We heard the saying: don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. Even small firms and freelancers should try to maintain an active portfolio of a few concurrent projects to avoid to depend on only one client.
Nobody has been told to put eggs not only in several baskets but to also vary the container type, basket, box, crate, vase... in fact it sounds like a bad idea when you try to optimize your business. Buying 10 baskets would give access to volume pricing whereas buying a few different containers would be inconvenient for storage, pricier, messier in terms of branding.
However, unless you have a serious cushion, it appears that the advantage of specialisation comes with a nasty caveat. A vulnerability to exterior factors that affect all the industry at once.
If all your portfolio is composed of clients in the same industry, or integrated vertically or horizontally, you may fin yourself in trouble when a new regulation or a plague hit that industry.
We are witnessing, completely powerless, the Event industry collapse and clients closing down or going bankrupt.
Tell me about it. I'm in the middle of a project for a large UK festival. Fortunately I've been billing by milestone, but who knows if the next body of work will go ahead...
we got a big project for one of the player in the health industry here - and we are all on 'home-office' now. Still a lot of work to do - but new communication methods have to be introduced, organizing becomes different (at least), VMWare drives us nuts (V5.4 is current, on the MacBooks, 5.21 is needed to display anything other than a black screen, 5.00 is needed on desktop Mac's with dual monitor setups (otherwise, the insertion point/mouse is shifted to right and up by 8mm and 5mm...) - we are running Horizon)
Further on, quite some new customers are calling us for help with setting up webd for their employees who are doing home-office as well..
If our big project would be in the events sector, we would suffer because of eggs only..
Covid-19 is very bad for everybody, businesses and individuals. The worst is that no one can predict when things will go better, and that means a lot of people will suffer even if they are not affected.
My sympathy. I was spending 20 Years of my earlier life as a freelance sound engineer. With the lockdown in Switzerland, I couldn't pay my rent if I still was in that business.
I used to give away squirt guns at street carnivals to draw business to a home exterior remodeler outside of Chicago. I called the guy who runs the place today (he’s still a client). After 7 years of success, they closed that department permanently and now have about 25,000 extra squirt guns that they may never use.