The time of being able to buy a house on a one-person salary and create wealth for your family without both parents working is dead. 

The financial model of the industrial age is over.

Without getting too morbid, this is a good thing. 

If you make good choices, the opportunity to create a free lifestyle for living and working is increasing in our current society. 

So what does that mean? 

Internal transaction cost vs. external transactional cost

The size of companies will get smaller and smaller because with this ‘information age’, we are increasingly trading services that were initially internal services externally. 

As a result, the number of consultants and freelancers in the last few years has increased. 

Why hire someone internally and take on the cost and risk of a full-time employee along with the need for training them in the skills you need when you can outsource the task to an expert already proficient in doing the job? 

The growing areas of consulting and freelancing are all classified as small businesses, rarely growing beyond a few employees, if that. 

Most often, they are a one-person business like mine. 

Think about it.

Companies will bring a job role in-house if it's too hard to make the contract and keep dealing with an external person. 

But, the growth of the internet is making it easier to do these transactions externally, so it's becoming much more accessible to communicate with people and monitor work output outside of the organisation.

Even I, as a one-person business, can send you small amounts of money. 

I can hire you through an app; I can rate you afterwards. 

For example, I did just that to build some Excel tools for this course.

I could improve at Excel/Google Sheets, but I don't have to. 

Why spend hours trying to work something out myself when I can pay someone who is already an expert to do it for me in a fraction of the time?

It means I can focus on doing what I do best: writing content, trading, and the activities that bring me direct income and enjoyment from life.

That is happening now but on the scale of large businesses many times over, which is why the freelancer community is growing so aggressively. 

Plus, with more and more people choosing to work for themselves, large companies with resource gaps are forced to select external consultants.  

Large companies are shrinking, and small one-person businesses are increasing. 

For example;

I hold multiple business relationships with various companies, from freelancing to trading industries. 

Even in my small businesses, I use sites like 5iver, CHATGPT, accountants, capital providers and banking all through the internet, and I pay for each service on a one-off contract or a monthly subscription. 

If I were trying to do what I do now with all these business relationships but 50 years ago, 

I would need a large office, many employees and a much larger capital pot to get started. 

The internet is the greatest equaliser for the modern age. 

Hats off to you Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn.

Companies are progressively slicing off parts of large businesses of the last century and turning each operation into huge markets for competition over service delivery to individuals and small companies. 

Don't believe me, here’s Naval who can explain it much better than I. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIXx617xVMo&ab_channel=PandoDaily 

If you like that and have time, Naval makes quite possibly the most coherent explanation of all things building wealth with your authentic skillset in his podcast, which you can watch for free here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-TZqOsVCNM&ab_channel=Naval 

If his predictions are correct, the freelancing trend of one-person businesses operating in different areas of the world will only increase. 

Intelligent people have already figured out that the internet enables this free lifestyle where you can live anywhere and build wealth from your laptop. 

The global economic workforce shifting to a four-day workweek supports this theory.

However, isn't that just freelancing lite? 

Yep, pretty much.

Check out my article I wrote on just that here; 

Remote working and 4-day work weeks are freelancing lite.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/remote-working-4-day-work-week-basically-freelancing-lite-coyne/  

When I go back into the office of a large company now, I see how much time gets wasted;

>1 or 2 hours commuting each day 

>1 or 2 hrs in big team meetings each day, which wastes everyone’s time versus a simple email update

>1 or 2 hrs more, chit-chatting and taking lunch 

TOTAL = 3 - 6hrs every day!

Somedays, people look exhausted, even though they have delivered zero output that benefits themselves or the business. 

Imagine you have those 3-6 hours working on something authentic to you for your own business; imagine what you could create. 

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE being around other people, but it's not how we are most productive; you can't get into deep, focused work that way.