Why I stopped working with agencies and went solo

Three years ago I was sitting in a meeting about a meeting. The actual project, a landing page for a fintech client, had been waiting six weeks for a "strategic alignment session" that kept getting rescheduled. The design was done. The copy was done. The Framer build was done. We were just waiting on four people in a room to agree on something nobody disagreed about.

That day I opened a new Notion doc and wrote two words: going solo.

I want to be precise about what I mean by agencies, because I have worked with good ones. I am not talking about the small studio of three people who move fast and care deeply. I am talking about the 40-person operation where the account manager has never opened Figma, the creative director is on three other projects, and the client has already forgotten who pitched them six months ago. That version. The one where process exists to protect the agency, not to serve the work.

Here is what changed when I left.

Speed became real again

When you are the only person on a project, decisions happen at the speed of thought. A client sends feedback at 9pm, I read it, I understand it, I implement what makes sense and push back on what does not. No ticket, no handoff, no "I will flag this for the team." The feedback loop collapses from days to hours.

This is not about working more. It is about removing the latency that bloated every project I had ever touched inside an agency structure. The latency was not laziness. It was architecture. When you have specialists for every step, every step becomes a handoff, and every handoff is a place where context gets lost and time gets spent.

Accountability became personal

Inside an agency, failure is distributed. A project goes wrong and there are six possible explanations, six people who could have caught it, six directions to point. Clients learn to live with this. It becomes background noise.

When you go solo, the project is yours. Fully. If the site does not convert, that is on you. If the timeline slips, that is on you. This sounds like pressure and it is, but it is the productive kind. The kind that makes you actually care about the outcome instead of just your deliverable inside a larger chain.

I found that clients respond to this differently. They relax. They give you more context. They stop filtering what they tell you because they know it goes directly to the person building the thing, not into a brief that gets summarized by someone else.

The work got better

This one surprised me. I assumed going solo would mean lower quality, fewer resources, less firepower. The opposite happened.

Inside an agency, design decisions get negotiated. Not always explicitly, but the work passes through enough hands that it regresses toward what everyone can agree on. Safe choices survive. Interesting choices get rounded off. By the time the work ships, it represents a consensus, and consensus is almost never where the best work lives.

Solo, I make a call and I live with it. I do not need to convince anyone. I do not need to document my reasoning for a creative review. I just decide. And because I am accountable for the outcome, I make better decisions. More considered ones. Ones I can actually defend because I believe in them, not because they cleared an internal process.

What I gave up

I want to be honest about this part because most "I quit my job" posts skip it.

I gave up the safety net. There is no team to catch a mistake I missed, no account manager absorbing client anxiety before it reaches me, no senior to escalate to when a project gets complicated. That weight is real. There are weeks where it is heavy.

I gave up the pipeline. Agencies have business development teams. When you go solo, you are the product and the salesperson and the person who actually does the work. Building a pipeline while delivering on existing projects is a skill that takes time to develop and it is not the same skill as design.

I gave up the camaraderie. Working alone is genuinely lonely sometimes. I have built habits around this, communities and coffee shop sessions and deliberate collaboration on select projects, but I would be lying if I said the absence of a team does not register.

Why I would not go back

Because the trade is worth it. Every single time.

The speed, the accountability, the quality of the decisions, the direct relationship with clients who actually know who they hired, the ability to choose what I work on and how I work on it. These things compound. Three years in, they have compounded into something that no agency structure could have produced, not because agencies are bad but because the constraints of going solo force a kind of clarity that comfortable structures do not.

If you are sitting in a meeting about a meeting right now, you already know what I am talking about.

The question is just whether you are ready to write those two words.