Last March, I had the chance to join the Source team, a Parisian design office in the design of innovative digital solution experiences for large groups and startups. I turned the page on 6 years of freelancing for a new life as an employee. In this article, I share with you a feedback and the reasons that pushed me to make this change, how it happened and everything that it implies. A choice that may seem "strange", it is generally the opposite, we become freelance after having been an employee.

Building a financial, emotional and commercial ecosystem around you

In 2016, I chose to become a freelancer to embark on a quest for meaning, to support my clients in their way of understanding their visual communication, then by specializing in the design of digital interfaces. Beyond this support dynamic, the idea was above all to build a dynamic and sustainable ecosystem around me in the long term.

When you start freelancing, you are released into the wild. Alone aboard your boat, you will have to structure yourself, set up processes to transform it into a boat, in order to move forward in a viable way, and sail towards independence.

This is the objective that has driven my activity during all these years; the desire to build a solid base that allows me to be independent. It is not simply about having your own hours or setting your own rates. But rather to be fully aware of your environment, to be able to use certain levers to bring in new customers, regulate your activity according to your workplace or a certain time of year, improve your skills or diversify your sources of income.

Of course, all this involves significant stress. If you are a full-time freelancer and you are reading these lines, in reality and especially when you start, you mainly wonder how you are going to eat at the end of the month ... This is an emotional aspect that you have to keep in mind at all times. Being your own captain generates enormous stress that can make you go in any direction to recover turnover, and potentially get lost in relation to your initial objective.

You have to accept that this mental load becomes your daily partner. It may seem counterintuitive, but it is also very beneficial. Just like any other entrepreneur, you are also building a company with its expenses, prospecting, investments, marketing, etc. This stress is formative and allows you to get your foot in the stirrup to start the machine. In my case, it was a great ally to learn the whole commercial aspect, take a step back, understand and initiate a customer relationship so that it lasts in the long term.

And precisely, this dynamic is one of the most important advantages; succeeding in building a real relationship with your customers. Rather than switching from customer to customer, especially via Malt or any other platform, I stayed focused with some of my customers during these 6 years. You have to see this advantage as in a couple. This implies necessarily making compromises and being authentic, especially at the beginning of the relationship. Depending on the objectives you have set for yourself in terms of vision, in terms of target or type of project, it will become a real competitive advantage vis-à-vis your market in the long term. That's right, what's better than clients who come back to you on their own and talk about you in their own ecosystem, without you having to do a new prospecting campaign each time. It will allow you to go faster, further and higher, in projects where you would not have been able to go.

When I talk about independence, this capital trust represents exactly that. It is succeeding in building an ecosystem around you, where there will be a kind of ping-pong between the market and you as a freelancer. Undeniably, for this ecosystem to work, it implies having to integrate a strong mental load, make compromises, generate visibility, etc.

Now that you know why I chose to go freelancing, here is the last advantage, and the coolest I think: it is to see your number of clients and your turnover increase, to understand that your project is evolving and growing. From a more global point of view, the most exhilarating advantage (and legitimate, that's why we do all this too...) when you're a freelancer is to see your project evolve. The evolution is both personal and commercial. You see your clients grow with what you offer them and you see yourself evolve as a Man.

That's why you also have to build a vision for yourself from the beginning of your freelance activity. It's the ultimate point of arrival where you're going to trivially say to yourself: "uh, well what do I do next?" It's a kind of ideal; in terms of your values, your choices, what you want to do with your clients, and towards which you're going to aim every minute of your life. And each of the things you do must contribute to it. This vision also flows into your personal life with your workplace, the people you meet, what you do in your free time, etc. This is also why freelancing generates so much mental load, it monopolizes your brain permanently. Obviously, this ideal will evolve permanently, with each evolution of your activity but also in relation to your maturity. And this is why you must be well aligned with your ecosystem, to succeed in listening to it and being able to put it in perspective with what you do, sometimes challenge it, sometimes go with it.

The objectives allow you to have an idea of the next step. The vision allows you to get back on the right track and to see overall if everything is going well, and that your activity is well aligned with your values. For the moment, I recommend “Freelance, l’aventure dont vous êtes le héros” as a very good book to read by Alexis MINCHELLA ⚡️, when you start freelancing.

This is what I liked most about freelancing, your professional activity is an extension of your person. it truly embodies and reflects what you do and how you do it.

Over several years, I would have managed to improve my skills in technologies and methodologies, build strong relationships with other freelancers who have become friends, or participate in the success of several clients by delivering productions to them. I would also have managed to define a healthy and serene working environment, in which I brought other freelancers on board so that we could set off together to meet the needs of our clients.

💡 If I can advise those who want to get started, try to build relationships as quickly as possible with freelancers with complementary skills to be able to extend your scope of interventions and act on larger projects.

Growing weariness

As you will have understood, from a financial and commercial point of view, things were going rather well despite some months that were complicated due to personal concerns. After 6 years of managing my client projects and doing mentoring, a progressive weariness appeared in my daily life. It manifested itself through 2 important constants: commercial management and the progressive lack of time / lack of motivation for my side projects. And I could no longer align this vision with what my clients wanted. I no longer liked what my activity reflected, I was no longer satisfied. I needed a change of scenery.

The mental load I was talking about earlier became too great and above all quite complicated to manage. It prevented me from taking a step back, staying focused on my goal and doing quality work. I felt that my mind was elsewhere and that I was looking for something else, another way of working. Furthermore, everything I described above was no longer my priority, it had become a secondary aspect. As if I felt that my career had to evolve. And when you look closer, I have not yet spoken once about design in this article, even though it is my main job. And for good reason, during all these years, I have tried to test work methodologies, project management, develop project manager qualities without seeking to optimize my skills in interface design.

And at the end of 2021 / beginning of 2022, it had become a priority. Precisely, an important underlying aspect when you start your own business is the realization of projects ancillary to your freelance life to make it grow or more simply to explore new spaces (painting, photography, cooking, etc.). For my part, I realized, especially after the multiple lockdowns, that I had less and less time to devote to ancillary projects. But whether it's for monitoring or creative projects, it's still essential to do some and there I felt a big fatigue and a big loss of motivation. I was monopolized by client projects and by staying focused, you lose efficiency and performance.

I think that side projects are super important when you're in a job like interface design, and graphic design in the broader sense, they allow you to exploit concepts freely, that you can't necessarily see in client cases and it's super important to improve your skills, to be more and more creative. Gradually, a feeling of marking time set in. Between the lack of time to evolve on side projects and this suffocation felt with pressure and stress, I had the feeling that a glass ceiling had settled above me preventing me from evolving.

In summary, I gradually lost focus from my goal and I had a big lack of motivation to try to grow my freelance activity, due to a recurrence in client projects and all the management that comes with it.

Why return to a permanent contract?

Since I started working, relationships, the quest for meaning and independence have always been the basis of reflections that I had to choose a path, a project to go into. And so having this growing weariness as pressure that pushed me to leave the freelance world, I saw myself more and more going back to employment, and starting a completely different path. Generally, we go from employment to gain independence and go towards freelance.

A desire to join a team with real collective intelligence to build projects of digital experiences. Despite your clients and the communities in which you are, when you are freelance, you are generally alone in front of your computer to have your design and your creations accepted. Joining a team allows you to have a better overview, and above all to compare your ideas and creations with your peers.

There is no admission of weakness because you could tell yourself that being a freelancer means being free, your own boss, etc. And returning as an employee means regressing... But ultimately joining an agency like Source allows you to be part of a larger project, to grow more serenely than if you were alone.

Reduce the mental load

In the section on mental load that I mentioned earlier in the article, everything related to prospecting and selling services was a source of quite significant mental load. Beyond the stress, the weariness of having to sell previous projects with each new project got the better of me. So, whether from a financial or commercial point of view, being an employee allows me to have an orthonormal framework in which I can operate much more serenely.

This serenity and this framework allow me to be much more incisive in the productions that I make, the graphic decisions that I make and to be able to present my concepts, without thinking that I could potentially lose customers in the long term. And no longer having this mental load changes your life.

Climbing in his skills

Beyond generating collective intelligence, the confrontation of ideas allows you to improve your skills and acculturate yourself to a corporate spirit and operation. This is an aspect that I had not developed when I was a freelancer (wrongly); really confronting your peers. This is quite important to be able to progress when you have left school. Having become an employee allowed me to have real feedback on the interfaces that I was conceptualizing and thus to really take a step back from the productions.

This confrontation allows you to have a kind of debate, to be able to defend your ideas and thus results in an improvement by definition of your interface. On the other hand, it allows you to improve your skills more calmly, by having honest feedback, to have people who can be able to evaluate what you do. This is something I was not too aware of either, when you present a creation, your clients, despite all their good faith, cannot really challenge what you have done except in light of their needs and their requests, and thus help you progress.

(Re)focus on what really matters and stay independent

Joining a real product team allowed me to refocus on side creative projects and thus remain independent (in a way) and reconnect with what I was doing. As you can see, independence is one of the things that drives my career and what I do on a daily basis.

Although it may seem difficult to accept, becoming an employee allowed me to remain independent. And that's why you have to be careful when choosing a company, so that it ticks the boxes of the things you need.

In my case, I knew that by joining Source, I would remain "independent" in the sense that I would not be crushed by too much pressure or by a poorly thought-out organization. So of course, I don't do what I want but it allows me, coupled with the framework in which I work, to be able to detach myself and refocus on more creative projects like photography or motion / video on the personal side. And that's something I had totally lost.

This framework allows by definition to have a boost of creativity. Since you know the limits within which you must stay, you appropriate them and gradually, you learn to surpass yourself, to get around these limits and to push the framework with creativity to go further than what is asked of you. All this allows me to remain "independent" and to continue to learn every day about the things that I like and that I am passionate about.

One last thing and then I leave you; the reason for applying to an agency like Source, rather than another agency. I think that can be a good conclusion to understand.

Choosing a design office like Source

I knew that going from freelance to salaried would change a lot of things, but without knowing exactly what it would involve. I set myself a limit: I was still happy in my freelance life, so if I changed it would be for something that I was sure would necessarily be better.

So, I made a list of the important points for the companies I wanted to go to, then I forgot, I searched a little and I skipped, I moved on to something else. Then one day, I watched Benjamin Debon talking about Source and I started to look at what they do, how they do it, etc. and when I put Source in front of my list, it ticked all the boxes, it's a bit of a cliché to say that, but it's true and I didn't wait, I applied directly.

Is it proof of maturity and evolution to know what you want and to succeed in it, I don't know, but in any case, the idea to understand is not that you shouldn't apply to just any company, but rather to remain rigorously focused on a list of a few agencies that fundamentally correspond to what you want. Ultimately, what is most important is your well-being at work, your serenity when you are in the office in the morning and your mental health. I knew that by going to Source, I would be in exactly this state of mind; to have all the working conditions to allow me to take a step back in order to stay focused on my projects, to develop my skills, because behind my state of mind has taken a step back and is serene.

A time of acculturation

And legitimately, you will want to know what my new professional life implies. Joining Source was necessarily a small upheaval in terms of methodology and state of mind mainly.

Firstly because it was necessary to acculturate to new work processes and methodology. For a while, you have to learn to unlearn what you know or what you think, to take on the new ecosystem in which you have just arrived. It is also agreeing to put your pride or your ego aside in a certain way, to better understand where you have just set foot and to be able to better understand your new work environment. There is a part of humility in all of this too.

Then because it was necessary to integrate a team remotely, and even if I was used to working with my clients 100% remotely, it is a real challenge for a company to succeed in integrating you into a culture while being fully remote. And finally, it wasn't that complicated to do it. I think they found a good compromise/balance between remote and face-to-face, with remote team moments (sports, aperitifs, games, design meetings), more or less regular, which punctuate our daily lives as employees, but also face-to-face sessions where everyone meets in the office or in seminars (Martin Charpentier wrote about how to manage a company remotely) and finally, and above all, onboarding sessions where you discover the team by talking with each person about the projects they are working on, hobbies, etc.

All these team moments allow you to perceive each person's personality and create affinities in the same way as a company that would only operate face-to-face. And, I haven't mentioned it, but of course, working in teams of 2 on almost every project allows you to greatly optimize the efficiency of these team moments, and to generate an overall dynamic.

In fact, this could be the subject of an article all by itself, but this whole aspect of the company will be, I think, one of the important issues in the coming years.
Finally, because it was necessary to adopt a state of mind and a posture, in relation to a different positioning. The job of a designer is to popularize his speech, to solve a need or a problem. That is to say, to translate with simple words a complex aspect of a problem. In our profession, this translation is generally done graphically, through a beautiful, clear and intuitive user experience. The fundamental challenge is to succeed in having this translation accepted, especially by your client. This implies that you have to go further than the “simple” problem, and take into consideration many more parameters, than just technical constraints (political, financial, marketing, etc.)

And so, by becoming an employee, you embody your company. You have a double responsibility. That of the designer who must justify and defend his graphic and professional choices, in light of the considerations we have discussed, but also that of the employee, who embodies an agency with a certain positioning, an already established client relationship, with a larger project. So you must succeed in having a posture that allows you to play on these two levels, especially when you work with clients with whom you could not have worked as a freelancer (L’Oréal, BNP, FFR, Hennessy, Pathé, etc.)

All these aspects imply that you must arrive with a fair amount of humility to be able to soak up all this experience, and succeed in sorting the information to create value as a link in a chain.

So you're going to ask me "And independence in all this?" It's true that it's one of the most important variables for me; managing to remain independent. Well, when you look at it more closely, by becoming an employee and in the broader sense, you continue to manage your clients, to have to be accountable, to manage your hours, etc. So you could think that I lost the independence that I had as a freelancer. But ultimately, becoming an employee allows you to get out of all the negative aspects that I had, and to refocus on the essentials and what really makes sense to me. Taking a step back, you realize that everything related to financial management, business management, prospecting, etc. had imprisoned me in a way of working that took away the freedom and independence that a freelancer could have.

And I will end the article on this fundamental notion, that's why I chose Source and not another design studio. By joining the Source team, I knew that I could grow as a designer, remain independent (develop this notion of independence), and work in a human framework and dynamic. So ultimately, the format in which you work matters little (at least for me) as long as it fulfills and serves the vision of life that you have set for yourself. And I think that this is how you know if you are successful in life or not. This is why I spoke about vision earlier in the article, it is fundamental to know where you want to go, all the choices you make in your life must serve this vision.