Why do you freelance?

It affords you time. Time to pursue your own mission. Time, and the integrity to pursue that mission instead of committing years to someone else’s.

If you freelance alone, though, you’re struggling to advance your cause. Ambitious projects grow on momentum, built atop consistent effort. Yet consistency is impossible when navigating the “feast or famine” of solo freelance work. Time that opens up between engagements is wasted if you put everything on hold when the next engagement begins.

The solution is simple, right? Distribute the work. So you start asking your talented friends to help out. But this also fails: you don’t always know their availability, and you certainly can’t guarantee it. Consistency still eludes you.

At this point, you could do as so many have done before: hire people to guarantee their time. But you guarantee their salaries in exchange, and full-timers expect a career path. Congrats, you’ve just started an agency!

But was that your ambition? To run an agency?

It’s not ours. And if it’s not yours either, come work with us. We’re trying something different.

We’re a small group of creatives designing an unusual organization, one that retains the desirable aspects of the “agency model” (a respected shared brand, inspiring colleagues, a full pipeline of attractive projects) and jettisons the rest (forfeiting control over your time, work environment, and project choice to secure a salary).

Our plan, in a nutshell:

  1. Collaborate on shared practices and tools that, over time, will stabilize our freelance work. Lean on that stability to pursue our respective goals more effectively.
  2. In helping one another, attract a deeper bench of like-minded colleagues to work with. As the team is excellent, so is the work: mission-focused creatives do great work because, by definition, we care so deeply about results.1
  3. The work attracts more, and more attractive, client engagements. Jon Lax put it best: “There is no magic to this business. If you do good work, you get good work.”2

If all this speaks to you, say hello!

— Singular Collective

  1. Most of us have been through startup wringer at least once. And we use the broad term “creative” deliberately: we want members with skills of any stripe applicable to our work. ↩

  2. The Making of Teehan+Lax ↩