When I started consulting I was actually quite lucky. Even though the company was large, I managed to get a direct contract. Getting truly started was difficult as the company didn’t know to whom I should send my invoices and nobody wanted to take responsibility for my case. It took a couple of months but then everything was sorted out and it was work as normal.
The one constant in the universe is that things change, and so a number of years later after some contractor ended up suing a company for a job (and winning) the company wanted to put a bit of distance in between us and them. The consultancy firm found two different agencies that they could put in between their former external consultants and themselves. If you didn’t have a preference they simply assigned you to their preferred agency. Because this was a requirement of their own making, and they still wanted to keep all their consultants, they paid the fees to the agency.
This agency was like any other and they took your hours, and passed them on to the various companies that order staff through them. Things were ok for the few year or two, but perhaps I should have seen something coming when they moved all of contracts for the consultancy that I worked for to their daughter company.
It was rare occasion that I thought about this situation, but I when I did I couldn’t get over the fact that I was working at the client’s site for the consultancy but I was not really working for them by contract I was working for a agency or perhaps for the subsidiary of the agency.
Real client → consultancy → agency → subsidiary → Me
You get what you pay for, some years later during a contract negotiation I discovered that the agency was literally making a pittance on the contracts from this firm – I guess big companies can negotiate from a strong position. I wasn’t exactly thinking that when I came back from my holidays to discover my agency was in insolvency proceedings.
You would have to think that was pretty much the end, but I did continue to do some work for this firm through a new agency. The end client was the same, the project giver was the same only the difference was the agency in the middle. I guess I learn slowly.