What's good about bureaucracy

I was recently introduced to someone I wanted to recruit.

He indicated he was interested in working for me, and the proposed salary/comp package was very attractive.

I managed to set him up with an interview with a prime on a new contract (for me) and they wanted to hire him.

I made the offer to the candidate and .... he turned me down!

Then I had to go back to the prime and bashfully tell them my guy rejected my offer. Embarassing.

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It's normal for candidates to turn down job offers. That's not a big deal.

However, when you're small business, you feel it personally. And you put in a disproportionate amount of effort to recruit even a single person.

A large company bureaucracy on the other hand, has scale and processes.

They turn down candidates and get rejected by candidates every day.

BUT they're able to hire consistently over long periods of time, which means they have stable processes.

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As an individual W2 employee in one of these places, these processes feel burdensome and irrational.

It's probably one of the reasons why you want to go 1099, to escape the bureaucracy!

And going 1099 is actually a nice way to get the benefits of working for a government contracting bureaucracy. You can get almost the full bill rate but not have to worry about things like performance reviews, meager pay raises, etc.

But if you every want to grow beyond being a solo 1099 into a real business, you'll realize that some of those bureaucratic things that you hated were actually very valuable to achieve growth and profitability.

Want the full playbook? Check out Going 1099.