I've a freelance/consultancy business for almost 2 years now. With my strong Linux Sysadmin and back-end dev background
I specialized on the hole "DevOps" theme and basically help customers to migrate their
classic on-prem/basic cloud infrastructure to a more modern approach. Containers, CI/CD, metrics monitoring,
centralized logging, deployment strategies, all of that stuff.<p>The positioning works great, because the topic is kind of hyped now with tech like Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus
etc. and people offering these services with a decent level of experience are still rare. I never
had trouble finding new customers and the business is doing great.<p>Still, facing the facts, as long as the business solely depends on me, my growth has a hard cap.
I will not overcome my limited time, I can only do a few projects at the same time and the market will only accept a
certain rate for my services. Also getting ill or more free time for family has direct implications on the business
performance. It just doesn't scale.<p>To overcome this situation I need to evolve my business into something that scales. The easy answer would be just hire
some people. This would introduce a lot of fix costs I'm trying to avoid. Also the investment from my side (time + money)
is something I can't really define. Before new people benefit the business in any way they would need training, which has
direct implications on the time I can spend in projects. I would also face the risk of employees leaving the company for
whatever reasons, which would have quiet an impact.<p>I wonder if you maybe tackled a similar situation or have a tip how overcoming this scalability issue could look like.
Do I maybe need to accept that substantial growth requires a substantial investment?