Should I Go Freelance?
I’ve been with a social media marketing start-up for a little over a year now. Our founder has made a lot of bad choices. Partly because he doesn’t know social media and also because he put his faith into a poor sales team.
We are now at a make it or break it point. I feel like I know what it would take to make a successful social media marketing company, but it would be entirely different from our current company, which may not fall into the vision of the founder.
Also, I currently do all the social media fulfillment for our clients. Everything. I’ve invested a lot of my own money in reading business books, seeing Seth Godin speak, and spend most nights blogging and reading articles on Hacker News. Yet, as long as the CEO/owner is in charge, I lack faith in the direction of the company.
Is it worth rebuilding the company or better to just start my own? How do you know when you should leave a start-up as an employee?
What you’re really asking is should you be do freelance social media instead of working for a company, right? Because that’s what you’d be doing, at least at first — you’d be selling the clients and then fulfilling the sales.
So if you can make it on your own, then you should leave. But selling social media is way more difficult than fulfilling social media. So if you think you can sell social media and do it on your own, try it now, while you’re employed. Get a few gigs on the side to see if you’re good at selling. And if you are, then by all means, strike out on your own.
But if it turns out that you don’t like the sales part, then maybe you should just go get a job at a company that has a vision you respect.
Penelope