For you Americans, time to go to the gym after all that turkey (let’s be real, it was the stuffing).

For everyone, time to grind.

• Leaders, time to get creative by hiring contractors to break through the freeze of hiring. While budgets are frozen for FTE’s, from a budget perspective, contractors are no different than the tools and agencies needed to keep shipping. Take it from Mina of Airbus who uses contractors to customize customer demo’s.

• Individuals, time to protect your worth by flexing your opportunity pipeline. This does NOT mean quitting your job to start a business or freelance. Quite the opposite, it means building value alongside your day job to either supplement your income, be prepared for a layoff, or get to a point where you don’t need your day job.

Freelancer Positioning Template

*Also please don’t pay for freelancer bootcamps. You can if you have the money, but best practices are unique to you, universal best practices are basic and not worth charging for, and the real learning will happen through experience.

🚀 Industry Update

This past month we’ve repeatedly heard:

• An acceptance of contractors accelerated during Covid (some saw 10-30% increase in usage of contractors) and is expected to continue.

• Contractor usage is now strategic. Leaders know contractor usage needs to go beyond a Procurement line item.

• Companies are prioritizing the contractor experience so they can acquire and retain good contractors.

• Contractors provide a specialized expert advantage that can help service firms win deals and help product teams accelerate insights or builds. Example, companies engaging an autonomous vehicle expert for 6 months to drive ideation and opportunity analysis.

• Enterprises are increasingly pissed off with middle man processes and want to go direct and want to re-engage with contractors.

• Enterprises want simple reporting and measuring of their talent vendors instead of trusting the 2 they’ve always worked with.

*Reply if you want a slide you can send up the chain.

🤔 PREVIEW: How The Human Cloud Can Fix Higher Ed Through Micro-Internships

This week we’ll announce an exciting initiative. We’ve been fortunate to partner with the Florida International University Honors College to integrate the freelance economy into their curriculum so that students can get immediate access to companies, immediate opportunities for learning, and accelerate their career through the student equivalent of freelance projects - Micro-Internships.

The results have been outstanding, Phase 1 data:

• 618 students signed up

• 23 companies signed up

• 15 Micro-Internships created

Subscribe to be first to hear about it later this week :)

Shoutout to Paul Polo, our Director of University Operations, JC Espinosa, the Dean of the Honors College, and our exclusive partner Parker Dewey, the world’s largest micro-internship platform.

💡 Voice of The Freelancer With Maari and Brooke

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.

We were fortunate to have 10+ year freelancers and entrepreneurs Maari and Brooke to help breakdown the voice of good freelancers.

Maari's Leader Portal

Brooke's Leader Portal

Paid Leader Resources

• For Everyone

  • Create Your Freelancer Value Prop Positioning Template

• For Corporate Leaders

  • Freelancer Job Description Template

Read more

Leaders, think about the below picture of Luca.

In one sense, his neck should be hurting from the amount of force. This is the current chaos we all feel in the market - layoffs, inflation, etc

In another sense, because he left the comfort of the couch to go to the park, he gets to see a beautiful sunset.

Ready for the 🌽?

If we get into the arena, which for Luca was the park, and for us is embracing freelance applications, we can find the opportunities in this chaos.

*Also idk why, but this edition is going to be extra cheesy. Maybe it’s because we had such validation and good news related to the direction and speed of the freelance economy last week. Maybe because I finally got new shoes.

🚀 Pulse Check: Cloudy with a high chance of contractors

From a leader in one of the top 3 global consultancies:

• “I think we are at the era of the biggest 1099 utilization. To the point that I’ve considered resigning my FTE position to go back to contracting.”

It’s not just them.

We’ve spoken with 7 enterprise leaders last week that highlighted:

• Covid catalyzed the sheer volume of contractors needed.

• But usage didn’t end when things went back to normal.

• Instead…

  • The perception of contractors changed to equal or higher value talent. Gone are the days of contracting to go from temp to hire. Gone are the days of contractors to sub while someone is out.

  • Contractor processes formalized. Instead of being a reactive part of procurement, contractors in most cases are now included in strategic workforce planning.

  • Contractor retention is a priority, with investments in learning & development, onboarding, and employee training to work with contractors.

    • *YES, this creates classification risk.

🙌 Proof: Mina of Airbus ✈️

Airbus literally engaged a Formula One designer to create real life and custom graphics for each customer - how insanely cool is that?!?!

In Mina’s leader portal we’ll also cover:

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

• How Airbus Started: Hint...Finding changemakers within each function, then building a layer between employees and platforms so employees have a simple experience

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

Learn From Mina »

🤔 Preview: What's in the way of companies hiring freelancers?

Above is incredible news. But we’re still very early.

Yes…

• 90% of leaders are prioritizing our $5.4 trillion dollar industry

• The value of access to specialized expertise, speed and cost efficiency are well defined

BUT hiring freelancers at scale is toughhhhh (I use too many h’s because the average time to a deal is 6-18 months, not because I’m Gen-Z).

In an upcoming article we’ll breakdown the 3 main challenges:

1. Risk

2. User Experience

3. Change Management

Stay tuned :)

Chart Of The Week - Statista, Number of freelancers in the United States from 2017 to 2028

“It is projected that in 2027, 86.5 million people will be freelancing in the United States and will make up 50.9 percent of the total U.S. workforce.” - Statista

Come Hang Out!

Paid Leader Resources

• For Everyone

  • Create Your Freelancer Value Prop Positioning Template

• For Corporate Leaders

  • Freelancer Job Description Template

Read more

If you feel like “they’re using the recession as an excuse” you’re not alone.

But it’s not going away, and it can actually be an incredible opportunity for your business.

Let’s talk :)

What’s the impact of recession? It should be an opportunity.

Last week hit especially hard with the below contradiction:

1. Everyone has a freeze.

2. Everyone is using the word recession for an excuse to not move.

3. Everyone recognizes that the work still needs to get done, but getting work done through employees is off the table.

So shouldn’t these same people be embracing freelancers?

Yes, BUT.

The Value Prop Has Shifted To Cost Efficiency

The value prop of the freelance economy fluctuates between access to talent, speed to talent, and cost savings.

In good times, it’s about access, speed and quality. In bad times, it’s about cost efficiency.

Your new ‘why freelancers slide’ should include:

• Freelance talent is a cost cutting way to get things done.

• There will be at least 10-30% immediate cost savings per role.

• There will be long term cost efficiencies in reducing talent needs from months to weeks.

Data You Need To Support This

• The freelance economy is a $5.4 trillion dollar market (SIA)

• 33 million people performed contingent work in the US last year (SIA), 86.5 MIL. Of the US workforce will be independent freelancers by 2027 (STATISTA)

• 90% of leaders are prioritizing independent workers (HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW)

• 60% of executives say they will substantially replace full time employees with independent workers in the next 3 years (MERCER)

Quotes

“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”

• John Garvey, Global Financial Services Leader at PwC

“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?”

• Vinod Kartha, VP of Strategic Initiatives at UST

“With the power of the Human Cloud, you can create, innovate, and invent whole new products and markets for your ideas.”

• Daniel Pink, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of When and Drive

🙌 Stripe CEO for his direct, honest layoff announcement

Bad news sucks. Unfortunately as leaders our job is defined by how we give bad news.

We believe that Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, did an incredible job at delivering the bad news.

What we love:

• transparency and accountability

• educating their market view right away

• forever resources like large discounts and alumni.stripe.com emails

What would make it better? If they had embraced internal marketplaces and avoided layoffs all together.

Paid Leader Resources

• For Everyone

  • Create Your Freelancer Value Prop Positioning Template

Read more

• The Context: Freelancer friendly legislation will not happen with this current administration. But this isn’t unique, the current language and direction isn’t too far off from the Obama era, and the freelance economy boomed under those times.

• The Bad: It doesn’t hurt the freelance economy, it hurts 99% of the freelancers themselves. Growth of freelancers and company adoption will still grow 20-40% YoY. BUT the real winners are marketplaces, consultants, and the existing top 1% of freelancers, not ALL freelancers or up & coming freelancers.

• The Good: It accelerates the need for pro-active planning on all sides rather than being reactive.

  • For companies, this forces you to incorporate freelancers into your strategic resource planning, to have proper onboarding, and to streamline technologies & processes like VDI and communication/collaboration so your contractors can succeed.

  • For individuals, this forces you to prove you’re a business, which means incorporation and proof of multiple clients (get Quickbooks). Honestly this one pisses me off most as being a freelancer shouldn’t mean needing to be an entrepreneur.

Learn From The Experts About Classification

We’re still learning, and we’re fortunate to learn with Ray Walker, a compliance expert this Wednesday.

Register here »

🙌 Leader Highlight: Mina Bastawros, VP of Creative and Digital Marketing at Airbus

If a company like Airbus can empower freelancers to wow their customers, so can you. What we especially loved…

• How much Mina cares about the impact their work has on the individual freelancer

• How much the business benefits from being able to access to over 100 mil expert freelancers

• How tactical they got, specifically discussing their engagement with CAD software freelancers

What is the freelance economy landscape?

Check out this interactive visual and industry overview from G2 👇👇👇

Open Assembly has a similar open talent ecosystem visual.

Why Do We Need The Freelance Economy?

It’s the inevitable best way to organize our career. Without getting too geeky into Coase’s Theory Of The Firm, we’ll highlight three things we saw last week that the freelance economy would fix.

1. Bureaucracy

When we decided it made sense to sign a forever contract we inevitably created bureaucracy. In a digital, remote, freelance first economy this bureaucracy gets replaced by impact.

2. Attrition

When we decided on full time as the default we gave up flexible work agreements that can adapt to life.

Thus instead of scaling up/down depending on life situations, we forced people into working, quitting, or boomerang’ing. Which created this ridiculous ‘returnship’ situation that could’ve been avoided if Intel just offered people the ability to contract instead of full stop quitting.

Intel said:

• “Have you taken a career break and are now interested in returning to the workforce? Intel is offering a 20-week paid Returnship for experienced professionals ready to return to the workforce! If you have at least 2 years of professional experience and have taken a break from your career for 2+ years for any of the following”

What if Intel just embraced internal marketplaces so that rather than returnships they could keep their best talent?

3. Economic Sustainability & Entrepreneurship

As we highlighted in the book, freelancing has been a saving grace for many people. Some have had to move across the country to help aging parents. Others had to leave the workforce for their own children. In each case, full time didn’t work for them, yet freelancing saved the day by providing an income that fit their situation.

Never is this more impactful than for entrepreneurs.

Bloomberg highlighted the rise and fall of Covid era billionaires.

While this is the extreme, it highlights a pattern all entrepreneurs have experienced - the inevitable boom/bust cycle of starting a company, making nothing for 2 years, then making a boom (or in most times a bust).

Freelancing bucks this pattern. It enables us to have side income, or easier paths to income to either complement your personal income or accelerate your company go to market.

Stay tuned for more about this.

Paid Leader Resources

• For Everyone

  • New Social Contract - MSA terms to copy/paste into your SOW’s/MSA’s

• For Corporate Leaders

Read more

Why bring this up?

• Because falling for the layoff trap is like his bath trap. It seems great to ramp up hiring full time, just like it seems great for him to leap into a marsh, but most likely you’ll be stuck with the toughest conversations and wasted time come layoffs. We’ll explain more below…

Quick Recap:

• 🚨 BOOK GIVEAWAY - We have some exciting events coming up. Our most exciting is a webinar with Worksome on how to be ready for the repeal of IR35. We’re giving away 2 books for the first 2 people to comment on THIS post.

• Y’all LOVED Vinod’s Leader Portal. We did too, which is why we made these graphics for you to share/add to your decks.

  

  

🤔 Redo: What if you could avoid layoffs? (yes, this is the Luca reference)

We get it…growth justified your hiring spree, salary inflation, and the board (or leadership) was breathing down your neck.

BUT we don’t get it…because you should’ve prioritized elastic talent, built freelancer talent pools (prioritized freelancers you always turn to), and empowered your leaders by giving them budget to hire freelancers.

• What’s the definition of insanity again? Oh yeah…repeating the same actions and expecting different results.

And guess what. This uncertain business climate isn’t going away. The only thing going away is that perception of a labor surplus in full time employment.

But as we know - this talent isn’t just disappearing, it’s shifting to independent work models in the Human Cloud 👇

How To Get Started:

1. Identify low risk outcomes or skills that have been stuck on the shelf.

   1. Most leaders start with presentation design, article generation, or research

2. Hire using a marketplace like Upwork or Fiverr (or start discussions with a niche marketplace)

3. Socialize it with colleagues you trust - here’s some data of ALL STATS we find relevant :)

*Shoutout to Maari Casey, founder of Uncompany, for spurring this discussion (stay tuned for her leader portal!).

💩 Inflation - Something We’ll Live With For The Next 10 Years

Sick of hearing how “tomorrow’s best companies will be built in todays recession”? You’re not alone, but it’s also true, because companies that can survive today’s storm will enjoy tomorrow’s boom. Unfortunately ‘tomorrow’ is a long time off, maybe 10 years off according to BofA Research.

Paid Leader Resources

Read more

• Continued proof of recession

• A massive high five to the UK 🇬🇧

• Tactical Human Cloud productivity hack

Before we get serious, Luca crushed the coffee shop this week.

🙌 UK Leads The Charge In Supporting Freelancers By Repealing IR 35

We can’t understate how important the UK’s decision to repeal IR35 is.

Quick Stats:

• IR35 will be repealed April 6th, 2023

• IR35 reforms in 2017 & 2021 put the liability of classification on the companies hiring contractors, resulting in companies shying away from hiring contractors

• Repealing these reforms frees companies from misclassification risk and tax liability by putting the risk on the contractor, not the company

What’s the big deal?

IR35 was regulatory tech debt built for a world focused on full time employment. Repealing it shows the UK believes in a freelance future.

Misclassification risk is the leading barrier to freelancer adoption.

To put it very simple - companies can get in trouble if they classify someone as a freelancer when they should’ve classified them as a full time employee.

Why’s this even a thing? Why can’t companies just hire who they want, how they want, when they want?

1. Because the government needs their tax money, and full time employees carry a larger tax burden, along with being easier to track.

2. Because employment laws, and in most cases full economies (think healthcare, unemployment insurance, etc), were built in a time where full time employment was the default since it was the most efficient way to acquire and manage talent.

3. Because an entire industry has been built around protecting companies from mis-classification (take the Microsoft’s $97m misclassification lawsuit in early 2000’s) and managing over $1b external talent budgets per company (the typical enterprise workforce is atleast 20-50% contractors with well over $500m - $1b in spend).

4. Because Unions won’t go down easy, and the freelance economy inherently rids of Unions.

What’s the impact to the UK?

The freelance economy will accelerate in the UK.

If I could give Kwasi Kwarteng a fat kiss I would.

Why? Because even though I’m a proud American, the UK is showing how:

1. UK Freelance talent will be prioritized over other countries.

2. UK companies hiring freelance talent will have a location advantage in hiring freelance talent (yes, freelancers still meet you in person).

3. UK entrepreneurs building for the freelance economy will have an advantage over entrepreneurs in other countries.

I’d go so far to say this makes the UK a leading country to be a worker in since workers have a higher degree of choice than most countries.

What’s the US impact?

Just like Companies, Countries are in a war for talent, and repealing IR35 makes the UK a leading country for talent

We live in a global world. As Vinod Kartha, VP of Strategic Initiatives put it, “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 UK obviously understands this, while American lawmakers are stuck either with their heads in the sand or their hands stuck in Union pockets as the only freelancer focused legislation was the brutal PRO Act.

Honestly, it is insanely embarrassing to tell leaders that the only areas we don’t recommend hiring freelancers from are Russia, Iran, and California.

Why California? Because they already have AB5 (the PRO Act tries to nationalize this), and their direction is towards difficult classification requirements that make it not worth the risk.

What Can We Learn From The UK?

In response to the PRO Act I proposed 5 ways to fix the freelance economy.

The first step is literally just waking up to the reality that individuals want choice, technology has enabled choice in flexible work, and the default of flexible work is the freelance economy.

This does NOT mean everyone will become freelancers. You will always need full time employees. But instead of full time being the default, remote first, independent first, and freelance first work will become the default, and both companies and countries need to compete for being the best place to be a freelancer and hire freelancers.

💩 80% Chance of Recession - How Can You Be Ready?

Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University said “The probability of recession, I think it’s much higher than 50% — I think it’s about 80%. Maybe even higher than 80%”.

Honestly Morning Brew described our economy best 👇👇👇

We’ve stressed this a ton over the past 2 updates. Instead of repeating go check out prior weeks :)

The Human Cloud

#87: Above Average Millennials Laid Off Most, Google On The War Path Against Rest and Vesting, Remote's Here To Stay (Duh)

Leaders, I ended my Saturday by spending over an hour picking burs out of Luca. Burs are those sharp things that attach to your skin and are impossible to pick out without pain. The poor thing had a blast paddle boarding, and celebrated by rolling in a patch of burs that attached to literally every inch of him…

Read more

4 years ago · Matthew Mottola

The Human Cloud

#88: Inflation Worse Than Expected, Did You Know...You Can Build The Next Figma By Embracing The Freelance Economy?

Leaders, 3 things you should be aware of this week: The Adobe acquisition of Figma shows us the importance of resilience and run rate, and how the freelance economy can unlock this resilience Inflation reports were worse than expected Luca got a bowtie…

Read more

4 years ago · Matthew Mottola

Productivity Hack In The Human Cloud

Paid Leaders, Check Out…

Read more

• The Adobe acquisition of Figma shows us the importance of resilience and run rate, and how the freelance economy can unlock this resilience

• Inflation reports were worse than expected

• Luca got a bowtie

Also enjoy our last pod :)

🤔 Inflation and the State of the Economy

Honestly, if anyone says they know what’s happening they’re either blissfully ignorant or lying to you.

Below is a screenshot from Google News.

🚀 Figma, a Case Study In Resilience

I can tell y’all from personal pain, building a startup totally sucks. You’ll make less. You’ll have little to no resources. And you’ll need a couple massive breaks that look like luck, yet this luck will be carefully engineered.

Case in point…Figma, specifically the below ARR growth chart.

That’s literally 8 years until any significant growth!!!!! 8 years!!!!!

Can you survive 8 years off savings? If you’re a public school American like me…the answer is hell no…unless you’re fluent in the freelance economy.

How we all can be Figma: Embrace the freelance economy.

Why the freelance economy?

It unlocks two massive benefits:

1. A leaner way to scale by hiring freelancers instead of full time employees.

2. Side income that can accelerate product development by aligning your freelance clients with the product you’re building.

How can you unlock these two benefits?

1. Position yourself for freelancing with the below checklist (paid members find this in your portal)

2. Be a pro at working with freelancers with these insights

Paid Leader Resources

Read more

I ended my Saturday by spending over an hour picking burs out of Luca. Burs are those sharp things that attach to your skin and are impossible to pick out without pain.

The poor thing had a blast paddle boarding, and celebrated by rolling in a patch of burs that attached to literally every inch of him.

I hope you’re week goes better than that :)

Today we’re talking:

• Layoffs crushing millennials

• Anti-solution to quiet quitting from Google

• Data to state the obvious that remote work is here to stay.

Let’s have a great week - Matt

🤯 Who’s getting laid off?

Above average millennial recruiters, engineers, and marketers. Check out the charts below from Business Insider. As a millennial myself, this is extra painful, but not surprising.

WTBFD (what’s the big f’ing deal) For Individuals:

• WTBFD 1: Layoffs are a feature, not a bug of full time first employment.

• WTBFD 2: Literally every single one of us needs multiple opportunities within reach. Freelancing is the quickest and safest way to do this. It doesn’t mean you need to quit your job or be a full time freelancer. It just means that you need to navigate your value in a remote, contract based environment.

WTBFD For Leaders:

• WTBFD 1: Just as it sucks when full time employees get laid off, it sucks when you’re stuck in a hiring freeze, and it sucks that full time employment carries such a heavy risk.

• WTBFD 2: Instead of high risk full time positions, start by hiring people as freelancers, then if the relationship grows, bring them full time. We see this all the time.

🤣 Google Goes A Step Further To Prevent Quitting By Ridding Of ‘Rest and Vesting’

Honestly, I still find it hilarious that coasting is now a story. Like why now? This has always been a thing.

No where is this truer than tech.

• In the Inc. story, a former Googler said, “My days began at 11 and I took long lunches". I mean…as someone that lived in SF at a time when large company people introduced themselves by saying, “yeah…I know I sold out but the perks are sweet and I barely work”, this person sounds like the norm.

Which is why Google is cracking down in a hilarious way - literally trying to get rid of rest and vester’s.

According to the Inc. story, during their productivity sprint that they tried to get rid of inefficiencies and stated getting rid of 20% of their workforce was a possibility, they explicitly stated tracking down rest and vester’s as a solution.

• According to the article: “There will be a number of solutions put in place to find efficiencies and weather this economic downtown. One of the approaches may just be a concerted effort in uncovering the resters-and-vesters and calling them out. Or getting rid of them altogether.”

WTBFD 1: Entrepreneurs start licking your chops at the time Google’s going to waste doing this.

WTBFD 2: Like above, coasting is a feature, not a bug in perpetual full time employment. Some companies can keep you excited for your whole career. UST seems like they can (stay tuned for leader portals highlighting this), Centric Consulting seems like they can (Larry English’s leader portal). But most can’t, and that’s okay. Instead of trying to force square pegs into round holes, embrace the reality of our digital ecosystem - a blend of freelance and first time with freelance making sense in most options.

WTBFD 3: Leaders, don’t become the rest and vester yourself. I know it’s tempting when the handcuffs are golden and the corporate machine seems too big to fight. But you don’t need to play politics, you can scale your impact by embracing the skills and scope that come with hiring freelancers.

🙌 Duh - Remote Work is here to stay

Wrapping it up with someone smart and with credentials to show us the obvious - remote work is here to stay.

We’ve seen the bounce back after Covid, and while we’re not at the peak, we ‘returned to normal’ with 30.9% of paid full time days being from home.

Also adding context around which industries are returning vs not.

🚀 Keep Going - Resources From Above

1. Take 30 minutes to position your freelancer value without quitting your day job.

The Human Cloud

Dip Your Toes Into Freelancing Without Quitting Your Day Job

Tactically speaking… How do you start freelancing? How do you know if you’re the right fit to freelance? How do you dip your toe into freelancing without quitting or affecting your day job? In todays economy you need a freelance muscle. A couple major reasons…

Read more

4 years ago · Matthew Mottola

2. We mentioned UST as a place that excels at keeping lifers. Below is Akhil Seth’s leader portal, a younger changemaker at UST.

3. We also mentioned Centric Consulting. Learn how they nurture life long leaders through Larry English’s leader portal below.

4. Keep the collaboration going with the social contract!!!!!

   • We’re on V3 of the social contract! Paid leaders, find the collaborative link at the bottom.

     We updated:

     • Legal language added to protect your clients from classification risk

     • Termination language to protect both talent and businesses

     Download Public V3

     

Paid Leaders, Check Out…

Read more

You ready to hit the gas pedal? Summer’s over. Kids are back in school. Time to work (or as Andreessen put it at the onset of the pandemic, it’s time to build).

A couple things really hit home this week.

1. The LOL factor of quit quitting and why it feels like someone complaining about their horse & buggy instead of buying a car.

2. An appreciation of the leaders in our industry. Our space is NOT for the get rich quicker’s. It’s for those that genuinely want to create a better life for others, with work as the medium to do that.

3. The importance of an explicit termination process. As we get further into the recession (albeit a weird recession), we’ll all be faced with the toughest conversations of our lives.

   • If done wrong, we can ruin families.

   • If done right, we can create win-win scenarios that keep our reputation strong, keep the business going, and keep the door open for talent you don’t need today but certainly need tomorrow.

   • GOOD NEWS! We added a termination clause to our social contract!

   

   Social Contract

🙌 Keep The Momentum Going!!!!

Y’all really loved the Bloomberg News that “More Than 75% of US Businesses Prefer to Hire Freelancers in Uncertain Economy”.

Keep the sharing going!!!! For each share I’m giving Luca a treat 👇

😂 Quiet Quitting - literally the norm in full time employment

Quiet quitting is doing the bare minimum without getting fired. In the past couple weeks this phenomenon has taken over the internet.

I mean how funny is this NPR title - “Quiet quitting is a trend taking over TikTok and possibly your workplace”.

It’s almost like a Boomer boogeyman is sweeping through corporate board rooms whispering “watch out leaders…there’s these young people full of TikTok rage working only 38 hours”.

When we dig deeper, we see a couple truths:

1. Quiet quitting isn’t new. Employee engagement has always been a problem as according to Gallup, over half of employees haven’t been ‘engaged’ at work for the last 20 years.

   

2. The pandemic and remote work certainly amplified this.

   • The pandemic gave employees time to re-prioritize their life.

   • Remote work gave employees more time, more autonomy, and more freedom to live out these priorities.

3. Full time employment is the problem in itself. Pre-remote work full time employment was the best option. Now it’s the problem.

Let’s be real - free food, office massages, and lavish treehouses were cute bandaids, but they didn’t solve the root problem of work - full time employment isn’t the ideal employee relationship.

Quiet quitting is just a lag metric to the problem of full time employment.

🤔 So how can we ‘solve’ quiet quitting?

Let’s start with how to NOT solve for quiet quitting…

1. Don’t invest in surveillance/monitoring tools. You’re basically creepily sneaking into your partner’s phone while they sleep (#creep).

2. Don’t invest in training or communications not to do this. You’re basically telling them to keep doing it.

3. Don’t keep feeding into the problem of a default full time employment talent strategy!!!!

   • In a vacuum with no internet and no remote collaboration tools, full time is the best option.

   • That’s no longer true as most of what we do can be done remotely, and here’s the kicker…on an outcome/contract basis.

   • Now that we’ve been exposed to this world, full time talent for most work is like trying to optimize a horse and buggy rather than buying a car.

Instead, what you should do is de-prioritize full time talent strategies asap, prioritize freelance models, and provide on-ramps for your existing leaders to engage freelancers asap.

Don’t be over dramatic and change everything asap. Start small with the below hacks:

1. Start measure employee success through impact

2. Start measuring productivity success through outcomes, not hours

3. Start working with incredible freelancers who already work this way

More to come next week :)

🚨 Morten Bruun Shows The Risk If You Stick With Full Time First

Morten’s latest Forbes piece hits the nail in the coffin,

• With the average cost of hiring a full-time employee hovering around $4,000 and an average onboarding time of one year, the cost is at direct odds with the average new hire tenure of 1.8 years.

Morten's Leader Portal

😂 What This Looks In Action…

Prioritizing full time employment does more than expose you to quiet quitting - it keeps your company out of touch.

Case in point…LinkedIn, with LinkedIn’s first Chief HR Officer showing the the lunacy of annual anniversary posts 👇

🚀 Added to the Social Contract

We’re on V3 of the social contract! Paid leaders, find the collaborative link at the bottom.

We updated:

• Legal language added to protect your clients from classification risk

• Termination language to protect both talent and businesses

Download Public V3

Paid Leaders, Check Out…

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• What does the recession mean for the freelance economy

• Why Google CEO Sundar Pichai telling employees their unproductive is a win for the freelance economy

• How Spotify dropped churn through their RTO strategy (return to office…hint they put autonomy in their employees hands)

Let’s roll! Oh… also Luca 👇

🤔 Do Leaders Hire More Freelancers In A Recession?

According to my personal visibility: Yes, BUT…

• leaders trim the fat of poor performing freelancers

• leaders double down on freelancers they already turn to

• leaders double down on freelancers working on core business

This is echoed by Bloomberg News as according to Jo Constantz, “More Than 75% of US Businesses Prefer to Hire Freelancers in Uncertain Economy”.

Interesting supportive data from his article:

• 78% of business leaders said they are more likely to hire freelancers rather than full-time employees while economic conditions remain uncertain

• 85% of US companies plan to implement a hiring freeze during the current downturn

• 78% plan to lay workers off

It’s not all good news…

• “Some companies still don’t even know how many external workers they employ. An investment firm Malcolm worked with recently was “astounded” to find one division was made up of 30% contractors. Another division had 50%.” 

• Wait until they find out Google is over half contractors…

Honestly I’m least surprised by this. Contingent spend is generally $1b+ in large companies, yet external talent is typically grouped in with total vendor spend without freelancers being integrated into strategic planning.

This will change, and below are some great leaders to show us why:

• Akhil Seth of UST

• Jon Younger of Forbes

• Larry English of Centric Consulting

Flop of the week: Google CEO tells workers they’re unproductive.

According to CEO Sundar Pichai:

• “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have.”

• He then asked employees to help “create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer focused. We should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity.”

A couple reasons this makes me smile.

1. The success criteria of productivity, business results, and innovation are more tightly aligned in hiring freelancers than hiring full time.

   • Next week we’ll break down an article from Morten Bruun, ex McKinsey and Google on why.

2. Because of this alignment, leaders prioritizing freelancers can outcompete their counterparts selling free lunches, free massages, and those other lavish tech perks that are impractical in times of business uncertainty.

3. This means you leaders already hiring freelancers are wayyyyy ahead of the curve!

Win of the Week: Spotify

The headline says it all. But briefly digging deeper, a discreet important detail is that they put the autonomy in the employees hands. Instead of all remote or all office, they their Work From Anywhere Policy “lets employees determine how often they work from the office and where they work, as long as the company has an operation there”.

Need some help driving awareness for why your org needs to hire freelancers? Forward this!

We sent this 3 times this week…John Garvey, Global Financial Services Leader at PwC, writing “The biggest cost reduction opportunity in financial services? It’s the gig economy”.

Key Learnings:

1. Cost is their main driver.

2. Changes to demand are their 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.”

Forward away!

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• One client told us he hires by starting people as freelancers.

• Another told us he’d like to funnel all talent through freelance models rather than traditional vendor models.

• Another told us they’d like to have regional talent pods of freelancers to expand (same skills, different regions). Talk about expansion, scale, and speed!!!

Before we get into the confusing state of the economy, let’s meet Akhil.

Akhil Seth, Head of Open Talent Center of Excellence

Akhil is a total baller. We’ll discuss why the future of talent is freelancers and how enterprises can tap into this abundant pool of open talent.

Akhil's Leader Portal

Here’s a little preview…

Now onto the economy:

💩 Bad News

Second massive interest rate hike hits.

Technically we’re in a recession after 2 straight quarters of a declining economy.

• WTBFD: Frozen budgets and FTE headcount freeze will be multi-year.

• WTBFD 2: That’s GOOD. That means most teams and org’s will stick their head in the sand while you embrace elastic freelance talent (which is under creative hiring OR variable business expense).

Moderate News

40% of workers still want to quit their jobs

• WTBFD: Notice the term ‘WANT’ to leave.

• WTBFD: The mid to low performers will stay. The top performers will keep leaving. Why will they leave? Keep reading (hint…career advancement).

🚀 Good News

💻 Top VC firm Andreessen Horowitz prioritizes smaller regional offices and remote work over one centralized HQ.

• WTBFD 1: This is a massive deal because it’s Andreessen, not the thousands of Twitter VC’s.

• WTBFD 2: This indirectly signals how venture backed companies will look going forward. Both companies will want to look like Andreessen, and Andreessen will find similarly distributed companies.

• WTBFD 3: We can finally say talent is distributed outside of San Francisco and New York. Here’s to smaller regions like Austin, Charlotte, Nashville, Columbus, Savannah, etc. Also global (hint…my teams have always been 60% outside the US).

🧠 McKinsey shows that lack of career development and advancement leading reason people leave their job.

Shouldn’t this be bad news? Not really when we explain why 👇👇👇

• WTBFD: Both sides are in a tough spot. Individuals want a seat. As leaders we have to align and justify the ROI to each promotion/salary increase. In my teams, prioritizing KPI’s, aligning on how outcomes align to KPI’s, and using the data as truth has been the best way to keep these two competing forces in alignment.

• WTBFD: If 👆 is aligned, don’t be afraid to drown us younger leaders in responsibility. BUT give us a lifeline in the form of mentorship and budget to hire freelancers.

• WTBFD: External experts accelerate our learning curve by learning from the years of experience and tactical knowledge these experts have. So it’s more than just ‘hire freelancers’, it’s enabling us to increase our scope, and accelerate our learnings.

• WTBFD: In summary, give us responsibility, give us a little bit of budget, and watch us shine.

Exciting Things

1. New Social Contract is LIVE! (members can access contribute link at the bottom of this).

DOWNLOAD V1

2. Leader Portals coming up!

• Next week you’ll hear from Abby Forman, Director of Communications at Fiverr.

  • Teaser Quote: “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”.

• Thennnnn Niklas Lieb, Head of Bus Dev at Vicoland.

  • Teaser Quote: “We are shifting towards an economy where freelancers are able to do more complex projects and to be staffed on more important missions.”

Want To See More Content?

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Links In Paid Leader Portal

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First check out Morten Bruun, VP of Global Operations at Worksome, who has an extremely rare background in driving change at both a global technology leader (Google) and global business management leader (McKinsey).

💩 Bad News:

• Layoffs and hiring freezes…

  • Shopify pulls job offers and internships.

  • Ford slashes 8,000 jobs (they say to shift priorities to electric vehicles).

  • Google announces hiring freeze for 2 weeks.

    • WTBFD 1: Full time employment just isn’t ideal. Things change, and full time employment is inefficient for both the talent and the leaders needing to have the toughest meeting they’ll probably ever have.

    • WTBFD 2: The Human Cloud is the new HR, and we’re in the middle of translating full time focused talent strategies to freelance first talent strategies. Example: Internships don’t need to be once a year, 3 month programs. They too can be freelance projects. Read more about micro-internships and Parker Dewey.

• Yet a labor shortage that isn’t slowing down? I know it’s a headscratcher 🤔

  • First, LinkedIn’s first CHRO said the “supply of qualified talent isn't going to increase”.

  • Then, Microsoft President Brad Smith says we’re in a new era of labor pool stagnation.

  • WTBFD: Great talent exists in abundance. It just doesn’t exist in traditional HR systems and traditional career paths. It exists in digital talent benches.

    • CASE STUDY: Upwork and Emirates NBD, one of the largest banks in the Middle East and North Africa.

    • According to Moadh Bukhash, chief marketing officer, “It’s a harder sell for an organization to ask someone to work full time when it would be far more empowering for that individual to be able to work with 10 different companies, offering the same talent and services they do naturally, without being tied to a single organization.”

• 🤯 It’s getting more expensive to have a car

🚀 Good News:

• Death to cover letters (shoutout Nicole Fernandez-Valle). How about we just skip tedious interview processes all together and get started ASAP through freelance projects?

  

• It’s never been easier to drive big change as an individual or with small teams (especially freelance teams!!!).

How To Be Ready

Individuals - prep your freelance muscle. This does NOT mean you quit your job. It means you start quantifying your experience and skill set to be ready for remote and freelance opportunities 👇👇👇

The Human Cloud

Dip Your Toes Into Freelancing Without Quitting Your Day Job

Tactically speaking… How do you start freelancing? How do you know if you’re the right fit to freelance? How do you dip your toe into freelancing without quitting or affecting your day job? In todays economy you need a freelance muscle. A couple major reasons…

Read more

4 years ago · Matthew Mottola

Leaders - engage a freelancer for a $500-$1.5k project. Here are a couple great projects to start with:

• 1,200 word thought leadership article for $500

• SEO audit for $500-1,000

Exciting Things

1. New Social Contract is LIVE! (members can access contribute link at the bottom of this).

DOWNLOAD V1

2. Leader Portals coming up!

• Next week you’ll hear from Abby Forman, Director of Communications at Fiverr.

  • Teaser Quote: “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”.

• Thennnnn Niklas Lieb, Head of Bus Dev at Vicoland.

  • Teaser Quote: “We are shifting towards an economy where freelancers are able to do more complex projects and to be staffed on more important missions.”

Want To See More Content?

We’re 100% user funded, and 100% independent. The more you give, the more we can produce :)

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Read more

Leaders,

💩 The Bad: Inflation, hiring freezes (mostly for white collar, non technical roles)

• CPI hit 9.1% in June. Insanity.

• Google the latest to slow hiring. It’s not a total freeze, but Google said it’ll be prioritizing engineering or other critical technical roles.

• Google employees were also challenged to be "more entrepreneurial, working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger” by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

  • WTBFD 1: You still need talent. You can’t do everything on your own. Yet the way you access talent needs to flexible, not full time, and strategic. Ding, ding…freelancers in the Human Cloud.

  • WTBFD 2: Ever more important is scaling up/down based off current demand, not predicted demand. That’s where tech companies got themselves in trouble. Instead of realizing the revenue boom was a one time opportunity, they planned their talent strategy as if the peak would continue and over-indexed on full time employees instead of having the agility of freelancers.

    • Quote from Abby Forman of Fiverr in her upcoming leader portal: “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”

  • WTBFD 3: In relation to white collar management being most at risk during hiring freezes and layoffs, management is increasingly about trust building, not following routine tasks or authoritative delegating of routine tasks.

    • Matt Coatney - “Authoritative leadership is dead.”

🤔 The Good: We might be able to afford a house soon…about 60,000 home sales nationwide fell through in June, equivalent to 15% of transactions that went into contract, according to brokerage Redfin.

• Maybe us millennials can finally buy a house??

👊 Guest Post: Sam Orrin, Global Director, Worksome

So, this is the backdrop to every conversation we're having right now...

There's a recession coming

We've just had Covid, maybe it's coming back again

The world is, generally, nuts

No one knows what people really want. Are they going back to offices? Do they want to work full-time? Do they live in the Metaverse? Who knows 🤷

One common thread is this - it's obvious that the best ideas happen in downturns. Everyone will have seen the "Slack, Uber, Airbnb started in 2008" posts on here. Everyone will have seen the big companies making redundancies, losing $billions off their market cap, failing to turn the ship around after 2008 and after Covid.

Flexibility is the way. Contractors, freelancers, gig workers, whatever you want to call them, are no longer an expensive cover, especially when 50% of your offers are rejecting you and your perm average tenure is only 12 months anyway.

Hiring someone for a week, a month or a year-long project is the only way to truly be agile. Hiring them fast, getting through the red tape fast, hiring them safely to HR and procurement's standards. Like, fast as in a few hours or a couple of days ⚡

Agile is not hot-desking, or allowing people to work from the Bahamas...

It's this ☝️

The companies that thrive in the next 18 months are flexible by design.

…………………….

Sam Orrin is the Global Director of Business Development at Worksome, a compliant solution to hire and manage talent globally with automated contracts and payroll.

Other Exciting Things

1. New Social Contract shipping this week (members get early access at the bottom of this).

• We’re re-building employment from the ground up.

  

2. Leader Portals coming up!

• Next week you’ll hear from Tony Buffum, CHRO and HR expert about how HR can take the lead in digital talent models.

  • Teaser Quote: “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.”

• The week after you’ll hear from Abby Forman, Director of Communications at Fiverr.

  • Teaser Quote: “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”.

• Thennnnn Niklas Lieb, Head of Bus Dev at Vicoland.

  • Teaser Quote: “We are shifting towards an economy where freelancers are able to do more complex projects and to be staffed on more important missions.”

3. Luca has been introduced to chicken and waffles. Safe to say life will never be the same.

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Updates to the newsletter:

• Trying to release biweekly.

  • Why? Because that’s the leadership cadence we use for ourselves and our clients.

  • For clients, we ship biweekly updates every week (our template).

  • For our own teams, we hold weekly sprint meetings with the working team and bi-weekly leadership reviews.

• Sticking to the freelance economy, with the lens of what you need to know related to the freelance economy.

  • Why? That’s what we’re best at, where we spend our time, and where we have visibility to tactical insights.

  • There’s plenty of great resources like the All In Pod, Bloomberg Business Week, WSJ What’s News, Morning Brew that we use as our starting point.

Need To Know Updates:

• 🇳🇱 Netherlands made remote work a right (somewhere Glen Hodgson is raising a glass!).

• 💩 Recession, specifically the inflation driving it, shows no sign of slowing down.

  1. Fed’s focus is inflation not becoming ‘normal’, meaning they’ll keep raising rates with to drop inflation even if that means recession.

  2. Supply chains will only get worse as California’s AB-5 law forces truckers off the road.

     • According to the Bloomberg article California Throws 70,000 Truckers in Gig-Work Legal Limbo, Risking Supply Chains.

       

     • “Two-thirds of state’s port truckers could be forced off road”.

     • Why? Because “70% of truckers serving some of the country’s largest ports are owner-operators, and AB5 will govern their relationships with carriers, brokers and shippers”.

     • Inevitably this leads to less drivers (follow the dollars) as: “The cost to transition from an owner-operator model may reach $20,000 annually as truckers file for the appropriate licenses and pay additional fees and insurance”.  

     • What’s scary as hell: AB-5 forces independent contractors to become employees in the name of ‘misclassification’. The Biden administration is trying everything to nationalize this through the PRO Act.

       

• 💩💩 Great Resignation is still here. Over 4 million Americans a month are still quitting.

• 👩‍💼 White collar office workers are in the worst position (keep reading below).

  

🎧 This Week On The Pod - A Human Cloud Career In Action

A single full time job isn’t safe anymore.

It’s great for healthcare, benefits, and vacation. But unless you have a significant safety net (at least a year’s runway) then you’re taking a big risk.

Instead, the future of careers is a diversified Human Cloud Career.

Learn more through Rebekah’s episode wherever you get your podcasts!

🤔 Will office workers be cut in half?

Michael Burry, investor and hedge fund manager behind “The Big Short”, said in a recent Fortune article:

• “I see a bifurcated labor market developing as unskilled and semiskilled remain in short supply, but white-collar workers, having proven their redundancy during COVID, will find gross excess in the labor market, pressuring wages at the end”

How real is this? Spot on.

Why?

• To say it nicely…most work in corporate is inefficient.

• To say it blunt…most corporate work is a waste of time, doesn’t add value to the firm, and is stuck in a purgatory holding pattern just hoping not to be laid off (okay yeah that was pretty harsh).

• This worked when full time was the ‘best of’ option. But now that you can access talent globally, in a deliverable basis, without a full time commitment, the writing is on the wall for corporate life.

Blurry continues:

• “The layoffs are evidence of the glut of white-collar workers in sectors like technology, finance, and consulting, according to Burry. Blue-collar workers, on the other hand, will remain in demand, resulting in a two-tiered labor market moving forward.”

He further said the U.S. labor market is about to be sliced in half, with white-collar workers being the ones to experience job loss and falling wages.

…………………..

Do we agree?

In direction yes, but we add that full time office work will become deliverable based freelance work.

Non-deliverable office work is most at risk. Who knows what the exact percentage and number will be.

Remember the Mercer Report that said 60% of executives will substantially replace full time employees with independent workers in the next 3 years?

This is just the start to a greater trend in the shift from full time, in person office work as the default to remote first, outcome driven, and an independent contractor majority economy.

…………………..

How Can You Be Ready?

If you’re a white collar office worker with one employer check out below 👇

The Human Cloud

Dip Your Toes Into Freelancing Without Quitting Your Day Job

Tactically speaking… How do you start freelancing? How do you know if you’re the right fit to freelance? How do you dip your toe into freelancing without quitting or affecting your day job? In todays economy you need a freelance muscle. A couple major reasons…

Read more

4 years ago · Matthew Mottola

Advanced Level

Paid members, access below in your portal (linked below paywall):

• Proposal Template

• Sales and Operations Dashboard

• Onboarding Template

Don’t feel like paying? Start the free trial, download the templates, then cancel. As a freelancer that’s what we do with most of these freelancer productivity solutions anyway lol

Read more

So what do you need to know?

1. Recession is here - see our last update to be ready.

2. The Future of Freelance Talent Marketplaces was 🤘🏼, with key themes of collaboration replacing competition and accessing talent replacing acquiring talent.

3. WorkGenius acquisition signals the shift to end-to-end flexible talent solutions, not just freelance solutions.

🤔 Future of Talent Marketplaces Recap

Huge THANK YOU to our incredible panelists.

Key themes from the chat:

1. Talent access NOT talent acquisition (🙌 Tony Buffum from Upwork)

   1. Acquisition made sense when it was too burdensome to organize and manage people in a project basis (back when we had big corporate office parks and pensions).

   2. Insert technology and it’s now easier to access talent virtually for outcome based work then spending months to acquire talent that will leave in less than 2 years.

2. Decoupling time from value (🙌 Abby Forman of Fiverr)

   • Instead of defaulting to hourly rate, default to outcomes or impact

   • Instead of ‘expensive meetings’, default to a-sync communication with clear OKR’s

3. Making it easier to freelance and hire freelancers (🙌 Jon Younger)

   • Make it easier to get started hiring a freelancer. Instead of starting with a $50,000 website build, start with a $1,000 scoping session.

     • Instead of rejecting a presentation for PII, abstract important info.

   • Make it stickier to hire freelancers. Instead of one off ‘gigs’, add freelancers to your leadership bench and continue working together.

   • Make it less complicated. Instead of 20+ page contracts, iron out the basics, get working, and hire/fire fast.

4. Going beyond your existing supplier base… #DitchTheCountryClub ((🙌 Niklas Lieb of Vicoland)

🙌 Expert Shoutout - Monarch Wadia

Preview to below…Monarch is the definition of an expert that would be your VP of Engineering under traditional models, but can add more value by working on a project basis. He’s an expert in full stack React, Typescript, Express, GraphQL, REST, Next.js, Postgres, DevOps, and HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

Hit him up ASAP.

🚀 Freelance M&A - WorkGenius Acquisition of JBC Means The Start Of Freelance/Full Time Hybrid Solutions

The world won’t be 100% freelancers or 100% full time.

If we want to get real deep, work will always be whatever makes companies and leaders most competitive.

• For the past 150 years, this meant full-time employment because it was too burdensome to find/hire/pay/manage on a project basis.

• Then technology happened, and for the past 20 years leaders have been learning how to leverage online marketplaces and remote collaboration tools to outcompete traditional hiring processes.

• For the next 150 years we’ll be adjusting to freelance talent being more efficient than full time employment for 60-90% of work.

WorkGenius acquiring JBC shows how a talent strategy needs seamless integration to access both freelancers and full time employees.

What’s been funny for me, is that the past 10 years have been a boomerang of opinions on the question ‘what actually is a freelancer’?

• Is it only someone that freelances full time?

• If you freelance on the side are you a freelancer?

• What about if you jump back and forth between freelancing and full time?

• Fun Fact: It used to be common for freelancers to say “I’ve freelanced for so long that I’m unemployable”. But that’s just not true in my experience. In my experience, good employees make good freelancers and vice versa.

The real answer to what is a freelancer: Anyone that trades time for outcomes, politics for impact, and a set one company path for a diversified Human Cloud portfolio should be called a freelancer (I think?).

The implication: Freelancers will go full time, then jump back to freelance, or go full time and stay freelance on the side throughout their career.

As CEO of WorkGenius Marlon Rosenzweig put it,

• “Not only has staffing been transformed by the freelance movement, it’s also created new career possibilities that we want to support. Nowadays, a top freelance engineer in the US, Europe or Asia might leave freelancing to join a company full-time for a great project, then go back to freelancing or perhaps work as an interim CTO. Talented professionals have more options than ever before, and we are uniquely able now to support them more fully throughout their career.”

How Can You Be Ready For The Freelance/Full Time Hybrid Workforce?

We predicted this in our book when we said there are 3 types of ways to embrace the Human Cloud as an individual (we’ve done all 3).

1. Freelance full time

2. Work full time and freelance on the side

3. Jump back/forth between freelancing and full time

For you, this means to plan for the hybrid world.

• If an individual, position yourself to navigate freelance and full-time opportunities smoothly.

  The Human Cloud

  Dip Your Toes Into Freelancing Without Quitting Your Day Job

  Tactically speaking… How do you start freelancing? How do you know if you’re the right fit to freelance? How do you dip your toe into freelancing without quitting or affecting your day job? In todays economy you need a freelance muscle. A couple major reasons…

  Read more

  4 years ago · Matthew Mottola

• If a leader, start building your leadership bench, them position your teams to seamlessly collaborate freelance first and remote first.

You all got this!

Upgrade to Access:

• Templates for SOW’s, Onboarding, Project Kickoffs, etc

• Full transcripts from each leader

• Leadership decks to copy/paste from

Get 14 day free trial

Don’t feel like paying? Start the free trial, download the templates, then cancel. As a freelancer that’s what we do with most of these freelancer productivity solutions anyway lol

Read more

We’re getting tactical with 3 industry leaders - Upwork, Fiverr, Vicoland.

Event Ticket

There will be 30 minutes of Q/A, reply with your questions :)

Recession Preppers…we’re here (check out Planet Money’s episode).

• 8.6% inflation last month. 11.3% if you’re in Tampa.

There’s plenty of smarter people writing long articles. But for this very moment, let’s answer two questions (disclaimer: I am NOT an economist):

1. What to expect

2. What you can do asap

1. What will this recession bring?

We can assume the below challenges won’t stop for the next 6-12 months.

• Hiring Freezes/Layoffs

• Inflation

  • Gas isn’t coming down

  • Go look at your childhood home on Zillow…most likely it’s up 2x 🤯

• Great Resignation (will slow down, but continue amongst high performers).

2. What can you do?

The work doesn’t stop. Your goals don’t go away. You just have less resources.

1. Prioritize

   • What do you NEED to be working on

     • Your goals won’t stop.

2. Digitize

   • “Necessity is the mother of invention”

   • Covid was your warm up. You NEED to digitally adapt your workflow and talent acquisition.

     • How to digitize your workflow:

       • Default from in office to remote

       • Default from working hours to a-sync collaboration

       • Default from talking to writing/documenting

     • How to digitize your talent acquisition:

       • Default from full time employees to contractors

       • Default from resume’s to outcomes

3. Ship Fast, Fail Small, Iterate Together

   • Agility is a cute buzz word to help enterprises learn what makes startups successful. Instead of reading the Lean Startup, use this strategic framework to navigate your 30/60/90:

   • Ship Fast - instead of taking months, what can you do to complete outcomes in under 2 weeks?

   • Fail Small - experiment cheap

   • Iterate Together - Tasks and projects change, but NOT keep the team together, both full time team members and freelancers.

🙌 The Human Cloud and Education

The FIU Honors College is partnered with us and Parker Dewey to connect their students with companies in the freelance format of micro-internships.

Here’s Jiselle Wilson, an FIU Honors College student who landed a full time role within a year of her first micro-internship. In her words, “I love what I’m doing there…it fits into my schedule, they understand I’m a student, and I get to explore more about myself.”

🎧 A Couple Episodes You’ll Love

• Burnout with Jim Young. This is ever crucial as we head into hiring freezes.

• Cultivating Strong Culture with Angela Howard

• The Future of Flexible Careers with Stephanie Nadi Olson

Upgrade to Access:

• Templates for SOW’s, Onboarding, Project Kickoffs, etc

• Full transcripts from each leader

• Leadership decks to copy/paste from

Get 14 day free trial

Don’t feel like paying? Start the free trial, download the templates, then cancel. As a freelancer that’s what we do with most of these freelancer productivity solutions anyway lol

Read more

💩 Did you get pulled into one of these management meetings this week?

You’re not alone. It’s happening across the economy whether big tech or startups.

Yet the work isn’t going away. The Great Resignation isn’t going away.

So what in the world do you do before your team quits and you miss your metrics?

Contractors in the Human Cloud.

• 🤔 In the words of one leadership call, “We will make budgetary exceptions if you can prove you’re reducing cost without requiring FTE spend”.

EVENT - Join 100+ leaders in 2 weeks discussing this »

🙌 Equal Parts Angry and Blessed

This past weekend a dog attacked our Luca in public, then the owners fled. Luca was left with 3 stitches, a cone, and 14 day recovery with us monitoring him by the minute.

While angry beyond belief, I’m blessed for remote work and freelancing since I can be there for Luca and keep working.

• Remote gives me the opportunity to work with him right next to me.

• Freelancing gives me the opportunity to work on a milestone basis rather than needing to be in meetings all day. This week, that means working while he sleeps rather than on a set cadence.

Important Updates

Have questions? Join our paid leader portal and we’ll respond within 48 hours.

💩 Inflation, Layoffs & Looming Recession

• According to Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan CEO, “That hurricane is right out there down the road coming our way. We don’t know if it’s a minor one or Superstorm Sandy. You better brace yourself.”

• More than 1 in 3 Americans earning at least $250,000 are living paycheck to paycheck according to Bloomberg Wealth.

• Dubai-based ride sharing firm Swvl cuts workforce by 32%.

• We’ve heard from 10+ leaders about layoffs and hiring freezes this week alone. One was a top 5 most valuable company in the world.

  • WTBFD 1: Leaders, the work still needs to get done (in fact, this is when opportunity is most readily available). BUT you need to think creative about talent and think beyond traditional hiring.

  • WTBFD 2: Individuals, be ready to freelance, if you’re wondering how to get started 👇👇👇

    

💻 Remote

• TaskRabbit (over 1,000 employees) goes fully remote.

  • WTBFD: Add to the data of companies that get it.

• Elon Musk not a fan…

  

🤯 Traditional Roles Model Freelancing

• Unilever launches their U-Work employment model. In their words:

  • "U-Work gives employees the freedom and flexibility associated with contract roles with the security and benefits typically linked to permanent roles. People in U-Work don’t have a fixed role. They work on varying assignments, and between assignments are free to do other things that are important to them. They get a monthly retainer and specially designed suite of benefits whether they’re working on an assignment or not. They can design work patterns that suit them – anything from a few days a week for a few months, to short, concentrated bursts of full-time with breaks in-between. And they get paid for each assignment when they’re working."

  • WTBFD: This is honestly nuts. Not because it’s a bad idea…rather because it’s incredible how far our industry has come in the past 2 years.

    • 1: If Unilever can do it, why can’t you?

    • 2: As individuals, we all need a freelancing muscle. Start flexing yours with our Value Prop template HERE.

🚀 How to be ready for a ‘freelancing internal workforce’?

• Launch an internal marketplace. Here’s how Gloat describes it:

  • “the internal talent marketplace is a two-sided platform that harnesses the power of AI to align employees (and their skills) to projects, gigs, mentorships, and full-time roles within their organization.”

🤦‍♀️ Legislation - Can we cut the 💩 with prioritizing the past and prioritize talent choosing to adapt to today’s digital talent economy.

• WTBFD: There’s no stopping the freelance economy. The question is just how much layers of complexity does government want to add to what talents and clients are choosing.

Join 200+ of your peers to deep dive into the future of talent marketplaces - Sign Up NOW!

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Matt and I are extremely torn about posting this, but after learning more, as a society we need to fight for sustainable careers so that we can be good mothers, fathers, and community members. Issues like this expand much further than our little space, but if done right our space can enable every individual a pathways to financial opportunity.

🚨 Forrester releases their freelance talent marketplace landscape - get it FREE through Vicoland

Some important call outs from their report:

• “Freelancers are a valuable addition to your digital workforce, particularly for the specialty skills you need in software, data, content, and strategy”.

• The freelance economy is an emerging market, with “hundreds of freelance talent marketplaces covering the waterfront of skills of every kind”.

• Hiring a freelancer is still years off from the experience of calling an Uber. The primary challenge is “integration into enterprise hiring and sourcing systems”.

  • Check out Jason Posel and David Obadia’s leader portal’s for more

WTBFD 1: Deeper than any insights, when major research institutions invest in our space, it means we’re well on our way to becoming the norm.

WTBFD 2: Statista’s number of freelancers report is another great data point 👇👇👇

🙋‍♀️ Don’t stop at the report…join 100+ of your peers to deep dive with the recognized marketplaces in the report…Sign Up NOW!

🤔 Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Freelancer Needs, WDYT?

What do you think?

*A good reference point is Jon Younger’s leader portal HERE

Important Updates

Have questions? Join our paid leader portal and we’ll respond within 48 hours.

🤯 Economic Meltdown…smells like recession

• 🚩 Hiring Freezes

• 🚩 Layoffs

• 🚩 Stocks

• WTBFD: For leaders, it’s not looking good. Yet as Jason Posel said, the recession will double the usage of contractors.

• WTBFD: For individuals, you NEED multiple points of opportunity. In Freelancing, this inherently happens through a diversified set of opportunities. If you’re an employee today, dip your toes into freelancing after work.

  The Human Cloud

  Dip Your Toes Into Freelancing Without Quitting Your Day Job

  Tactically speaking… How do you start freelancing? How do you know if you’re the right fit to freelance? How do you dip your toe into freelancing without quitting or affecting your day job? In todays economy you need a freelance muscle. A couple major reasons…

  Read more

  4 years ago · Matthew Mottola

🤔 Great Resignation Isn’t That Great…

• Bloomberg highlights how many that left for higher pay ended up in a worse situation.

  • WTBFD 1: For individuals and leaders, cool the jets on chasing your next best offer OR candidate. Instead, focus on the outcomes and how to get to those outcomes.

  • WTBFD 2: Especially with a recession on the horizon, the great resignation should lessen.

💩 Return To The Office: The Party That No One Showed Up To

• Almost half of people show up just one day a week.

• Office occupancy worldwide has peaked at 40% this year, with the lowest rate in Latin America at 11%.

🤖 Rage Against The Robots

• Fun fact: ~75% of resumes are screened by algorithms.

• Not so fun fact: People are fighting back as lawsuits ensue across the US and EU.

  • WTBFD: Screw the robots or HR filters. Instead of trying to get that ‘perfect’ hire in the door, let applicants prove themselves through freelance projects.

🙌 Leader Shoutout: Will Lawrence, PM, for his template.

• WTBFD: Whether a manager or a client, consistent expectation management is the key to a successful long term relationship!

In Case You Missed

The Human Cloud

How To Work With A Freelancer

Dear Client, are you the person directly managing me (the freelancer)? If so, consider this an intro to working with me. Maybe this is your first time. Or you’ve had a couple bad experiences. I get it…it’s not something included in the leadership videos…

Read more

4 years ago · Matthew Mottola

The Human Cloud

Jason Posel, CEO of GreenLight.ai

Leaders, let’s talk: 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…

Read more

4 years ago · Matthew Mottola

The Human Cloud

David Obadia, Ex SAP Fieldglass, VMS/MSP Veteran

Leaders, 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…

Read more

4 years ago · Matthew Mottola

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It’s Saturday, Luca Musk says ‘put that laptop down ASAP’.

🚨 Event Event Event - You don’t want to miss the top players break down the future of talent marketplaces…Sign Up NOW!

🙌 Braintrust introduces full time benefits and web 3 partners. In their words, “the freedom of freelancing and stability of benefits”.

WTBFD 1: We’re in the re-build phase where low hanging fruit is replicating what worked well in full time employment into freelance models.

• For companies hiring freelancers - this means replicating what worked with full time retention into your freelancer talent pool. Learning/development, community, potentially even benefits.

• For leaders building freelance models - providing on ramps to steady streams of work (doesn’t mean always having work, rather providing visibility and means to applying for work), community (not just a generic Slack channel).

• Check out Jon Youngers leader portal for tactical approaches here!

WTBFD 2: Think bigger than what we already have. If work were to be invented today, how would we organize it. Another incredible aspect of Braintrust is there transparency - check out below 👇👇👇

Important Updates

Have questions? Join our paid leader portal and we’ll respond within 48 hours.

💩 Inflation…

• CPI increases 8.3%.

• According to the New York Times, “The pressures that have kept inflation elevated for months remain strong, fresh data released Wednesday showed, a challenge for households that are trying to shoulder rising expenses and for the White House and Federal Reserve as they try to put the economy on a steadier path.”

  

🥩 Where’s the beef? It’s between the Unions and Starbucks/Amazon

• Starbucks hit with over 200 violations of the National Labor Relations Act according to Regional director of National Relations Board in Buffalo. According to CNBC, “The NLRB says Starbucks interfered with, restrained and coerced employees seeking to unionize in various ways”.

  • WTBFD: This shows the risk and importance of prioritizing classification into hiring freelancers.

🥸 Where the 1950’s at? In Google’s new performance reviews…

• Google revamps performance reviews after employees cite low pay compared to competitors. Reviews are now once a year, and leaders believe changes will result in higher pay.

  • WTBFD: Performance reviews are like saddles - they might incrementally boost the speed of the horse, but ignore the new normal of having a car (a car in this case is embracing Human Cloud models for employee augmentation).

    • What if instead of investing all that money into tech and consultants, you invested it in incentivizing the type of leaders you want to see.

  • What’s an example of this in action? Internal Talent Marketplaces to connect employees through collaboration.

  • And another? Give employees budget to hire freelancers.

💻 Remote Work

• Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is thriving ever since he made remote the default for every employee. Recently he said in a post:

  • “If the office didn't exist, I like to ask, would we invent it?”
    “And if we invented it, what would it be invented for? Obviously, people are going to still go to hospitals and work, people are going to still go to coffee shops and work — those spaces make complete sense. But I think that for somebody whose job is on a laptop, the question is, well, what is an office meant to do?"

  • WTBFD: What more do y’all need to see the ‘choice’ of remote is essential to compete.

💸 Acquisitions

• Ollo (creative freelance platform) acquired by Bpool (agency platform). Jon Younger gave a good run down in his Forbes column.

• WTBFD: Enterprises, VMS’s, and MSP’s are quickly playing catch up, and acquisition can at times be a shortcut.

🙌 Leader Shoutout, John Garvey, Global Financial Services Leader at PwC, for writing “The biggest cost reduction opportunity in financial services? It’s the gig economy”.

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.”

Stay tuned, next week we’ll deep dive »

😂 LOLS - from Freelance Writer Kat Boogaard

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  Get 14 day free trial

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Read more

We were super fortunate to have Larry on the pod this week. What he uncovered was how transformational remote work can be. BUT, and here’s the massive but…if done in a balanced way, net of any magic tools. Larry and his team at Centric Consulting have been for doing for 20+ years.

Because we love his book so much, first 5 that reply with your favorite animal will get it free on us :)

🤔 Why’s The Freelance Economy Moving Slower Than We Thought?

Larry raised this on the pod, and it’s a common question I get, especially since studies come out every 2-3 years saying things like ‘over half the workforce will be freelancers by 2027’ or 60% of C-Suite executives expect freelancers to replace full time employees

The reality is a lot less sexy, yet a lot more promising, as our once little space has grown 20-30% annually for the past 10 years.

I see 3 major reasons it’s moving slower than expected.

1. We’re not Uber.

2. We’ll probably never be a winner takes all or oligopoly market.

3. Freelancing in itself is an ever changing definition.

Stay tuned for next week’s deep dive into this!

Important Updates

Have questions? Upgrade and we’ll respond within 48 hours.

💩 Layoff Time, it’s not just you, in the words of Shaan Puri, “startups that were trying to blitzscale the past 2 years will be making deep cuts” 👇👇👇

• WTBFD: A core pillar to a Human Cloud Career is diversification in opportunities, geographies, and income streams.

💩 Inflation

• Fed raises rate by 0.5%, highest hike in more than two decades.

  • WTBFD: Brace for recession.

• Hourly wages increased by .3% in April.

🤔 Labor Shortage

• April adds 428,000 jobs, but 363,000 also left the workforce. According to Bloomberg: “The extreme competition for workers has driven up wages at a rapid pace in recent months, and the drop in participation suggests employers will have to do even more to lure workers back”.

👻 New employee ghosting…yep it’s a thing

• Southwest Airlines said 15-20% of new hires are MIA on their first day.

• Allied Universal puts the number at 18%.

💻 Remote Work

• Airbnb sees success in their work from anywhere change.

💩 4 Day Workweek

• California shelves their four-day workweek initiative.

🎉 We Are Rosie Kicks Off 2022 Rosie Report Survey

Want your voice to be heard in the freelance marketing space? Take the We Are Rosie Work Experience Survey.

• They're also giving away five $100 gift cards - go get that 🍞

2021’s report unveiled some crucial insights:

• 63% of marketers are planning a job change

• only 37% of freelancers feel the org they’re working for is prepared for remote/flexible work

• 33% of independent workers never going back to FTE

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