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Career & Freelancing Intermediate

From Contractor to Studio: Building a Dev Agency

Hire, delegate and productise until the business runs without you writing every line.

8 students

TE Created by Tom Eriksen

  • Last updated August 2026
  • English
  • 18h 40m of material
  • 140 lessons

What you will learn

8 concrete outcomes

Every bullet below is something you will have built, shipped or be able to explain by the time you finish the last lesson.

  • Track utilisation, effective rate and margin per engagement accurately
  • Manage a cash conversion cycle so payroll survives a late-paying client
  • Write delivery processes someone else can follow without you
  • Define a quality bar that can be inspected rather than only felt
  • Interview for judgement rather than for trivia
  • Onboard a new person so they contribute inside two weeks
  • Delegate work and accept it being done differently from your way
  • Productise services into fixed-scope offers and stabilising retainers

Course curriculum

8 modules · 140 lessons · 18h 40m of material

18 lessons running 2h 16m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

18 lessons running 2h 22m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

18 lessons running 2h 26m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

18 lessons running 2h 28m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

17 lessons running 2h 20m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

17 lessons running 2h 18m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

17 lessons running 2h 16m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

17 lessons running 2h 14m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

8 modules · 140 lessons

18h 40m total length

Requirements

Short list, and deliberately so. If you meet these you can start today.

  • You are already freelancing or contracting successfully
  • Enough client demand that you are turning work away or considering it
  • Willingness to work on the business rather than only in it

About this course

A successful contractor hits a ceiling made of hours. The obvious answer is to hire, and the obvious answer destroys a large number of good contracting businesses, because a studio is not a bigger version of a freelancer. It is a different business with different economics, and this course is about surviving the crossing.

You begin with the numbers that decide everything: utilisation, effective hourly rate across all work including unbilled, gross margin per engagement, and the cash conversion cycle that determines whether you can make payroll while a client pays late.

Then delivery systems, because you cannot delegate work that only exists in your head. Written processes for discovery, estimation, development, review and handover. A quality bar that is inspectable rather than felt. Documentation a new hire can follow in week one. Hiring gets a long treatment: contractor against employee, the first hire being operations rather than engineering more often than people expect, how to interview for judgement, and how to onboard so that someone is productive without you narrating.

The closing modules cover productisation into fixed-scope offers, retainers that smooth revenue, and an honest module on the failure modes: growing on one client, hiring ahead of pipeline, and the founder who becomes a bottleneck.

Topics covered

Frequently asked questions

Still unsure about something? Write to misteryjj100@gmail.com and a human answers, usually the same working day.

The crossing from one person to a team of three to eight. Beyond that the problems change again, and the final module says plainly where this material stops applying.

Not to start the course. Structure, insurance and payroll differ by country, so the material covers what to decide rather than prescribing one jurisdiction.

Yes. Process documents, an estimation model, a hiring scorecard, an onboarding plan and a financial tracking sheet all ship with the course.

Checkout is handled on our provider's secure payment page. The moment your payment clears we email your personal access link and access code to the address you used at checkout, and the same link appears in your account library. There is nothing to install and nothing to wait for.

Email misteryjj100@gmail.com within 14 days of your purchase, quote your order number, and we refund the full amount to your original payment method. No form to fill in and no questions about how much of the course you watched.

What students say

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Your instructor

TE

Tom Eriksen

Platform engineer and DevOps instructor

  • 219 students taught
  • 13 courses published
  • 4.8 instructor rating
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • CI/CD
  • Testing and tooling

Tom has built delivery pipelines for teams of three and teams of three hundred, and openly prefers the smaller ones. He teaches Docker, Kubernetes and CI/CD outward from a single commit, so nothing ever appears by magic, and he treats the test suite as part of the pipeline rather than a separate subject. Every course includes a deliberate outage that you have to diagnose from logs and metrics before you can continue. He is a CNCF contributor and a reluctant but formidable YAML expert.

See every course by Tom Eriksen
$159 USD

One-time payment · lifetime access

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