Freelancing and transaction costs

In the six years of running my own consulting business, I’d forgotten about an essential part that you need to endure as part of a job – piecemeal work. It is fairly often when you’re working for someone else that you get work that is so tiny or insignificant that you can hardly take ownership of it. The best strategy for dealing with it is to quietly get it over with and hope you won’t get such stuff again.

However, sometimes you can get caught in a rut of continuously getting this kind of work, and start wondering what you actually signed up for. And this is one thing I hadn’t expected to encounter when I got back to full time working earlier this year.

Thinking about why I never had to encounter such stuff during my consulting life, I realised there’s a fairly simple explanation – transaction costs.

Being a consultant is high transaction cost business. Every time you need to take on a new piece of work, you need to go through the charade of negotiating specifics with the client, pricing and drawing up a contract. All put together, the effort is not insignificant.

Moreover, in the line of work that I used to do, there was this massive overhead cost of understanding, cleaning and getting comfortable with the client’s data  – the effort involved in that meant that after a particular point in time I stopped taking work that wasn’t chunky enough. For a while I started refusing such work, but then got smarter and started pricing myself out of such work (though some clients were generous enough to meet that price to get their little tasks done – effectively I’d passed on the transaction costs to them).

The downside of this, of course, was that there was a fair amount of money I could have made taking up small works which I didn’t since the transaction cost was too high – this can be thought of as potential lost revenues. The upside was that whatever work I did was of high quality and (hopefully) made a big impact on the client’s business.

In the nature of the firm, Ronald Coase wrote that the purpose of the corporation was that transaction cost of dealing with co-workers can be eliminated. But then, I realise that sometimes this transaction cost can also be a good thing!

Oh, and obligatory plug here – my book Between the buyer and the seller deals with transaction costs, among other things. It’s available for sale (both in print and digital) on Amazon.

 

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