When it comes to finding work as an escort, whether you are male or female, gay or straight, you can choose to work for an escort agency, or join the ranks of the independent escorts, or indies. Which you should choose is very much a personal matter, but you need to take into account the pros and cons of each carefully prior to beginning work.
If you are fresh to the business then it might be a good idea to work for an agency, at least for a while, so that you can learn the ins and outs of the escort business. This will also give you the opportunity to speak to other escorts employed by the agency, and learn from sharing their experiences.
The Advantages of Working for an Agency
There is more to working as an escort than many people assume when they first start, and it can be nice to have someone else to take care of some things for you, while you are getting comfortable. For example, the agency will handle the advertising, will screen potential clients, will manage your diary for you, and will take care of booking hotel rooms and organising transport, when appropriate.
Perhaps most vitally for many escorts, the agency provides a safety net as they know where you are and what you are doing at any given moment, and the client is very conscious of this. This provides you with a notable level of safety, and with a backup team to call on if you fall into trouble.
Speaking of trouble, the law also plays a significant role in many escort’s lives, and the degree to which it affects you will depend on where you are working, and how you are exceuting your business. Many escort agencies have been around for a long time, and are extremely accustomed to what you and cannot do. This again can be enough to stop you inadvertently running into problems.
The Disadvantages of Working for an Agency
An escort agency is the same as any other business, and some are very well run while others are poorly run, and may even simply exploit their escorts without a care for anything other than the money the business can make. For this reason, you need to do your research and make sure you know exactly what kind of agency you are joining.
While an agency will handle much of the background work for you, such as advertising, client screening and organising appointments, they will also ask certain things from you in return. For example, they may need you to be free for work between certain hours each day, and decide how much time off you can have each week. They may also decide where you have to be when you are not working, perhaps allowing you to go home, as long as they can contact you on the phone, or requesting you to be available in the agency’s office.
The agency is also in the business of making profit and does this typically by taking a cut of the fees paid by the client for providing him or her with an escort. Fees can be high, especially in major cities where it is not unusual for clients to pay several hundred dollars an hour for an escort. You will have to look carefully at the financial agreement sought after by different agencies and decide what is, and what is not, acceptable to you.
The Benefits of Working as an Independent Escort
Private escorts are esentially their own bosses, choosing for themselves when they work, who they accept as clients, and what they are comfortable to do. In effect you are entertaining all of the benefits, including the monetary benefits, of being self employed and, for many people, these benefits often overtake any disadvantages.
The Disadvantages of Working as an Independent Escort
Working for yourself means that you will have to handle everything yourself, including such things as advertising, screening potential clients, booking hotel rooms, organising transport, and indeed confronting anything else that comes up. This can be a lot of work initially, but much of this routine work becomes simpler as time goes on. One thing that you have to deal with though, and which will never become irrevelant, are the risks that come hand in hand with escort work.
Like it or not, escort work can certainly be very dangerous, and you must not only be constantly wary, but must take positive steps to cover yourself. The list of precautions you need to take is far too extensive to explain them all here, but will include such things as ensuring that any room you use with a client has an emergency exit that you can use, and being positive that someone knows where you are, and that the client is aware of this fact. Telling yourself that this is a safe enough area and that nothing is going to happen to you does not work, and safety needs to be the priority on the list of things to think about for independent escorts.
On Balance
As with any job there are both good and bad sides to becoming an escort, and this is deifnitely one job that you need to go into with a careful mindset. That said, independent escorts can enjoy a very nice lifestyle if they get it right, and the job can be good fun if you have the fitting personality for it, take the time to understand what you are doing, and set your business up correctly.