can see other people building amazing companies and just find like-minded people in general.

Thanks for reading, the post became a bit longer then I expected

 

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