Bro, freelancers/contractors/consultants who have a reputation for getting the job done and getting it done well are afforded huge amounts of latitude.

People will put up with all kinds of shenanigans from someone who is good at what they do when that person is external to a company hierarchy. You’ll fucking love it.

There will be intra-office discussions where someone will be like:

“My goodness, that website designer you brought in to do this is extremely gruff. They’re downright rude, if you ask me…”

And the other person is gonna shrug their shoulders and be like:

“Look, if you want to go hunting for someone else who is reliable, who can do this job to the same standards, and who isn’t going to demand 3x the price then be my guest but in the meantime remember that we hired him to design our website not to act as our receptionist.”

Get ready for some emails that you might as well have stored as proforma templates for stuff like telling a company’s mahogany row that until their team has achieved consensus and clarity of purpose, you will not be able to move ahead on the project, that the whole thing will be delayed by however many days it takes before they have arrived at this point and that you have been contracted to produce one website so if their employees are requesting that multiple websites be built then you would be happy to duplicate the standing contract as many times as the team desires at the same cost per contract based on how many iterations of the website they request from you.

It’s shit like that which will light a fire under everyone’s arses because, as long as your contract is worded correctly, you’re basically telling them “You don’t have your shit together and I’m not going to waste my time trying to marshal your staff remotely when you have an entire management team dedicated to this task which they are clearly incapable of doing themselves. I know that you basically needed this website launched by the agreed-upon due date but your deadlines are your problem - I’m not the person who will have to answer to your board because your staff couldn’t decide on which colour scheme or choice of font they liked better. Let me know when you’re serious about this because I ain’t here to play.”

Obviously getting from here to a point where people will put up with your shit will take a bit of work but as soon as people start recognising you as the guy, you will be able to set terms and boundaries like you wouldn’t believe.

You know if you’re clever about it and you are inclined towards it, you can also parlay your experience as an outsider working with a company or a team for web design into consultancy - it’s actually really hard for a top-heavy organisation to get a picture of what the fuck is going on, where it’s going wrong, and what to do about it.

Often consultants will be like organisational psychologists who’ll do shit like designing anonymous surveys or conducting interviews in a very slick way but it’s often just feel good bullshit that is marketed to executives using trendy business language and pretty powerpoint presentations to conceal boilerplate advice. Not all of them are like this but if you’ve worked in an office job for long enough then you’ve probably been at a company that has brought these types of clowns on board while the staff at the coalface have been trying to find a way to communicate the fact that being micromanaged is killing productivity for months and months now but nobody has been willing to listen and now you’re expected to do shit like rating how much you agree with statements such as “When working for this company, I feel as though I am achieving the best solutions possible for our customers” and “The company vision makes me feel inspired”

Some executive types will see through the bullshit though and some will recognise that you might have insight which is invaluable so you can put a price tag on this stuff. Worst case scenario is that they don’t buy what you’re selling.

But if someone does throw the right amount of cash your way and you’re capable of doing this kind of work you’d be able to sit down with the executive team and be like:

“This manager usually takes a week to respond to my simple requests and they are unable to provide a response that is direct and unambiguous. If this is how they treat outsiders, they’re probably treating their team even worse. Do you find that their team is consistently the worst performers, that they lose contracts at an abnormally high rate, and often there are preventable costs that they incur due to what is apparently a lack of action or initiative? Have you noticed that highly motivated staff typically last less than 6 months in this team?”

Or whatever. Maybe you notice that the different team leads are engaged in a tug of war over you, maybe some manager just cannot make up their mind on anything, maybe none of the staff seem to have any clue what’s going on, maybe nobody knows how to delegate jobs… you get the picture.

If you’re able to apply organisational analysis and maybe prescribe some solutions, there’s almost certainly a market out there for this kind of work. This might sound like a special kind of hell to you, it might be something that’s really outside of the scope of your skill set, or it might be something that you’d take to really well. Just an idea that you might consider kicking around.