💡 Independence and Ownership series For the full picture of why leaving employment does not free you from masters — and where the exit lies — start with the cluster pillar. → Why starting a business does not free you from masters
Introduction: Spreading the Risk
Having most of your revenue held by a single client really is precarious. Let that one company change its policy and next month’s living tilts. So increase the number of clients — this judgement is sound. It is genuinely true that a position supported by several clients collapses less easily.
How to escape subcontracting, and how to go about spreading your client base, are already well documented. What this article takes up is the separation of what that spreading solves and what it does not.
Here is the conclusion first. Dispersal scatters risk, but it does not sever dependence itself. And the habit of speaking about these two as though they were the same thing is precisely the confusion that has kept independent people exhausted for years.
📖 Contents
The Confusion Buried in “Spread Your Dependencies”
Depending on one master is unfree. So spread the dependence across several and you become that much freer — the inference runs smoothly at a glance. Yet somewhere in the middle it has joined together two entirely different things.
Spreading dependencies means increasing the parties you depend on from one to several. Someone who depended on one company comes to depend on five customers. From the standpoint of risk, losing one of the five leaves four, so the living collapses less easily. From the standpoint of freedom, however, it also means the parties to be answered have multiplied fivefold. The risk scattered; the total quantity of dependence did not fall.
Take a set of scales. Depending on one company is carrying one heavy load in a single place. Dispersal is splitting that load into five and carrying it in five places. Splitting it means that one place breaking no longer drops everything. But the total weight being carried has not diminished in the slightest. If anything, the labour of carrying has gone up, since each of the five places must be minded and kept in balance.
Why does this confusion occur? Because the word dependence is tied to two different anxieties. One is the fear of losing what you depend on. Dispersal eases that. The other is the unfreedom of depending at all. As long as you live in dependence on someone, you must keep fitting yourself to their convenience. This unfreedom is not eased by dispersal. If anything it deepens, since the parties to be fitted to have increased.
The Work the Company Did Moves Onto One Set of Shoulders
There is something else you take on beyond dispersal: every kind of labour other than making the thing you sell.
Selling, quoting, contract exchanges, invoicing and payment tracking, expense records, tax preparation. What surprises people on going independent is how short the time actually spent making the thing turns out to be. This is not because you organise your days badly. It is an unavoidable structural consequence.
In a 1937 paper, the economist Ronald Coase asked why firms exist at all [Coase, 1937]. The answer lay in “transaction costs” — the hard-to-see costs incurred each time a transaction occurs in the market. The cost of finding a counterpart, of negotiating terms, of concluding a contract, of monitoring whether promises are kept. A firm is a device that takes such transactions inside an organisation and thereby holds down the per-transaction cost — that was Coase’s insight.
Apply the theory to independence and the answer becomes plain. As an employee, much of the transaction cost was borne by the company. Finding customers fell to the sales function, contracts to another, collecting payment to accounting, tax to administration. Independence is stepping outside the organisation that bears those transaction costs. Whoever steps outside carries alone every transaction cost the company had been processing.
Here sits one point the story of independence does not tell. The story paints the company as the side skimming your share. But the company was at the same time a device processing an enormous volume of transaction costs on your behalf. Without counting that transfer, the profit and loss of independence cannot be calculated correctly.
▸ That using a brokering mechanism produces management of another kind is taken up in how the freedom to pick projects creates a new boss.
The Deeper the Dispersal, the Less Rest There Is
Dispersal has another easily missed consequence: the more income sources you add, the less rest you get.
From the unfreedom of deep subordination to one party, to the unfreedom of broad subordination to several. Depth fell; breadth rose. And what actually exhausts the days is, in most cases, the breadth of subordination rather than its depth. The more parties to answer, the more time and attention are finely divided and continuously consumed in minding each one, handling their demands, and keeping the relationships intact.
Having several masters is an altogether different thing from having none. Dispersal does not erase subordination; it merely rearranges it from concentrated to parallel. Several subordinations placed in parallel may each be thin, but taken together they bear down with a weight no less than one deep subordination.
Conclusion: Ask for the Road Out of Dispersal
Let me be clear here. This is not a denial of dispersal itself. A position supported by several parties collapses less easily than one in which a single company holds your living. As a preparation against risk, this is sound wisdom.
What is cut is not the action but the turn of phrase that retells the spreading of risk as though it were the acquisition of freedom. Dispersal does not work in the direction of reducing dependence. What reduces dependence sits on a different axis: holding some proportion of the decisions about production on your own side.
What is needed is to swap the question. Not “how do I add more clients?” but “when my hands stop, do I hold anything that remains?” The whole picture is gathered in why starting a business does not free you from masters.
References
Academic papers and theory
- Coase, R. H. “The Nature of the Firm” Economica, 4(16) (1937)
- Standing, G. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) Bloomsbury Academic
- Marx, K. Das Kapital, Band I (1867) Verlag von Otto Meissner
