After watching the Mad Men series, you might start to dream of expanding your freelance writing business into an agency.

The agency model sounds alluring. You find clients, then sit back, let others do the work, give it a quick little edit, and boom — make a big cut of the fee.

The agency model works when there is a high volume of projects, as 50 percent or more of the pay will be going to other people. The volume needs to be high enough that by taking a 30-70 percent markup on each gig, you can make a living.

Needing to charge more to cover both the writer’s fee and your own cuts the client pool down. You’ll need to find bigger companies, in general, with the budgets to pay these bigger fees.

Especially if you’re hiring your friends, it’s going to be hard to take a big markup, as you’ll want to pay them well.

To sum up this little math exercise, you might need three or four times as much work or more to make close to the living you would have if you simply wrote for a smaller stable of clients.

Why newbies can’t be an agency:

The big problem is, when you first start out, it’s hard to find clients. Any clients. Much less good-paying ones.

It takes a lot of marketing hustle to get those first few clients. Then, it takes more time to find good-paying ones that have a steady stream of work.

Give up most of the income from your writing gigs at this point, and you won’t have much left.

That is not to say that writers should never switch to the agency model. Some have done so quite successfully.

How do you know it’s time to consider becoming an agency? Here are five clues:

1. You have too much work:

You’ve built your freelance business and you’re working too many hours now. Or you’re turning down gigs and leaving money on the table…money you might keep some of if you hired subcontractors.

You have enough client volume that you could earn a better living keeping a percent of all that than you do turning down gigs and writing only the best ones yourself.

2. You love marketing & have a great rep:

When you’re an agency, you have more mouths to feed. You can’t ever have downtime, or your stable of writers will drift away and possibly be unavailable the next time you need them.

You want to have enough contacts that tapping them will bring you a large volume of ongoing projects. Your network will want to send you clients because you’ve established your credibility as a freelance writer and have a great reputation.

Barring having an amazing network up your sleeve, you’ll need sharp marketing skills and an eagerness to devote many hours to marketing and finding clients.

3. You know many freelance writers:

While the writer above imagines his business can run off the aid of his personal writer friends, that path is fraught with problems. Are you going to be able to tell your best friend the client hates their writing and the copy all needs to be rewritten? Do you think you can even be objective about your friends’ writing?

What you need as an agency head are professional contacts with lots of writers.

Remember that good writers are often fully booked. They may not be available when you need them, or at rates you can afford to pay as an agency.

4. You like managing people:

This one is important. As an agency head, you won’t be writing. You’ll be shepherding projects.

Your job is to:
* talk to the client and find out everything needed to do the gig.

* find and hire suitable writers.

* train them up on your needs and the writing needs of this client.

* call them when they blow their deadline.

* call another writer when that writer flakes out.

* stay up all night editing the late work to make deadline.

* explain to the client why their project is late.

…and so on.

You are a manager. Do you communicate clearly? It’s important because now you’re playing telephone — often, you’re talking to the client and then telling the writer what they said. The writer has a question which you relay to the client, and then relay back the answer.

There is more opportunity for miscommunication than when you were writing for clients, so you need really stellar skills here.

5. You prefer editing to writing:

Unless you hire an editor as well, you will be combing through your writers’ work and getting it in shape to be turned in to clients.

You might think that’ll be an easy gig due to your awesome writers, but don’t bet on it. You’d be surprised the junk even pro writers turn in on occasion.

There’s also the issue of changing client needs and priorities, where they assigned 1,000 words but they’ve decided last-minute they want 750. Guess who’s going to fix that? You.

The Nigerian Online Writing Industry isn't all that advanced yet, so we have just a handful of Freelance Writers who've managed to build themselves an Agency and would like to be addressed as such. The rest of the Freelance Writing folks would rather stick to unprofessionalism.

The reason for creating this thread afterall, was to sensitize Freelance Writers on the need to metamorphose into an Agency. I recall conversing with a Freelance Writer I met here on Nairaland. He was urgently in need of writers to outsource a few writing gigs to. He needed my service, since I owned a job board and could help him publicize the said job opening. In the process of creating his job advert I asked him for the name of his agency and he just froze up, he had no name. And I was like, how on earth do I create a job advert on my job board with no name of Agency?(Rhetorical).

Source:
http://colouredscribes.com/5-signs-freelance-writer-become-agency