I have a question on Upwork: many clients request not to work with agencies. What is your experience with this?
Most clients on Upwork don’t want to work with agencies. I recommend not using Upwork as a primary agency growth channel; treat it as a way to get an initial foothold while you’re still freelancing. When you’re selling yourself, you want the client to feel they’re hiring you, not an agency. Avoid agency language on your profile—use “founder” if you like, and bring up any consultants only during calls after you’ve secured the project. Start as a freelancer, deliver a high‑quality first project, get a great review, then gradually introduce others or a consultant on later projects. Don’t say you’ll hand the work off to an agency; keep the work yourself initially. In short, don’t label yourself as an agency on Upwork—position yourself as an automation specialist or similar, because Upwork users dislike the word “agency.”
He advises starting as a freelancer on Upwork as quickly as possible, not forming an agency there because proposal reply rates suffer and clients prefer working with a person rather than a faceless corporation. Use freelancing to generate initial revenue, then hire team members but still brand the work as yourself, avoiding a corporate facade until you’ve reached around $50 k in earnings. After that you can scale the team and rebrand as a company. He also encourages the high‑school student, noting that pursuing entrepreneurship now is great.
If you're early in your career and need experience and to pay down debt, take every opportunity—including agency work—to build skills and cash flow. Once you're earning $10–$20k/month as a solo freelancer, saying yes to everything spreads you thin and prevents skill accumulation; you'll plateau. At that point, niche down to one or two core offerings so your revenue can keep growing. Early stage: say yes to everything. Later stage: focus and specialize.
No, you don't need to start anywhere else. Upwork is by far the easiest place to start for a number of reasons. As a beginner, sales is hard and consists of three parts: understanding the client’s problem, pitching a solution, and standing out enough for the client to pick you. Upwork handles the first two parts for you; you only need to pay for connects and a fee (now between 10‑15%) when you deliver a project. This means you only have to focus on being the best pick among freelancers, which is roughly one‑third of the sales work. It also minimizes capital outlay because you don't need to spend large amounts on cold‑email tools, ads, or other lead‑generation platforms. As a beginner you might spend around $200 on tools and see no results for weeks, whereas with Upwork you can start seeing ROI in a few days, making the gap between spending and earning much shorter.
No, you should continue applying your freelancer account and you should move clients over to the agency account only where it makes sense. Agency accounts are typically much lower converting. They have lower view rates, lower reply rates, much lower booked meeting rates, uh, and are just significantly harder across the entire stack. And you get virtually zero payoff for that as well. Unfortunately, it's Upwork trying to fill the obvious kind of question, which is like, what if the freelancer I hire just contracts work out? You know, we need to give them a quote unquote legitimate path to doing so. Unfortunately, it just does not work in practice because when somebody makes a job post on Upwork, they want to work with the person that applied and they want to see a face. You know, it's the people that they're looking for uh and who they can readily assess the quality of. Agencies are just one additional barrier because you're communicating with a faceless sort of company and then that company could pass you off to one of very many, you know, account managers and vendors and stuff like that. So, there's no benefit to positioning or pitching yourself as an agency basically whatsoever. Um, I would not do this. I would always pitch as you. I would then amass as many points, earnings, stars, whatever the hell JSS on your profile as possible. And then, you know, if you wanted to get a few reviews in the agency profile, you could do so. [sighs and gasps]