I found myself inspired by a recent LinkedIn post by Jessica Strelioff—a colleague and former co-worker at Asana who runs the wonderful design studio Goodside—as she reflected on her desire to keep her business small, despite the potential for growth.

We built Goodside to do good work for good people but we also built it to fit into the lives we want to live. Staying small is hard but it's worth it and it's what works for us.

Jessica Strelioff

This post from Jessica inspired me to reflect on how I tried expanding my business beyond myself throughout 2019–2021. I hired contractors to do the engineering work and positioned myself as a people and project manager rather than an engineer. Doing so allowed me to say "yes" to more projects because I had more hands on deck to help with engineering, thus allowing me to make more money due to how many projects we could take on.

While my management work didn't exceed the amount of engineering work I had been responsible for prior—making it "net positive" in the time management sense—it wasn't the type of work I wanted to do. I had become a manager, not an engineer, and management as a job was not fun for me.

Ultimately, I could have hired a project manager and continued to put layers of abstraction between myself and the work. I was wary of taking this step toward further growth despite the potential for greater monetary gain, which would have made me responsible for more people and further accelerated my "work treadmill."

My life has been much more relaxing since reeling in my ambitions to being a solo freelancer. I only take on as much work as I can handle; my management responsibilities are much lower, and I have greater freedom. Sure, I'm not making as much money as I could, but that's not the point. The point is that I'm enjoying the work I do daily.