Albert Azis-Clauson, Chair at The Association for the Future of Work, Founder of UnderPinned
Leaders, Albert brings up 2 points that I think we all need to memorize.
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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