Subcontract work for a larger marketing firm:
While I was trying to procure more software-oriented design work, I found that while non-profit agencies were interested in what I could provide, larger, enterprise-scale clients either had internal design teams or were interested in outsourcing larger jobs to other design companies, but they were unwilling to use my company once they found out I was the only developer involved.
Since I was also working from home and playing 'Mr. Mom' to raise my son, I found it difficult to be doing that while also doing both the development and marketing work for my business simultaneously, but wasn't bringing in enough money to bring on other employees.
At the same time, I was getting solicited by programming teams from geographic locations such as India and Eastern Europe who were promising to do advanced programming for the equivalent of $5 per hour per person. While I did not want to become the U.S. marketing front for foreign programming teams, I realized that my direct competitors may be taking advantage of this.
So I resolved to try to identify a larger marketing firm which already had large enterprise clients and who had the need to outsource smaller jobs to smaller design companies like mine. I did identify a large marketing firm and they initially just sent me artwork jobs, like Photoshp manipulation, but when that went well, they started offering me programming-oriented work, including things like coding AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) jobs for their large site with clients such as Blue Cross, Blue Shield and a large hotel chain. They were happy with all my work, and they were able to pay fees which made my time profitable enough to continue.
The downside to this was that these jobs were always very quick-turn with tight deadlines, which meant it was difficult to try to do this with more than one agency at the same time. Unfortunately, as the marketing firm I connected with experienced a downturn in their business load, that directly affected the amount of work they could send me, so my business started suffering as well.