Leaders, we seldom bring on individual freelancers for an entire episode.

• The reason is absolutely NOT that we don’t leave freelancers (they are the hero’s of our industry).

• The real reason is that the best freelancers aren’t usually talking, they’re building, and a podcast for them is typically a distraction.

BUT. Their voices need to be heard. And you need to understand their problems and their motivation in order to attract and retain the best one’s.

Which is where Brooks comes in. Brooke’s would be your VP of marketing. Instead he’ll still do what a VP of marketing can do, but as an independent contractor, he’ll be your go to for every piece of SaaS & B2B content.

We’re going to hit on everything.

• Why he freelances.

• Why freelancing is better than a full time job for him.

• Why hiring him leads to better results than full time employees.

• What sucks about freelancing.

Enjoy :)

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Our Favorite Quotes :)

What does Brooks do?

• “I work with high growth, venture funded and profitable, b2b SaaS companies by helping them put together all their growth programs through content and copywriting.”

What does Brooks like to be called?

• “I do prefer the term independent professional over freelancer or terms that you see”

Why does he freelance?

• “when you work a 40 hour week at a corporation, it’s very different than a 40 hour week freelancing because when you're freelancing, those 40 hours you're working, you're not hanging out at the coffee stand, you're creating assets for your clients, you're thinking, you're strategizing, you're building documentation, you are on calls with clients, it's all active.

• “If you think about working out, there's a big difference between walking very slowly and sprinting. And freelancing is closer to the sprinting side of the spectrum.

• “The Freelancers I've met, have all been this way, highly focused on their work, highly focused on their clients and wanting to do right by their clients. And that's because their muscles have not atrophied. Like, freelancing is a lot less wasteful of a process. And that's not a dig on working at large corporations. I'm not none of this is to is to bash anyone or pick on anyone. But this is just my experience in seeing both sides.”

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Leaders, Jon Younger and Steve King are the brains behind many of our industries leading stats.

What’s unique about Steve is that he’s the perfect example of freelancing becoming the natural evolution of work. Steve wasn’t a pissed off employee that wanted to ‘ditch the 9-5 to sit on a beach’. He was a VP & GM at leading companies like Lotus Development and Macromedia. In terms of the corporate ladder, he made it, yet he chose to blaze the solopreneur path instead through his firm Emergent Research,

There are 7 massive themes that Steve and I discuss.

1. There’s now a middle class to the freelance economy

2. 55% of individuals have been independent at some point in their life

3. 60% of Americans don’t have the risk profile of a freelancer

4. 26% growth from 2021 to 2022, with full time freelancers leading the growth

5. Freelancing is overwhelmingly chosen, and freelancers have the highest levels of fulfillment

6. Misclassification is protecting 25% of the population at the expense of the entire freelancer population

We’ll also break down MBO Partners recent State of Independence in America 2022 Report.

Enjoy :)

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Some of our favorite quotes:

How has the freelance economy grown in the past year?

• “we've steadily seen the increase in the number of independent workers that report earning $100,000 more a year. And that that grew quite a bit over the last year in particular. But it's been growing steadily since we've been tracking this in 2008.”

Where are we heading?

• “In another 10 years, it'll probably be close to two thirds of Americans will have been independent workers at some point in their careers.”

• “About 55% of adult Americans have been independent workers at some point in their careers. And so you see this revolving door, we see a lot of lot of freelancers who freelance and then get a job, they leave that job go back to freelancing. A lot of full time employees will shift into freelancing for a short period of time and go back. And so it's not so much when your kids are going to say, ‘I want to be a freelancer’, more likely, what your kids are going to say is, it's, ‘Hey, I'm going to be a freelancer, whether I want to or not, at some point in my career, and maybe it's going to be my full career, maybe it's not’.”

Freelancers overwhelmingly choose freelancing:

• “consistently somewhere between 70 and 80% of freelancers say they did it by choice, as opposed to having a layoff or a lost job or inability to get a job, or some other shock.

• Satisfaction rates are always somewhere in the mid 70s to low 80s. And so the vast majority of freelancers are satisfied with their work.

• Most every survey on ‘am I going to go back to a traditional job, do I want to go back to a traditional job, or do I prefer freelancing’, you find that only about one in 10 freelancers, on average, say they would prefer a traditional job.”

What are some major challenges?

• “about 60% of Americans simply don't have the risk profiles to be successful as a full time independent worker. And part of that is many of those people don't want the responsibility, they want other people to manage, and I'm not saying this in a negative sense, it's just the way it is. They would prefer having someone else manage them. Others can't deal with unpredictable income and can't deal with what they view as the risks and the insecurities associated with it.”

What is the break down of freelancers?

• “freelancers who are their households primary income earners are only about a third of the total number of three freelancers, most freelancers work part time.”

What are common characteristics of the best freelancers?

•  “one of the groups we studied was commercially successful artists, and it turned out they spent about half of their time on business issues, and about half of their time on art. And the artists that were successful as artists, but unsuccessful making money, did about 90% Art, 10% business.”

• “that's effectively true for everybody. I mean, I don't want to do accounting, I don't want to do billing, I really don't want to do marketing. I want to do the work, the research work, I want to do the analysis, I want to get the data back and study it. So that's really a big part of it is you have to be both.

• Particularly if you want to grow then you've got to become a business person more than necessarily a freelancer. That's a very common common issue. And we consistently find people who don't focus enough on the business are less successful than people who do.”

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Kam started in the semiconductor industry. Then went into manufacturing automation.

He now enables manufacturing companies convert leads by optimizing their copy...think email outreach, email follow ups, everything reps are moderate at but do anyways.

Long story short…he’s insanely valuable, and his value is increased by working on an independent project basis.

In our episode we’ll talk about:

• How he changed from consulting to freelancing

• Why we hates the term freelancing

• Why he freelances

• How Covid changed everything

• Why Freelancing can be a race to the bottom and how we can fix this

Enjoy!!!

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Leaders, we all know for the Human Cloud to go global, we need global legislation that is pro-worker, and pro-freelance economy.

Glen just released the EU’s leading freelancer research report, our summary below.

The Human Cloud

Breaking Down The 'Voice of Freelancers', EU Focused Future of Work Study 2022

Leaders, three leading policy groups just released their Voice of Freelancers Report. Full Report HERE » Our Quick Take Many of these findings support existing research that the freelance economy is quickly becoming the default global economy. What we especially love is that…

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3 years ago · Matthew Mottola

In this episode we'll cut through the noise and get to the core of where legislation is heading by talking with Glen, the EU's foremost legal and policy practitioner.

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You should embed freelance subject matter experts into your teams asap.

Consultants and subject matter experts are nothing new, but engaging experts throughout the lifecycle of important milestones are, which is where Dr. David Kupper comes in, Founder and Managing Director of expertpowerhouse.  

In his interview we discussed:

• Why the freelance economy is a win-win for companies and individuals

• How a leading global automotive company embraced freelancers to build their autonomous driving strategy

• How David went from PhD to Boston Consulting Group to the freelance economy

• How the freelance economy is an innovation to expert networks

• What we can expect in the next 5 years, hint...doubling of the freelance economy

Enjoy!

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Point 1: The 3 main shifts driving the future of work

• lessening of divide between employee and non employee

• lessening of time based to project based work

• increase in team members that work across other teams in the company

Point 2: The signal to the death of a marketplace is if the best freelancers leave. As he said, the main problem with marketplaces is that they get in the way of a good freelancer growing rather than nurture and support it.

A bit on Albert, I consider him the Creative Leader of the Future. 10 years ago he’d be your fastest rising Creative VP. Today he’s better off being independent where he can rise quicker without your corporate bullsh**.

He built UnderPinned, a leading freelancer upskilling platform, and is Chair at the Association For The Future of Work.

Enjoy!

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Our Favorite Quotes

How does he define our space?

• “gig work, competitive on price and time”

• “freelance work, value across multiple projects and project based work”

• “contractor is long term work”

•  “Do we have a word that doesn't group people into any of the prior three in a way that is unhelpful? You use the word partner within your open source contract from the human cloud, and I think that was a really great example that I've actually been running with quite a lot”

What are the main challenges in our space?

• Definitions - “what is currently damaging is that if you use liquid workforce and someone else is using blended workforce and someone else using freelancer it's very difficult to know you're talking about same thing. At the moment, which is true of any kind of nascent conversations, the process of defining the lexicon that you're using at the beginning of each conversation is more important than the substance of the conversation.”

What separates the top freelancers? A clear understanding of their commercial proposition?

• “it's interestingly similar to the startup world, there's a relatively small number of people who are in and get it and are performing at the top level. And their ability to access capital is completely different to a normal person who wants to go into the startup world.”

• “In the data and research that I have, the the statement that keeps arising is that the quality of the Freelancers knowledge or work is not directly correlated to their ability to earn over a certain level.”

• “if you are a good enough developer, if you are a good enough designer, if you're a good enough marketer, you don't see a correlation between further experience directly and earning potential and what I've kind of developed around, is the idea that if you actually look at the way that they operate, very high level consultants, freelancers, what they are able to do is clearly and eloquently identify the commercial value and context of the work that they're doing.”

• “the turning point in any freelancers ability to be successful, is to stop providing a skill or service and start providing this commercial context within which they can generate value.”

• “the way they should think about themselves is not a profession that sells skills, or a freelancer that sells skills, but a business that solves problems for a particular type of client using their skills as a toolkit.”

What makes a clear commercial proposition?

• “Answering the following five questions.

  • What do you do?

  • What problem do you solve?

  • Who do you solve it for?

  • How do you solve it?

  • Why are you the person to solve it?”

What’s the difference between small and large businesses?

• “the people who get enterprise clients and the people who get SME clients are operating in a wholly different way, and sell in a wholly different way. And access to opportunity at an enterprise level or a very valuable contract level is never to do with personal brand”

• “if I wanted to build up a large base of small businesses, the influencer route is quite a powerful route, because that's where people look for social proof, like it is a form of social proof that is validating, big companies do not look for social proof from other SMEs, they look for a small number of select relevant bits of experience.”

Marketplaces…do we need them?

• Yes and no

Let’s define Marketplaces

• Gig Marketplaces: “Gig, who is cheapest, right? That's gonna stay, there is always a need for that I want my food delivered.”

• Verticalized Marketplaces : “the other end of the spectrum [from gig]. I want to have an intermediary. I want to have somebody that does some sort of vetting process. Because this is important to me and I don't have that process internally. These are the vertical specialized marketplaces that solve a specific problem for a specific type of client with a specific type of need.”

What’s wrong with marketplaces?

• “the moment the marketplace gets big enough or to a certain level, they stop being an efficient agency and start being this competitive transactional business model, recruitment platform, where 90% of the users are inactive. And the 10% that are active do 80% of their work off platform.”

What is the actual ‘future’ of work?

• “There will be a general lessening of the divide between employee and non employee, there will be a greater focus both in enterprise and SME level on projects based on objectives and skills rather than roles, whether they're an employee or not.”

• “I would also anticipate a much smaller earning of core team members who have specific linear roles and a much bigger increase in team members who work across different projects.”

Marketplaces are a-symetrically aligned with how freelancers grow their business.

• What is the defining characteristic of a successful freelancer? Well, statistically, the defining data point is their network, the size and value of their network, there is no other defining characteristic.

• Now, let's take a marketplace model. The marketplace model works on transactional fees based on recruitment. So what you're telling me is, as this valuable data point grows, I become less reliant on you. So the better I am at freelancing, the more successful I am, the less I need the core service that you're offering.

How do different marketplaces approach this relational vs transactional a-symmetry?

• “Fiverr’s attitude is, we get this, we actually agree with this statement, as far as I

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The result is that leaders have sexy decks, raise a bunch, but can’t get real traction outside of marketing walls.

Brooke isn’t one of these leaders, she’s a web dev freelancer at heart, and will bring us to the core of what’s most important to freelancers, what’s in the way for freelancers, and where the industry is going.

We’ll also hit on something controversial - the disruption of freelance talent marketplaces.

Specially we hit on:

• What the actual purpose of a talent marketplace is, and why the current form of talent marketplaces won’t be what works in the next 5 years.

• Why this transition away from talent ‘marketplaces’ and towards talent ‘partners’ is happening faster than we think.

• How entrepreneurs can build for the next wave of freelance talent marketplaces.

Trigger warning: Some leaders will feel very uncomfortable as our industry was built on marketplaces, specifically Upwork (UPWK) and Fiverr (FVRR). Both were one of the first, both have clear strengths, yet both were built for an industry that is quickly and fundamentally changing. Specifically, freelancers the past 10 years look very different than freelancers entering today.

Enjoy!

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Why did platforms introduce the freelance economy in a transactional way?

• “the way that a lot of platforms and freelancing gig economy had been set up to this point up to date are very focused on transactional.”

• “the marketplace concept was so focused on fulfilling the needs of quote unquote, the employer that it really wasn't supporting the freelancer and the Freelancers have more power now and they'll continue to gain more power and they should, because they're providing the work.”

• “if you've got millions of people on a marketplace? How is there any sort of real, like, vetting process or anything there.”
  

What is the future of freelance talent marketplaces?

• “I definitely think there's an end to them as we know it now.”

What will companies always need?

• “There’s always a needed element to help manage in between. If you look at corporate America, there's always a third party in there. It's managing there's a whole HR department, there's you know, there's always a manage management element in between.”

Where will disruption come from?

• “People are really looking towards more curation, more niching, more support, that they're not getting in a marketplace setting. And so that's where I see that there's going to continue to be that disruption.”

Companies need full time talent dedicated to just managing freelancers

•  “I see one path that that could continue to develop is the HR departments having a specific person or team that is associated with these marketplaces or these freelancers.”

• “there's going to have to be literally employees at these companies that are managing the freelance talent.”
  

What do both small business owners and corporations need?

• “They love reporting, both small business owners and corporations.”

• “They want quality, they also are not exactly sure how to get fully set up with freelancers.”

• “They want someone to manage it, they just want it to be taken care of, they want it to be, you know, handled smoothly and work with them.”
  

How can companies support freelancers? Onboarding!!! And empathy.

• “letting them do their job and not micromanaging them, because they've got it and you're gonna waste your own resources trying to micromanage them.”

• “Let them do their job and make sure that you've set that scope successfully at the beginning, and expect that the Freelancer is going to let you know if they're going out of that scope.”

• “It's just like having an employee, usually they're going to be a little bit more independent and able to handle everything that's coming at them, but make sure that you make room for them”.

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For the past 10 years we’ve been client focused. Meaning our attention, our investment, and our decisions typically were based off what was best for the client, not the freelancer.

Today we’re freelancer focused. Meaning the value of marketplaces is shifting from volume (lots of freelancers) to quality. This seems small, but this is a massive shift in marketplace value away from large networks and towards strong individual outcomes.

The tough part is that freelancers are tough to understand, and while we have phenomenal data to point to, most marketplaces or solutions aren’t run by leaders who have freelanced themselves.

Maari is the exception. Before leading Uncompany she was a freelancer for over 10 years. Which means she can go beyond the data and teach us the core of what good freelancers need and where the freelance economy is going.

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Freelancers - who are they and why should I care?

Let’s start - they’re now your best leaders

• “There's a lot more executive level people entering the industry of freelance coming out of careers of 20 to 30 years of working.”

• “when I talk to clients now, it’s like I know there's design and writing freelancers and photographers, but I need a senior strategist that's going to lead our content development team. And I'm like, yep. And then they're like, and I need a senior strategist to have experience in tech startups, specifically fin tech. And I'm like, Cool. Yeah, I know that person. He's super awesome. He's available start.”

And why should you care?

• “You can have the Lebron James of digital marketing, you can have the Serena Williams of strategy, because those people are out there. And they're doing it at a really high level, and you can tap into them for a game without having to buy their entire season.”

Okay, that is so baller…

And what does this look like? Hint…we won’t all become freelancers

• “We think all teams going forward will be a hybrid team. We have our core team, we have our full timers. We also have a combination of full timers, freelancers, contractors, part timers, remote workers all working together. That core team, they're delivering skills that you can't do business without, and we need to build a bench underneath of them to support that core team. So that's contractors and freelancers and all those folks, because they're flexible, so you can kind of pull them in and out.”

What is the transition to freelancing like?

At first tough…

• “It was a tough transition. I think a lot of people who make that transition, especially if work is a big part of your life, it becomes a big part of your identity, and there's this level of loss that you experience. We're just like, well, if I'm not Marii Casey, Senior Art Director, then what the heck am I, where's my identity now, and that's tough. That's tough to find. And so for me, the the year I transitioned freelance, it was really exploring what that meant. What does success mean for me, because I think a lot of times in traditional work, success means I got a promotion, I have a new title and more letters behind my name, or now I’m making more money, or I now have more people under me, or I'm getting awards, there's all these external ways that we measure success.”

• “So I kind of transitioned my mindset to think if I'm not measuring success by what other people are doing, I'm gonna measure success by just having a kick ass life, and letting work support whatever that is at whatever stage I happen to be in.”

Then life changing…

• “So I started freelancing, probably about 20 to 30 hours a week. And it was just like, just like LightSwitch, like, the clouds opened up. And it was just this amazing alignment where I was like, wow, I really can build and grow and career, but then also have a life that's healthy, get my hair cut in the middle of the day, go to the grocery store at a normal time. Like it was really this moment of this amazement, and I was like, I should tell everybody about this, everybody should know that this is possible.”

How did she get started?

•  “I'm gonna give myself three months or so of runway where if I make no money, we're still good. You have to say I'm all in on this, you're gonna have off days when you're freelancing, but basically it was like, I'm willing, if I don't make money in three months, to go work at Starbucks, or I'm gonna go work at the grocery store. Because it's so to the point where traditional work isn't working for me that I'm willing to take that risk. It's like, I will live in a van down by the river.”

•  “I spent the first several years in the first part of my freelancing just studying and figuring business out. I walked around, I had my business cards, and I would walk into places that I felt like I like your business. I like what you sell. And I started with a small business in my area, and I just went and I was like, ‘hey, I love what you guys have to offer. Here's what I can offer you.”

• “I was selling design services coming out of my skill set from advertising.”

BIG PROBLEM - her corporate life didn’t translate to small businesses…

• “A lot of what I did in advertising didn't fully convert, because I was doing Nike campaigns and Travelocity shoots and you can’t ask a local brewery to do a three week shoot in South Africa.”

HUGE SOLUTION - package your offerings

•  “One of the things I did early on was take a look at other service based companies, like dry cleaners, laundromats, all these different services and photographers, and ask how do they package and sell their services? And so I was like, here's a list of services that I could do, here's a packet, because I realized pretty early on that if I'm not making it easy for them to understand what I'm doing they're not going to buy it. So I tried to make it really, really easy for them to say, Yep, Add to Cart.”

Let’s Talk Freelance Marketplaces

What’s wrong with traditional marketplaces? Let’s start by talking about the problem of prioritizing freelancer volume rather than quality.

• “traditional models don't work for me as an independent who's mid to senior level and wants to build a career as an independent, which means I want to get good work, I want to grow my business, I want to grow my salary, and I want to retire. I don't just want to run on this, like low paying hamster wheel for the rest of my life.”

• “It becomes this, what if I can get it for cheaper, which I think comes from the mindset of a lot of these big race to the bottom 1000 million people in there who's gonna do it for cheaper, and we immediately notice that in clients. That's a red flag for us, because to me, we're not going to be the cheapest, and we're not going to address that race to the bottom mentality. It's just, it's not a positive, you don't get good work. Freelancers aren't happy, clients are happy, nobody's happy.”

Too many freelancers means too little understanding of each individual.

• “When I say me, I mean, me as a freelancer, when I was working with staffing companies, it's like you don't really know what I do. Like they would hit the tag for Illustrator, and since I know how to use Adobe Illustrator it would come to me, but it's like, I'm not an illustrator, I can use Illustrator, but it's a completely different skill set. And I would get really frustrated because the job was weren't relevant.”

And lack of transparency and being in the middle of the freelancer to client relationship is misaligned with good freelancers…

•  “the lack of transparency was a big issue. Not knowing how much they're making and how they're getting paid. The margin game with staffing companies and platforms is crushing because it's hard to build a business if you can't control what you need to make.”

• “One of the things that I experienced was like, wow, this awesome project. But since I don't own the client, I can't reach out to them, and I can't follow up and I can't talk to them. And there's this like behind the curtain mentality that I just didn't like and getting served jobs that weren't relevant or way beneath my pay scale. This is not right.”

SOLUTION: Start by prioritizing relationships

• “We spend time getting to know people. You mention retention, and long term working. It's important for us when we connect the Freelancer with a client, that our goal is that it's going to be ongoing, it's not going to be this flash in the pan. Ideally, you have somebody now that is reliable. And you can go back to again and again.”

Then curate rich experiences rather than transactional marketplace transactions

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Mina shows us how the Human Cloud can help you do this. Y’all know we love tactical, in the weeds leaders, and Mina is certainly one.

In our session with him we’ll cover:

• Why Airbus Cares: Hint...Accessing 70m+ diverse experts

• How Airbus Started: Hint...Finding changemakers within each function

• Tips For Leaders: Hint...Align passion, build a solid foundation of minimum requirements

• Seeing the Future: Hint...an Amazon for talent (not in a way that commoditizes talent though!!!!!) 

Without further ado, let’s learn from Mina!

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Our Favorite Quotes:

Why does Airbus care about freelancers:

• Access to a diverse global talent pool:

  • “There are 70 plus million people doing exactly that. We're 130,000. Imagine having access to 70 million people as a workforce going forward. That in itself was just a done pitch.”

  • “This individual has been doing this in other industries instead of having to limit ourselves to what is done in the aerospace world.”

• Access to experts at the top of their game:

  • “him or her always working in other fields, it's allowing them to be always at the top of their game. We're not going back to say, Okay, we need to upskill people to get to that level for another month worth of work every couple of years.”

• Provide a better customer experience.

  • Example: Providing custom imagery for their customers

  • How? They engaged a Formula One designer to create custom airplane mockups for each customer:

  • Result: “I looked at the imagery and it was just incredible. Absolutely incredible. It looked like it was a real photo. That allows me to be very flexible in saying, ‘Okay, I'm speaking to a customer in the next couple of weeks. Instead of sending them a generic aircraft, why don't I just make something that is theirs?’”

• Test fast:  “this allows us to fail fast, test fast, and prove value”.

How did Airbus get started:

1. They found the right POC - “one of the things that one of my colleagues in the team did, he found a use case within one of the divisions in Airbus. And he thought why don't we give this a shot? That was a poc, a proof of concept that they could tangibly put their fingers all over and use.”

2. They connected the pain points HR, the CTO, and digital transformation was facing - “did our homework to make sure that we were speaking the language of the different functions and built a narrative that worked for them at the end of the day”.

   1. HR: Find the right resource

   2. CTO: “They have an issue where they want to get things done very, very quickly because otherwise the innovation's going to move on.”

   3. Digital transformation officers: “the digital transformation officer is trying to digitize the way we interact and work with each other”

3. Mimic’ed the organization as a whole within their program - “mimic ABO as a startup. We surrounded ourselves with members of hr, members of engineering, members from R&D, members from Procurement and so on and so forth. So we really mimic the organization as much as we could.”

4. Found and empowered Change Makers: “we selected individual that were change makers within those respective functions and they ended up being our ambassadors.”

5. Built a service layer within Procurement between their employees needing talent (hiring managers) and the various vendors/marketplaces:

   1. “we built a layer on top where these platforms connected. So as an employee, you didn't have to go on platform, A, B, C, D, E and post the same thing three times. What you would end up doing is just log in through SSO and put whatever you want and then it would just figure out which platform you need to push you out to. We've automated as much as possible.

   2. “Yes. There are a few individuals today working on it. Operationally under general procurement in the company and not under specific functions technology or engineering or hr, et cetera.”

   3. Why Procurement?

      1. Procurement was the Switzerland. If we can coin it that way, to make sure it would work out as ideally as possible, especially because payment methods were involved and terms and conditions, IP agreements and so on and so forth.

Tips for fellow leaders:

• You don’t have to start from scratch, you can build off existing leaders: “we took all the learning that he has gone through over the last 10 years, and we said, okay, can we sort of bypass all those mistakes, all the difficulties he's gone through and inherit, just laid on a silver plate.”

• Benchmark: “we did a lot of comparisons. We asked how much would this cost with the traditional sourcing methods? This made it tangible and measurable.”

• Build a solid foundation of minimal minimum requirements.

• Give freelancers the space and respect to do their best work:

  • “Allow the freelancers to deliver higher quality work. Don't just give the mundane tasks to them. Allow them to come up with better ways of doing things. They're also human, so treat them fairly and be kind to them.

What are the main hurdles in our industry:

• “I would say there are way too many platforms out there.  Ideally for a corporation like ours, we want an Amazon model where I just simply, whether I buy toilet paper or buy a toothbrush, whatever, it's on the same place. Same payment methods, same types of conditions, same ways of getting things to my front door.”

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Vinod leads strategic initiatives at UST, a global digital transformation consultancy (UST is like that quiet kid that doesn’t need to insert themselves into every convo yet is the valedictorian, sports star, and just a great human). Vinod’s focus is Talent Supply Chain Management and Digital Transformation, along with spearheading an industry leading initiative called the Open Talent Center of Excellence.

A couple highlights I can’t wait for you to hear about:

• The culture change required to adopt Open Talent

• The tactical benefits of Open Talent as both elasticity and access to needed skills

• The deeper implications of our space…hint it’s not just about $$$$$

And a framework I can’t wait for y’all to implement:

• Step 1: Group the best of procurement, legal, HR

• Step 2: Scope a program solution

• Step 3: Change management 101

Without further ado, let’s learn from Vinod!

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*What differs between Open Talent and the Human Cloud or the freelance economy? They’re about 99.7% similar, with a slight difference in ecosystems vs outcomes.

Our favorite quotes:

What is Open Talent?

• “Open talent is basically fluid and elastic talent that you can access in a matter of days. You have a problem, you need the expert for short duration, solve the problem and bow out. They're like a SWAT team for me.”

Why Open Talent?

• “what happened in the last three years in the market, it forced us to be in the talent business, to provide the best talent to global 1000 firms for their business and digital transformation journey”

• “we realized that more and more people are moving to that workforce [independent workforce]. And then when we looked at the pool there, it's like, when people talk about talent shortage, open talent was screaming what shortage? So that's when we realized that there's really not a talent shortage, but it's more of a talent shift. More and more people want to be independent.”

  

• “elasticity is what this open talent brings to your workforce. It's about a blended workforce, a workforce ecosystem. MIT published a paper on this on the future of workforce ecosystems. Basically, we're talking about that workforce ecosystem where the open talent becomes an extension of your org. It's a very fluid and very flexible workforce, based on your demand and your customers demand.”

• “I use a lot of freelancers to accelerate some of our internal needs. So I'm able to go to my business users and say, I can do 2x 3x 5x for the same amount of money or even less money, right? And these are not, these are not bold promises. These are, these are promises that I know I can easily deliver.”

What do the next 5 years look like?

•  “if you look at the positive impacts of globalization, I think we're gonna see a significant impact with talent mobilization, that the the open talent, and the freelance economy is enabling because now like earlier, you had access to technology and processes and frameworks, now you have access to talent, and we are a human economy. So the fact that you now don't have any cultural barriers, any technology barriers, any regional barriers, any political barriers, to be able to tap the best talent anywhere at your fingertips, the amount of innovation that that can lead to is profound, right?

• “we are currently limited by geographical boundaries, by our company boundaries, etc. So I'm looking at a world where these boundaries slowly vanish.”

What’s in the way?

• “there is enough technology and process innovation that has happened and companies world over have solved for a lot of these by virtue of insurance, by virtue of employee agreements, etc. But they don't have to be as restrictive because a lot of the employee agreements that we see are based on, I mean, I'm not saying they are unreal, but I'm saying it's based on problems with the past.”

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• “we don't have to reinvent the wheel somebody else has solved for it. I mean, large corporations are using freelancers openly. I mean, there are companies who are using thousands of freelancers, at any given point of time. So you would imagine they have risk exposure. But guess what they're doing that means they're managing the risks. My point is, they can do that. I think there's a lesson that others can learn from that. Take a lesson from that playbook and say, Okay, how do we solve for that because I don't have to. We don't have that old adage of what's mine is mine, that does not have to be the case, right?

How they adopted Open Talent?

• “for us to implement the strategy, we had to bring our contracts, legal, HR and procurement, our finance, business team, and in some cases our customers to the table. And each of them has legitimate concerns. I can very confidently say that not one person told me that we should not do this. Whatever they said is, we absolutely need to do this, but how do we address these because these are the conditions in which we operate.”

• “it's a collective answer figuring out what we need to do and we as the change agents, we take that first step and do our homework. Ask others around because we don't have to solve it ourselves. I mean, other companies have been using open talent for ages, right? If you talk to some of them, they will give you insights on how this can be solved. And you take a half baked solution or a nearly full baked solution to the stakeholders and say, ‘This is how we can do it’.

• Then what happens is they see that you have solved for their countries because they are responsible for their own functions and they are accountable for those KPIs. So if you can do that, then the solution becomes easy. And that's how we were able to do it.

•  I don't think you'll find any user who say, ‘Nope, open talent does not work’. And it's not the future. It's just that everybody is looking at it from their perspective and saying, ‘how does it address the concerns that I'm responsible for’? I'm responsible for this exposure for this company, or I'm responsible from a taxation perspective, how do you solve for all of this? So I think that's what is really the crux of it, bring all the stakeholders to the table.

Will the world be all freelancers?

• “core full time employees, that concept is not going away. You need that core talent, the resident experts who understand your business, who understand their culture, who integrate well with the customers. So those employees are very essential to the company, for example, to drive open talent Akhil is there, I am there, we are full time employees of UST, we cannot be doing this in a freelance capacity.”

Some beautiful words that go beyond Open Talent…

• “We are all equal, but we do different jobs. So treat everybody as an equal. Like, you might be a CEO, you might be a VP, you might be an SVP doesn't matter when you're in a table. Everybody's an equal, we're doing different roles.” So giving that respect to every team member that equal respect, and making sure their voices and their input is heard is so so critical. The decision can still be yours, but making the team and everybody feel part of part of that bigger picture. It's not about just telling them that they are you have to act, and you have to show that you mean it. I think that's how high performance teams are built.

• I mean, what we've accomplished an open talent is just because of that, I mean, honestly, none of us, the stakeholders I mentioned, who are partners in this journey, myself, Akil, we're not experts in open talent. We learned this through others. The fact that we've been able to accomplish the success that we've accomplished so far, and are also confident about the journey ahead is because of this, this philosophy that I just shared.

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Key Learnings:

1. Cost is the main driver for freelancers.

   • He says, “Moving say a $100,000 average contractor that has a 40% markup to a talent platform with a 10-15% overhead cost would be game changing for many firms. Further savings are also possible by using a portion of this talent only when needed as opposed to typical long-term contracting arrangements.”

2. Changes to demand are the secondary reason as “greater use of gig workers overall greatly improves the ability of the business to flex to meet changes in demand”.

3. Inflation and decreased growth prospects are a catalyst.

   • He says, “With increasing inflation and lowered economic growth prospects, the road will not get any easier for the foreseeable future.”

What’s the big deal?

I’d say less than 5% of the work we do gets approved to be released. Because of this, the fact that such a high position was allowed to say anything is proof in itself of the growth of the freelance economy.

Find his full article »

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Some of our favorite quotes:

What are the key challenges Abby’s solving for?

• I truly believe that one of the reasons why I'm still here is because I believe in the future of this space. We've seen it grow.

• I saw what it was in 2017. And it's grown immensely since then.

• So I think the number one challenge that we face as an industry is really to educate companies, both large and small.

• It's really to educate companies both large and small about the impact that freelance talent can have not just on their productivity and their scalability, but also their bottom line. I mean, because that's, you know, in the end, that's what companies are focused on.

• And I think in times like these, it's incredibly important for companies to ensure that they're managing costs accordingly, managing their fixed expenses and their variable expenses.

• And freelancers have the flexibility to come and help when needed and leave when they're not. They can help a company scale up and down based on changing customer demands and market needs, in addition to helping these companies diversify their workforce.

Where does Abby see the freelance economy in 5 years?

• breaking the idea of a typical hierarchy. And, you know, breaking loose of traditional management styles, because for so long, we've been stuck in a world where we almost value time more than output.

• We've been brought up in this world to think that the first person in the office, and the last one to leave is probably the hardest worker. But that's not the case anymore.

• And especially when it comes to this new world of working, where everyone is remote, managers can't keep track of people's time the way that they used to. And so now, all they have to rely on is the output of that person's work.

• And that was something that Fiverr saw very early on. And that was the basis for productizing services. Because we thought, and our founder may have thought, there's deadlines and stuff like that, but we don't really care when, or how much time a person spends on a project. We care about the quality of the deliverable and the output.

• We know that the freelance economy is only going to continue to grow from here, actually, just a little less than a month ago, we released our fifth annual freelance economic impact report, which differs from some of the other reports out there, in the sense that it looks at the size and growth of knowledge based freelancers in the US versus just, you know, more general, independent workers that can earn a living by, you know, sharing their home, or driving a car or, you know, other sharing economy type of type of roles.

• What we found was that in 2021, this workforce, this particular workforce of knowledge based, independent workers brought in $247 billion. And not just that, but their satisfaction with work is higher than it's ever been before.

• And as a result of the massive success that we're having, their earnings are continuing to grow, they're continuing to make more money year over year. And their satisfaction levels are higher than they've ever been, we know that this workforce is going to continue to grow.

• And so as more and more people go independent, it's going to become impossible for companies to think that they can fill all the roles that they have with with full time talent, because the talent simply won't be there.

How can the freelance economy create opportunity for everyone?

• So I'll answer this by telling a little bit of a story of someone on our platform who has muscular dystrophy. He grew up in a poor region in Bangladesh, you know, family, not a lot of opportunity. And he taught himself how to how to do web design, Squarespace, Wix, he would build websites for companies. And he taught himself how to do this. Now, for him, his parents didn't have jobs, there was very little income. And he supported his family through his work on Fiverr. And he was able to buy a home for his parents and buy a home for his siblings. And meanwhile, he has muscular dystrophy, he cannot walk very well, it's impossible for him to get around.

• And so I think, when we talk about, democratizing access to opportunity, we really have to talk about underprivileged communities that don't necessarily have access to opportunity in the way that all of us have probably our whole lives.

• We provide these opportunities for people to better their lives in ways that have never been seen before. For him, he couldn't go out and get a regular job there's no way he could, but because he just had a computer, he taught himself how to do web design, and he had access to the internet, he was able to provide for him and his family.

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Leaders, Morten has an extremely rare background in driving change at both a global technology leader (Google) and global business management (McKinsey). In his leader portal Morten really stressed:

• How technology can solve real business problems

• How the enterprise is unique and how to drive change across these large beasts

• Where the freelance economy stands today, where it will be tomorrow, and what was supposed to, but didn’t change after Covid

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An outline of his episode:

2:35: How Google and Mckinsey taught Morten how technology can solve real business problems

5:39: How to be ready for the recession

9:53: Market landscape and where Worksome fits

15:30: Why we can’t have a truly independent world

19:45: How do you balance the entrepreneurial spirit with corporate

24:34: What hasn’t changed since Covid when we talk about the ‘future’ of work?

38:40: What’s different about the enterprise?

43:11: How should leaders drive their freelance program?

46:44: How do you balance long term bets with short term validation?

Some our favorite quotes:

On navigating the recession:

• When you're going into a recession, everything seems like risk. And when you're looking back at a recession, everything seems like opportunity, right? That is sort of, you know, whether you're like investing in the stock market or you know, a business owner or whatever, then right now feels extremely risky and uncertain. I think looking back at it, it will look like a lot of opportunity and edit and a time where a lot of things actually sort of will have to change. We're actually accelerated, which I guess is what we generally see in times of crisis.

• being able to have a really flexible workforce will allow you to be agile, and to scale up and down and adapt to the different changes that is coming externally into you and hitting you as a company.

On the state of contingent talent:

• It was just really eye opening for me, like how many companies are actually spending a lot of time going through these things manually, and seeing sort of the value that we could bring to that was just really fascinating.

•  We thought that the issue was actually finding the talent, sort of solving the same problem as Upwork. And I think, especially as we came to talk to more enterprise companies, we really saw that they had an awful lot of talent, or people in the network that they've been using for solving different tasks, but they were overwhelmed with the amount of paperwork and compliance issues getting people paid, especially getting people paid on time.

• So they didn't need a place to find the talent, they really needed a place to manage it.

Why hasn’t the industry moved as fast as expected?

• Two reasons for it, I think one is friction, and one is money.

  • You buy into this great vision of just hiring Matthew and bring him into a project, and then all of a sudden becomes overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork and compliance and legal stuff that you have to do on the back of it. So from this vision of like, I'll just spend the time on what I'm absolutely the best at, you actually ended up spending a lot of time on all that crap that you didn't want to deal with in the first place.

  • Result is that you have these intermediaries like the staffing agencies and the vendors and whatnot, that sort of take away that risk, and that compliance and the paperwork and whatnot, and end up making a lot of money on right. So there's also a huge industry. And it's important not to forget that right? There's a huge industry of companies that make a lot of money on this complexity.

What didn’t change after Covid?

• I think this whole notion that you see full time workers as just time blocks of 40 hours, or 10 hours.

• Really what you want to see is that people can execute on a project or help you do a certain body of work, right.

Importance of Community

• There's lots of comfort to be found in building an external community around you with partners or peers within the industry. Everyone has like seen the same things, right. Everyone's struggling with vendor onboarding, if they work with direct talent, Everyone is struggling with worker classification, Everyone is struggling with getting people paid, someone needs to go on payroll, and someone will be just having a direct deposit, like all those things are all struggles that everyone in the industry are, you know, dealing with on a daily basis.

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Leaders, while every board is talking about a contradictory great resignation, hiring freezes, and talent shortage (see update 83), Akhil Seth and UST are leading Enterprises to an abundant talent pool of freelancers.

Some crazy learnings:

- How Open Talent can shorten proof of concepts from 2 months to 2 days

- How you can fractionalize unicorn full time employees into multiple freelancers

- Why a company like UST is leading the charge in helping both themselves and their clients in adopting Open Talent

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A Preview of What To Expect…

• 2:00 - Why he's so passionate about Open Talent

  • “We don't have the right talent, we don't have the resources, who know the right things, to be able to achieve the work outcomes that we want to achieve. The strategy, the vision, the leadership, the tools, and the products, they're all there. The one missing piece is the people who know how to bring it all together. And where I see freelancing come in is that it's where that talent supply is now abundant. It used to be you could hire 1000 factory workers in a day, I imagine back when steel mills were first opening up or, but now now where you can go and hire 1000 people in a day is on freelance open talent marketplaces”.

• 12:52 - What he's working on at UST

  • “We're very interested in the problem statement of how do we get the abundance of talent supply into the work streams that allow our clients work done as quickly as possible? Currently when they come to us, we say we can't do that yesterday, we need at least a month to hire these people. We'd love to flip that around and say we've done it last week. That's the outcome we'd really like to achieve. And open talent is the perfect medium that gets us there.”

  • “Where we're positioning ourselves is we're solving for the fact that most freelancers don't have insurance, or don't have the insurance levels that our clients expect us to have for them to feel comfortable access to data security, IP protection, just general management of a fluid workforce.”

    • “All of these things we want to figure out and solve for, so that our clients don't need to worry about it. Or we want to be able to tell them give us the work that needs to get done. We'll orchestrate the talent that needs to exist to get that done. And we'll deliver you a finished work product.”

• 15:55 - Industry leading solutions in virtual desktopping and change management

• 18:27 - Big wins for Open Talent

  • “We projected it will take about 2 months of internal resources time to develop this proof of concept to a stage where it's ready to present to our client.”

    • “Instead we ship that off to to an open talent market space, we hired a freelancer to complete that. And it took them two weeks to do what we thought it would take two months, and it only cost us $150.”

    • “Of the 7 billion people in the world, it's very likely that there's already someone that's done something very similar to what we need to get done. And so with this proof of concept, we found someone that had, they really just needed to take some code that they owned, put it in, make a couple of tweaks and then send it to us very easy for them. And we got exactly what we needed.”

  • “What we found brilliant was that when we engage open talent, we can kind of build the person we want out of fractions of other people. So to make what I mean clear, we found a mathematician that could explain all the complex computational geometry that needed to be done. And we found an Angular developer who understood how to convert the mathematicians notes into front end development code. And so rather than having to find one person that knew how to do both, we were able to build the solution with fractions, well, building blocks. So the way I like to see it is rather than having to operate in the middle of a Venn diagram, that one person in the middle that has both that overlap that's in the intersection, that Venn diagram, we can operate with the talent that's out there in the union of the Venn diagram. So everyone, and that opens us up.”

• 22:13 - Best projects to start hiring freelancers for

• 27:55 - The biggest challenges of hiring freelancers

• 37:00 - Why classification is such a big problem in hiring freelancers

• 41:00 - Akhil's leadership journey 

• 45:49 - How to acquire and keep top young talent like Akhil

Go connect with Akhil asap! https://www.linkedin.com/in/akhilvseth/

Also special thank you to our freelance producer Ryan Mellinger for an extra innovative production!

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His portal couldn’t be more perfectly timed with how HR leaders to navigate layoffs, hiring freezes, and inflation.

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Some of our favorite quotes:

What are the key challenges Tony’s solving for?

• This challenge of converting our kind of archaic talent acquisition mindset, to a talent access mindset.

• And the challenge there is, a lot of HR professionals are just completely overwhelmed right now. They're struggling with trying to figure out how to get people back in the office or not to getting back the office how to rewrite policies on an almost daily basis, addressing that, how to juggle social political unrest, geopolitical, conflict, all of these things that organizations and talent are really looking at their leadership to provide some guidance and direction and leadership on and companies aren't used to that.

• So one of the things I said when I had a chance to talk to the whole crowd was, HR has that seat at the table. And everybody at that table is looking directly at HR to help solve all the problems right now.

• And so, to me, this is such a great opportunity for HR leaders to embrace the moment and make this change. But it's not easy. And so they're, you know, they're they're struggling with how to prioritize how to address those challenges. And I really believe just like Abby said, we can have a huge impact on the organization on their talent strategy on their employee morale, their everything, if they can just get started.

Where does Tony see the freelance economy in 5 years?

• There's no reason to expect anything other than continued rapid growth.

• Technologies continuing to rapidly accelerate how transparent it is to work for companies to get freelance or independent contractor experiences.

• And as technology continues this rapid evolution, so skills also rapidly evolve.

• So we're gonna continue to see more people realize that they can learn a skill very flexibly, probably online, and then leverage that to get work. And that's the cool thing.

• I think one of the great things about this, this whole market in general, is that it's incredibly democratizing, right, you know, opportunity exists everywhere to anybody with an internet connection and a computer. So this brings a lot more work to people all around the world. And there's no reason to think that's not going to continue at this really rapid pace.

• I think if you also look at the demographic makeup of freelancers. 50% of Gen Z is already freelancing in some way, shape, or form 44% of millennials.

How can the freelance economy create opportunity for everyone?

•  I think, all of these opportunities, whether it's people, you know, in rural America, or whether it's people in India, like Abby story, or, or anywhere in the world, the biggest impact we can have is just by educating people on what they have access, once they have the skills that they can find work really easily, really fast.

• And it's valuable work, it's work that can be proud of, and they can work for small companies, they can work for private companies, or they can work for the world's largest companies.

• You know, I think there's a ton of opportunity out there, it's just a matter of going back to where Abby started the whole conversation around educating not just employers, but talent. And I think we're gonna find a lot more talent is going to be embracing this as a way to build their lives and their careers.

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This is Jon’s second time in our leader portal. Like fine wine, Jon only gets better the more you hear him :)

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Some of our favorite quotes:

What are the key challenges Jon’s solving for?

• I love the notion of acquisition versus access. Acquisition, implying ownership access, meaning, being able to take advantage of having having it on tap, I think you're absolutely right.

• And I would add one other piece, and that is, I've been a CHRO, I've been a head of talent, I've been a head of organization development. I've worked for great companies. In my earlier part of my life, Tony in HR, nobody ever taught us how to architect the workforce. You know, it's like the big bank, suddenly, the universe is here.

• And I know how to negotiate within it. But I have no idea how to create a Big Bang. And think of all of the HR people that have learned to do a fabulous job of improving or administering or, or supplementing or aiding a workforce, but never had to figure out how to architect one from scratch. And if you don't know how to architect the workforce from scratch, you don't know how to create a flexible and blended one you don't trust it. And so what you default to is, if we own all these folks, quote unquote, somehow we'll be safer, the risk will be reduced.

• And we of course know, since the average tenure is less than two years, you're renting them anyway.

• Nicholas, what I loved about what you said, is that if you befriend procurement instead of hate procurement, they will help you because they can tell the difference between being loved and hated. Befriending procurement and helping them to understand the difference between cost and value actually helps. And then figuring out how to put stuff in the organization in a way that procurement doesn't have to, you know, sort of react badly to.

• All of us face a fundamental demand. And that and that is we're trying to convince a global industry, that they've got to change in their most fundamental assumption, and that is that if they don't own the people, they can't be successful. And that I believe, is the most important thing that we can do.

• It's education at multiple levels. It's education, in terms of freelancers, because we've got to help those folks. Freelance, one of the things we learned from our global survey, Matt is, is that freelancers are every kind of optimistic, except when it comes to marketing and networking, because they hate it.

• And so we've got to help these folks to figure out that they're not only doing important work that changes the way, the way that we live the way we operate. But they are running a bodega on the corner of Lafayette Avenue, and Carlton Street in Brooklyn. And they've got to do all of the things that that Bodega where I buy my bottled water from does. And until we educate them around the specifics of building their business, and benefiting from the association with the platform, but the platform doesn't sell their business they do, the platform makes the match.

• We've got to invest in HR education, HR hrs reward system is the love of the manager. And we got to understand that that we're not, we're not contributing to the love of the manager with freelancers because they don't count.

• We've got a supply issue. Right now full time freelancers are only somewhere between a third and a quarter total freelancers, we're not going to escape, we're not going to get to escape velocity at the enterprise level. And until we do that, we don't have an industry.

• I want to see us understand a fundamental data point. And that is that all of the business of all of the freelance platforms, agencies, marketplaces represent less than 5% of total staffing spend globally. So who's our competition? It's not each other. Our competition is history. And that's our challenge.

business of all of the freelance platforms, agencies, marketplaces represent less than 5% of total staffing spend globally

So who's our competition? It's not each other. Our competition is history.

•  I'll tell you folks, we got to help governments figure out how to tax us because if we can't figure out how to how to help governments tax us, they will shut us down.

• Right now what's happening in the UK with IR35 has nothing to do with policy towards employment, it has everything to do with how do we tax you. Because we know historically, that companies send tax rolls to government, and that forms the basis for being taxed. And now I'm in Argentina, but I'm doing work in Austin, Texas. And they're not tracking me and they are pissed as hell.

How can the freelance economy create opportunity for everyone?

• I want to plug another group, and that's working moms and working dads. And it's not just working moms. It's working moms and working dads. And one of the things that that we are able to do through this wonderful invention of a new way of working in the technology that supports it is work providing an opportunity for people at all levels of the economic ladder, top to bottom, it to create more meaningful relationships with their family and to support their family in ways that that you know, don't destroy their family.

• If I may put it in those to dramatic terms, you know, my, my, if my kids were to were to honestly answer the question, was I away too much when they were growing up? Their answer would be, of course you were. And one of the things that I am quite certain of because of that belief is that neither of them want jobs or will accept jobs that require a tremendous amount of travel. They don't want to be that far away from their kids.

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• Emergence of the MSP (managed service provider)

• What’s the difference between VMS and MSP?

• What happened with Microsoft and how did that change our industry?

• How has the freelance economy changed from a contingent worker economy to a chosen independent economy?

• Loss of tax revenue is a major driver of government NOT wanting freelancers…

• What is the risk for companies?

• What will the be the impact of a recession?

• Where do talent marketplaces fit?

• Why SHOULDN’T people become freelancers?

• What can we expect the next 5-10 years?

Honestly, it took me 3 listens to truly understand the power of what Jason discussed with us. Hopefully this cheat sheet will accelerate your learnings :)

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Some of our favorite quotes:

Emergence of the MSP (managed service provider)

• The biggest companies in America have always used contract workers. From using tons of engineers to lots of marketing people to the people filling the cafeterias, all of these people are third party workers, right? Whether they are a 1099, or a W-2.

• At the large enterprise it's always been fairly structured. HR owns employees. But at the large enterprise, they literally don't own an employment relationship with contractors. And so that relationship has typically been managed through procurement. And it's a different type of relationship.

• It's very vertically integrated, right? So they would have these suppliers, right? Oh, you need QA testers for games, let's go and find a supplier who can really help us with that at that time, or you need lots of engineers, and we need engineering supplies, actually, that's the biggest use. So we probably don't want to rely on one engineering, but we probably need loads.

• And so essentially, they came up with these very big supply chains. And our procurement person or team don't really have the internal expertise to efficiently manage that type of supply chain. And so they will have third party vendors come in and manage that and managed service providers.

What changed?

• It used to be fairly informal. And over the last 20-30 years, the way that they have looked at contingent workforce, all extended workers of every category has become more formalized, and more strategic rather than just tactical.

• Companies passed the risk of compliance/security down the chain to MSP’s/VMS’s, who passed the risk down the chain to staffing companies

What’s the difference between VMS and MSP?

• MSP = People

  • The MSP plays the role in between the supplier and the manager who has a need

• VMS = Software to software

  • Usually either SAP Fieldglass or Beeline

• *Most companies handle this in a hybrid way, using both

What happened with Microsoft and how did that change our industry?

• Late 90s, high growth company, hiring tons of engineers can kind of could be generic, right? Just happened to be Microsoft.

• They were hiring tons of engineers, and they would essentially offer people a role. And say to them, we can pay you as a freelancer, we can pay you as an employee, if you come in as an employee, let's say we'll pay you 100 bucks an hour, or 1000 bucks a week. But we'll also give you benefits you can like have and stock options, and you can come into the cafeteria. And for other people that will be like, Oh, we can just pay you 120 bucks, or let's say 1200 bucks a week, whatever it was, and you're not gonna get any benefits, but we'll pay you 20% more. And by the way, you you're not going to pay tax either probably on most of your income.

• Now these rules around who was an independent contractor and who's an employee have always existed, but they really weren't enforced.

• What happened here was that post IPO, all the people who got paid a little bit less became millionaires and all those freelancers were like, oh my goodness, that was probably the worst decision ever. And they sued Microsoft.

• And Microsoft settled for like, $100 million.

• They sued saying we were employees, essentially, we did the site work. And we were misclassified.

• And this misclassification rule is like, companies and workers don't have a choice. The assumption is you're an employee, unless you can prove otherwise, like that's, that's the one line summary of of the risk there.

• And so every procurement person at the fortune 500 was like, whoa, independent contractors, well, I don't want to lose my job over all they freelancers or not.

Microsoft exposed the existing code that existed but wasn’t enforced when the contractors that chose higher pay without benefits and stock options missed out on the IPO.

How did this change our industry?

• So what they did is they made all their staffing vendors employ them and insure them make sure they got workers comp insurance, and so on.

• All companies turned to W-2’ing everyone, and MSP’s and VMS’s handle all the risk involved with staffing the right people.

• Managers still needed talent, so then they went ‘rogue’ spend, where they don’t go through the approved internal procurement process.

How has the freelance economy changed from a contingent worker economy to a chosen independent economy?

• those people working back 20 years ago and a contingent workforce program, for the most part, most of those people, it was a stepping stone. So maybe I want a full time job. I think I'll take a contract role at Microsoft, as an engineer, but ultimately, I'd really like to get hired there full time.

Loss of tax revenue is a major driver of government NOT wanting freelancers…

• One major trend is the increase in enforcement of independent contractor roles. What do I mean by that? It's not just about the worker saying, I want to be independent, I want to be a 1099 GUP. The basis of how government collects tax revenues is from income tax, right? If you pay someone as an independent, contractor, they're not paying income tax.

• So government has an incentive for people to be an employees.

“If you pay someone as an independent, contractor, they're not paying income tax.”

What is the risk for companies?

• You’ve been working 40 hours a week for a company then meet a lawyer…lawyer will say, “Oh, you worked all these hours as a freelancer, by the way, they probably should have employed you. And they probably are you a ton of like, overtime. And they probably should have paid your Social Security and all this other stuff. And by the way, oh, that growing? Probably we can get you options and all of this other stuff, right”?

What will the be the impact of a recession?

• Data showed that the use of particularly Engineering and IT folks have doubled.

• You're talking about programs that are already spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on their contract workers.

• We're gonna see, that means that they're going to hire more contract, there's gonna be more layoffs, and they're going to bring back more contractors, right.

• So now there's a lot of pressure again, increasingly on this procurement departments who are like, what's better than VMS, MSP.

Where do talent marketplaces fit?

• [From above]…And what you've got is talent marketplaces.

• What does that mean? They are doing recruitment, right, whatever their flavor is, right? So whether they're vertically integrated, these companies now are going back to the roots of we can find you the best people, the best prices quickest, whatever that variable is.

• If you want to get the best marketing folk, the old vendors are not where the best talent got, right?

Why SHOULDN’T people become freelancers?

• If you're an employee, you don't have to do anything.

• Secondly, not everyone is an entrepreneur. And not everyone has that ability.

• Those things are becoming better, but it's still quite fragmented.

What can we expect in the next 5-10 years?

• I think that we're gonna see more people having choices wanting to grab more control over their own lives, which means in many cases being independent.

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Our space is a weird intersection of staffing, VMS/MSP’s, tech, and freelance marketplaces. Most people are good at one, but very few can understand the full range.

Davis is one of those rare few as he was an early leader at SAP Fieldglass. He’s a wealth of knowledge when it comes to the history of VMS’s/MSP’s, and the below knowledge should be in a curriculum for every leader in our space.

Welcome to our Leader Portal, where you can find exact transcripts to copy/paste into your own leadership decks or research.

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Some of our favorite quotes

What is SAP Fieldglass?

• SAP Fieldglass, which is one of the if not the leading vendor management system, it's a platform that companies use to manage all of the external workforce.

Why now? What changed for freelancing to be relevant now?

•  I think now you've got some services and you could set up a limited company, at least in the UAE in the UK just in a few hours, and things are becoming a lot more convenient and accessible. Whereas before the idea of just setting up a company you knew you had you know, quite a journey to go through.

• The freelance platform themselves provide more and more services to help those freelancers to get started.

Why do you need a VMS?

•  it's really to manage your external workforce, and external vendors. You could have two main categories that you've got your your contingent workforce. You have people you get in on a temporary basis, based on a time and material, but you also have your service providers, those where you will engage more on statement of work where you will define a piece of work.

• A VMS will tend to manage the end to end process. All the way to work being invoiced and paid.

• If you think of an organization, they would have, obviously, the internal workforce, and then the external ones, the internal one, it's managing the HR system. And you can ask any company, how many employees they have. And they can tell you from this morning, I've got 27,333 employees, so it can be very precise, because it's every employee will be registered on that system.

• But as soon as we say many external workers do you have, then you've got a bigger question mark uncertainty.

• And then you go down to the question, what do you classify as an external worker is someone you know, working in the cafeteria or doing the landscaping, you see an employee, or we see an external worker, so you've got quite different complexity there.

• Visibility is probably the main driver and from visibility, once you've got visibility on the external workforce, then you can try different types of value goals for your organization, in terms of how do you use that external workforce to the best of the organization.

Visibility, visibility, visibility

What’s the core drivers of complexity with contingent talent?

• Defining the work that needs to be done » Deciding what is the best way to navigate through the different channels to access talent » compensation » then how to engage them.

• There's not yet the full freedom of choice. You've got certain rules and regs that you need to follow, and those actually increasing as those more and more channels exist.

• Then the compliance aspect becomes more and more relevant. As an organization it's how do you make sure that you've got the right classification across your organization, you've got the common way of engaging so you know, every channel that you have access to is compliant, it's properly regulated.

• Because of that easiness, of access to talent, the talent and demand, it becomes so much easier for, obviously, the hiring manager in a very decentralized, let's say, location or business unit of the business to just go and use of prevents. But how do you make sure that that doesn't put the company at risk?

• It's making sure they get the best talent at the best price at the best time that they need it. And that's also where technology can help and but processes as well that you implement internally within the organization can help.

Will the world become 100% freelancers?

• No, I don't think it will be. It's crazy.

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Leaders,

• How do you create leaders in todays digital first era?

• How do you create community in todays digital first era?

• How do you grow sustainable professional service models in a digital first era?

Enter Larry, a pioneer that was 20+ years early in building a remote consulting firm.

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Some of our favorite quotes from Larry:

His thinking on Centric

•  Since the beginning, the why has never changed 

• The same way you would think of Disney from an entertainment standpoint, those unbelievable customer experiences, that's what we're trying to do from consulting, and that we didn't see that in the marketplace. Same thing, from an employee standpoint, one that just values, employee culture, you know, the culture of our company, and making it consulting Nirvana, the best place for consultants to work. Those are very audacious goals, and very meaningful. And that's what we've been trying to set out to try to do.

What does the upcoming generation expect?

• Now we see kids coming out of college, they want to work for a company that cares beyond just making money, that really cares about and takes care of the community that they're a part of, and really cares about them.

His take on remote work

• So for us, it was interesting, during the pandemic, we were already a remote model. And then a pandemic happened. And we saw the world change overnight, and clients were much more accepting about delivery of remote services.

• Part of that whole thing I was talking about what made somebody happy and bleed, is there is still this, this human interaction social interaction component. And so even though we don't have office space in those cities, we're still getting together quite often face to face, because it is a part of what makes you complete as a human being.

• And also part of that is, what we found with our clients is even though they're okay with us delivering remote services, they still want to have a relationship, they want a deep trusting relationship, to solve their toughest problems. And so if you do that, you can't it's you can't do that and just call and dial up and be, you know, 1000 miles away, you have to interact you, we coach, our kids, soccer teams, and our clients are on the same soccer team.

• And then so part of that also is, as part of that formula is giving back to that community to make it a better place. So we're remote and we're pulling in the best remote talent anywhere in the world to help that client. But we're also balancing the relationship of physical contact and deepening that relationship through physical interaction.

• So the data shows during the pandemic, people moved out of the big city, but they didn't go very far. They went to the suburbs. And so that was really the people with kids is that what you're talking about, there was a little bit of more of that balance.

Freelancers vs FTE Percentages

• We've had about around 60% full time employees and then a 40% wide range of labor. It’s 1099, it's temporary, and then there's freelancers in there.

Why not 100% freelancers?

• Culture, I mentioned is hugely important. And to make that culture happen, you have to have people that know how to lead and they've been trained to lead, but they need to be able to lead with your value system. And so you've got to train people, and it doesn't, it can't be in two months, it's, it is a longer period of time to lead with that.

• And so for that, for the core of how to operate that company and make it happen. We have to have people that stay with us for a long time and want to stay with us for a long time.

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Leaders, Stephanie is a personal hero of ours for multiple reasons.

• She bootstrapped We Are Rosie for 4 years

• She didn’t have the silver spoon to Stanford to Sand Hill Road

• She’s using the freelance economy to create a future that works for everyone

And she said my 2 new favorite quotes:

• “the people that are out here chasing their dreams are not superheroes, they're just people that do stuff in spite of being scared out of their minds”.

• “connecting all of these folks to work that gives them both the career they desire and the life that they deserve”

In our interview, what blew me away was how practical she was. It wasn’t the typical, “I quit guns blazing, gave up everything, then never did anything but work” hustle porn.

Enjoy :)

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Some of our favorite quotes from Stephanie:

About her entrepreneurial journey

•  So I was this big dreamer that also has this deep desire for financial stability and security and safety. And I think even some of that is epigenetic coming from my father kind of being snatched out of his home and put in a refugee camp.

• Safety and security is important to me, it's probably a big part of the reason I've never left Atlanta, like I like predictability and all of that. So it had to be a slow boil. For me, I was never going to be that person that was like, forget everything. I'm building a startup. And so when I left AOL, I intentionally went and got a job at a startup, I went to work at flurry mobile and analytics, which was sold to Yahoo.

• And I realized, like, man, they're not that much different than me, right? So that was the beginning of me demystifying that, like the people that are out here chasing their dreams are not superheroes, they're just people that do stuff in spite of being scared out of their minds.

About the definition of working class

• My dad is 77, he still works full time at the mall in the suburbs of Atlanta, and has been a tailor paid hourly at the mall his entire life, right. So he's been doing that work for almost seven years. And my mother, despite not having the opportunity to go to college, she worked for hardware, equipment, manufacturing companies, so like digital equipment that's sold to HP back in the day, and worked in sales management there.

• She did well, and she's always been the breadwinner for our family. But not like, what I've been able to accomplish. And so they had three kids and worked really hard. And you know, it's hard, right? And sending money to family and all of those things that come along with, you know, immigrating to the states from my dad's side.

• So, you know, it was a fantastic childhood and my parents worked so hard for us to have the opportunity we did and I'm so thankful for it. But I was also aware of the sacrifices that they were making.

Why the freelance economy?

• I think like at the core, it's this idea that we've all heard many times, like talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is not. And when I look at my own family, that's so obvious, right, like three college educated children, and parents that didn't have that opportunity. Like, my parents are brilliant, like they are incredible business people, they are incredibly savvy, they're really hard workers. It didn't matter how hard they worked, right? They were never going to get the opportunity that I had.

• I think we see this a lot with with immigrants, right? They immigrate to the states, and they're driving a taxi, but their children are in law school or becoming, you know, surgeons.

• And so I've always been obsessed with this idea of like, how do we democratize access to opportunity and wealth? Because I've seen people who just never were in those rooms where any of those those things were handed out.

What is We Are Rosie?

• And we are a flexible career platform for marketers.

• We have 12,000 marketers on our platform. And they come together for project based work with many of the biggest brands in the world.

• We work with 25, fortune 500 brands, we work with 20 ad agencies. We work with global consultancies, and our Rosie's, which was what we call our freelancers on our platform, ranging from former CMO’s of global companies, all the way to self taught creatives and people that didn't have the opportunity to go to college.

• We're connecting all of these folks to work that gives them both the career they desire and the life that they deserve. What we mean by that is, you can come to we are Rosie to get a 40 hour a week project, you can also come here and get a 20 hour a week project, and you can get a year long project that will allow you to take summers off with your family.

• All of our work is done remotely. And it's all project based.

• It could be you know, our clients might come to us for one Rosy. And then we also have teams, which is a beautiful thing where we spin up kind of a micro agency or a micro consultancy for our clients. That is hand picked bespoke curated teams for a specific project.

• And we just kicked off the coolest one, Matt, we have 10 Rosie's running all special projects for the CEO of a Fortune five company for the next year. So anytime the CEO has a project that they need to get tackled internally or externally or they need to be educated on something. They have this kind of team of navy seals that has been provided by We Are Rosie that's working full time at their disposal for a year.

Why the We Are Rosie Model?

• Our goal is to provide all the fun parts of full time employment and get rid of all the stuff that people don't like.

• The fun parts are things like access to benefits. So when our Rosie's are working for us, they have medical, dental and vision benefits. We're even beta testing some new benefits with two of our enterprise clients, one of them will be offering things like tuition reimbursement and parental leave and PTO. And so we're working on kind of continuing to raise the bar in terms of how freelance talent is treated, because with more and more of the workforce shifting into this capacity, it's going to become incredibly competitive to access this talent.

• And the people that are creating an environment where people can truly thrive and be treated with dignity and respect, are going to win in the long term. You're going to have a more innovative agile organization. You're going to have more diversity.

The not so sexy…COMPLIANCE

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