Since 2015, still no employees. That's on purpose.

People assume I want to grow into an agency.

They ask it kindly, the way you'd ask a kid what they want to be when they grow up. "So when are you going to bring on a team?" Like staying small is a phase I'll eventually get over.

I've run P27 since 2015. I have zero employees. And I'm not stuck. I chose this, and I'd choose it again.

Here's the thinking, in case you're a small-business owner trying to figure out whether "solo" means "risky."

The math an agency doesn't want to explain

The moment you hire your first employee, your business stops being about the work and starts being about keeping that person busy.

You need enough projects to cover their salary whether or not those projects are any good. So you say yes to things you'd otherwise turn down. You take the bloated retainer because payroll is Friday. The quality of what you ship starts bending around the size of your team instead of the needs of your client.

It happens to good designers. They don't get worse. Their overhead gets bigger, and the overhead starts making their decisions.

When it's just me, the math is brutally simple. If I take your project, it's because I think I can do it well and I have the hours to do it. There's no quota underneath that yes.

What you actually get when you hire one person

Most "agency" experiences for a small business go like this: you have a great first call with the person who sold you, and then you never speak to that person again. You get handed to an account manager, who relays your requests to a designer you've never met, who hands the build to a developer in another time zone.

Every layer is a chance for your meaning to get lost. You said "clean and trustworthy," it came back "cold and empty," and now you're explaining yourself to a project manager who's also confused.

When you hire me, the person on the first call is the person designing your homepage and the person you hear from when something breaks. When a project needs a specialist, I hire a freelancer and manage them myself, so you still only ever talk to me. Nothing gets translated. Nothing gets lost in a handoff.

That's not a charming quirk of being small. For a four-page website or a workflow audit, it's the entire advantage.

If you're nearby, it's also local. I'm based in Orange Park and work in person with businesses across Jacksonville and Clay County, and remotely with clients anywhere in the U.S.

"But what if you get hit by a bus?"

Fair question. It's the one real risk of hiring a solo shop, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

So here's how I handle it. Every site I build is yours — your domain, your hosting account, your files. I don't lock anything behind a proprietary platform you can only escape by paying me. If I vanished tomorrow, any competent developer could pick up your site and keep going, because it's built on standard, boring, well-documented tools. No secret sauce, no hostage situation.

Compare that to an agency that built your site on their custom CMS and holds your domain in their account. Being big doesn't make them safe. It just hides the lock-in behind a nicer lobby.

AI changed what one person can do

Not long ago, staying solo meant a hard ceiling on how much one person could physically do.

That ceiling is a lot higher now. The kinds of AI workflows I set up for clients are exactly what make a one-person studio work: a transcriber like Otter so meeting notes write themselves, a custom GPT loaded with real pricing so a proposal starts from a draft instead of a blank page, a Zapier step so nobody retypes an inquiry. Even this blog is drafted with AI assistance, then checked against my published services and prices before it goes up.

Leverage that used to require headcount can now come from tools. That's new, and it's a big part of why "solo" isn't the limitation it once was.

This isn't advice for everyone

If you're building something that needs a warehouse, a sales floor, or round-the-clock coverage, you need a team. I'm not arguing nobody should hire.

I'm saying that for a lot of service businesses — including web design — bigger is a choice with real costs, and "small on purpose" is a perfectly good answer to "where do you see yourself in five years."

Same place. Doing the work myself. Picking up my own phone.

---

Want to work directly with the person doing the work? Tell me about your project — free 30-minute call, and you'll be talking to me the whole way through.