Delegation to Upwork: what is the mechanics?

Question

Upwork

Dear colleagues, tell me please.
I have been freelancing on Upwork for a long time, I have a top rated account (namely, personal, not agency), now I want to expand and actively delegate tasks. But a number of questions arise.
First, purely conceptual: how acceptable is it to find a client from a personal profile and tell him: "I plan to work with a team, do you mind?" - and, if necessary, offer him to conclude an agency contract.
Secondly, there are a number of purely mechanical (i.e., organizational) questions. At the moment, I see the following options for organizing work:
1. Work as an agency. At first glance, the easiest way, because. the client simply pays for all employees and this money goes to them, a minimum of gestures is required from me. But I have an assumption that no one will want to work with me like this, because I have never actually seen this and have never received offers to work through an agency. Intuitively, it seems to me that if I attracted an employee to Upwork, then he will not agree to enter my agency, and if he is outside Upwork, then he will not agree to register there specifically to work for my agency (especially if he is not a freelancer). Please tell me if this is true or am I wrong?
2. Contract for a personal profile and hire people separately. Coordinate the fact that I'm working with a team. Add employee time either as manual hours (the problem is that you can add a maximum of 24 per day), or take only fixed price projects, or work on an hourly project yourself, and ask employees to open a separate contract and issue invoices as milestones (I don’t know, they will agree whether clients work this way - sounds too complicated).
Please advise the best option, ideally from personal experience. I see that many start-up companies work this way at the very beginning, but it is not obvious to me how they organize everything.
Thank you very much in advance!

Answer 1

I warn my clients that I will delegate design, layout and some other tasks, since I am a programmer, not a jack of all trades. People are okay with this, especially if you mention that testers and layout designers are on average significantly cheaper than programmers and it is inappropriate to take on tasks that do not require high qualifications.
Accordingly, if you find a person who cannot do your work completely for you, do all the most important things yourself, and give him the part of the work that is easier, then I see no reason why this person will not work on your terms.
But I have to be responsible for the quality without any excuses that Vasya screwed it up.

Answer 2

My answer is not entirely relevant, maybe I will come up with thoughts.
I work as a freelancer offline.
When there are too many orders, I delegate only PART of the work to a freelancer from the exchange.
I don’t tell clients about this, since not a single freelancer can say that he made the ENTIRE order.
On principle, I don’t work with agencies, because of the conviction that there the manager winds up his percentage and delegates to just anyone (the price is higher, the quality is lower).
I check each order personally and correct the shortcomings - gradually I remove the role of the performer and take the role of the leader.
I saw the next step at the start of one now successful company - where the director took students for a quarter of the rate. There were several programmers, a couple of designers - I took good ones full-time as orders grew.
And all this rested on the project management system.

Answer 3

It is absolutely normal to work with a team, it is extremely difficult to do everything alone.
1. The agency is convenient in terms of certain automation, but again, if you say someone is on a salary, and an hourly contract is also difficult.
2. Both options are ok, given that there are no problems with the manual in a week of 7 * 24 hours.