How to scale my freelance job?

Hey Filippo!

Here my quick 2 cents:

(1) DOWNLOAD YOUR BRAIN
Write down detailed SOPs (video tutorials help a lot as well) to cover your typical workflow for a client. Lay down every single step of the way, from start to finish. You'll find it quite easy when it comes to schematic and repetitive tasks, a bit less re:creative work; creative tasks can be "standardized" as well - it comes down to aggregating and labeling inspiration sources in a proper way and then expose your team to such inspirations over and over again, until it starts clicking for them as well. It's very important that you also outline a quick future organizational chart, that can serve as reference for recruiting down the line.

(2) START RECRUITING NOW
Finding good teammates is a hard but very rewarding journey, it pushes you to learn so much about yourself!
There are multiple places where to find amazing and affordable talent, but I guess you can start from one of these two:

• https://www.upwork.com/
• https://freeup.net/

While working on (1) you can submit a job offer and go through a round of interviews: here you can practice explaining your vision for the business and go through your shiny new SOPs - this way you can gather feedback and quickly figure out what to improve. In my experience, while doing this you'll soon stumble upon a talented candidate who will raise above the rest and proactively help in shaping your processes. That's a keeper :)
Re: compensation, try to keep at least a 50% margin after employees/contractors costs, otherwie things can get ugly pretty fast.
Here my suggestions in terms of what to delegate first:
1- Direct client work execution (in your case, anything related to your clients eCom)
2- Client relationship (i.e. getting account managers to handle all clients communication) - this takes time, clients will keep trying calling you directly for a while. It's good to keep a line of communication open with them, for QA and potential upsell.
3- Sales
4- Recruiting
5- Finance

(3) DELEGATE, ONE STEP AT A TIME
Once you have a first version of your SOPs ready and a first team member, it's time to sloooowly start delegating some of the daily tasks to her/him. I generally follow this rule:
a) start with pure execution tasks and only later climb up to organizational and more creative ones
b) do not overload your team, limit yourself to educating them on 1-2 new tasks a day
c) have your team follow a strict delivery-based process, made of regular stand-ups and clear deadline

(4) EMPOWER & REWARD YOUR TEAM - aka how to avoid "Team Churn"
This might seem obvious, but it's probably the most important aspect to capitalize on your efforts: if you want to grow a solid team, it's essential to:

• promote a friendly and equal environment for everyone
• clearly show appreciation when they do something right and politely show them how to correct anything they haven't done right.
• at times, stop and take the time to let them know that you value their opinion/feedback on the work they're doing (great source of improvement for your SOPs).

(5) RAMP UP SALES
Now that at least part of your daily operations is being handled, it's time to focus on better structuring one of the more delicate areas of your business: your sales process. The plan is the same, to work on (1) + (2) + (3) + (4) for sales positions within your business. I find it super important to have an in-house sales team, it really makes the difference when it comes to communicating your competitive advantage to potential clients.

(6) SCALE SCALE SCALE
Keep refining (1) and repeat (2) + (3) + (4) a few times, to find new additions to your team, until you can delegate this crucial part of the process as well: recruiting.
At this point you'll have most likely removed yourself from any day-to-day activity and can focus solely on:

• overall strategy
• high-level sales (e.g. partnerships, sponsorships etc.)
• the financial side of all this

Hope it helps e in bocca al lupo!
(from a fellow 🇮🇹)