mayurdotca

Cool. One thing to pivot them from working on their own stuff vs stuff that gives you skin in the game is offering them to work offpeak on some startup idea in house. Make a list of 20 things. If it takes off, share the spoils with the founder(s) and spin it off. Track using slicingpie.com. Could be anything from an info product to a full saas.

Basically incentivizing company benefitting activities vs "do anything you like" stuff. They will all end up doing Tiktok videos if you let them decide lol.

Points taken. I think generally speaking when you have "bandwidth" in house there are tonnes of things your team may like/want to work on vs you wanting to keep them busy. Not everything has to be revenue generating. There are adjacent activities like contributing to open source, hosting meetups, helping non-profits, etc. Lots of things that look time wasting but have the end result of helping you win new business.

Maybe ask your team what would they like to work on during off peak times and see what they say. There might be a SAAS app sitting on the shelf that some of your team might love working on that could later become a huge business (eg: gmail for google)

Looking at your comments - you are running too close to breakeven. Thats too lean. Either double your rates, or half your staff.

You should be aiming for at least a 30% profit so that you can put 10% back into emergency fund, and 5% into company growth - marketing, employee benefits, parties, etc. The last 15% is your ice cream.

UPDATE: Looks your staff are sitting around. No bueno. You should have a 100 item list of things people can do when there isn't work. Make tiktoks, publish a blog post, etc etc. Ideally your team should be so busy that people have to wait to become your customer cause you can't take on any more.

Upwork is great but its also terrible for long-term reliability. Main ongoing work should be from existing customers - work hardest on this. Next work hardest on building an excellent brand and site and then find joint venture partners - guys like me that do product, leadership circles, designers. Then #3 is other platforms for work. Then government. Then SEO, etc.