I am stuck doing small gigs – how to land long-term contracts?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been freelancing in Lithuania full-time for about a year now doing WordPress development, troubleshooting, and improvements on existing projects. Recently I brought on one freelancer to help me with a couple of small and simple projects while I work on custom ones. I still enjoy coding myself and prefer to stay hands-on with development.

Things are going well in terms of workload. I usually work with around 4 clients per month. I’ve built a very good reputation with clients, so I often get referrals from existing customers or in business network "BNI" that I am member of. The problem is that most projects are small or lower-medium size. A typical project lasts anywhere from a week to about a month.

I usually charge 35€/h, and I’m currently stuck at around 2,500€ monthly revenue, which is quite low. If I had consistent work, I could easily make 2x that. With the extra person, even more. Since July I do not spend any time in sales, but making new proposals, meetings, evaluations for refferals/recommendations still eats up a lot of time.

I’m not trying to build a huge agency. My ideal situation would be a small team of 1-2 people working on a few longer-term contracts instead of many small projects.

Basically fewer clients but larger and longer engagements.

For context, most of my work currently comes through referrals and business networking, but project sizes don’t really grow.

For those who made the jump from small freelance projects to longer-term contracting – what helped you make that transition? How did you get in front of companies that need contract web developers?

Is it possible for my situation to find contracting opportunities in USA since the need is the biggest there? If yes, where do I start?

Any advice would be appreciated.