I've been self-employed/contracting for pretty much my entire working life.

I live in one of the regions, and have no desire to move to the 'big smoke'.

A couple of times recently, I've run into similar questions from clients:

"What happens if something happens to you?"

I can see three possible solutions:

• I go and work for someone else, who has other team members with similar skills. (Last time I tried that was an utter disaster. They should have read "The mythical man month", before they even considered hiring.)
• I hire someone myself. (This is pretty scary since I'm a sole trader, and I've had a few people on work experience in the past, more qualified than myself who basically needed to be spoon fed.)
• I carry on as currently, and risk losing opportunities, or being replaced. (I already had this happen once, and I'm still cleaning up the mess the person who replaced me made. At least I did get to increase my hourly rate when the former client asked me if I could come back.)

I don't have any formal qualifications, but I've spent over 20 years doing development work, initially with Microsoft Access, eventually graduating on to SQL Server and a bit of mySQL.

SQL Server is probably my major platform, although there are gaps in my knowledge as I haven't worked with clients with enterprise grade systems, although SQL Azure is part of what I work with. Mostly it's lots of data modelling of business processes, querying, stored procedures, functions, and some admin. 

I've done a little bit of ASP.Net and am starting to work wit Xamarin for app based data access, in addition to quite a bit of PHP based web coding along with (S)CSS HTML etc.

Git is a part of my workflow.

Of the formal university papers I've past, although I haven't completed a degree, I've taken a broad mix, including mostly life sciences but also a number of linguistics papers, and I guess this reflects in the fact that I don't just write code, but also documentation.

My latest formal learning effort apart from picking up new coding skills, is to learn te reo Māori, after already having picked up a second language previously.

I have face to face meetings with clients to determine requirements, and I guess I'd say I employ something of an agile methodology, although there are certainly gaps in my knowledge due to not having done formal training.

One question is, what is that sort of skill set worth in the current marketplace, a) if I were to work for someone else or b) if I needed to hire someone?

I feel as though I'm in a situation where it's hard to find someone else with my skill set, but also my skill set is maybe too broad and lacking depth in some areas that might be desirable if I were to work for someone else.

I don't have truckloads of cash sitting in the bank or major assets if I do pay someone, and I have my quiet patches when there isn't heaps of work even for myself, so I can't afford to have things turn to custard, but if I can help anyone else with some income, even if it's only intermittent, that would be satisfying.

I've got a few ideas for projects that may or may not generate revenue in future so I'd find it frustrating to be locked into a closed environment where there's no opportunity to innovate, but I'm not really the right kind of personality to go out and do the whole startup venture capital kind of thing, as I'm a bit of an introvert (although definitely not a hermit!). 

I'm also interested to hear any ideas for solutions anyone has for how to deal with this kind of scenario.