Stopping freelancing and returning to employment isn’t a failure.

There’s been a lot of posts recently I’ve seen about freelancers returning to employment, and the tone is one of “I’ve not been successful as a freelancer”.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

We need and crave different things at different times. Sometimes we need a feeling of stability, sometimes we want to focus on the work over finding the work. Sometimes we need the flexibility that some employers don’t offer. Sometimes we need a team around us.

The future of work is fluid. Longer contracts, shorter employment, a couple days here, several years there.

Design and find the models of work which work for what you need right now, and don’t see it as a failure when those needs change.

Failure would be ignoring that things change.

Even before the outbreak of racist action on the streets of the UK in recent days, the topic of racism and exclusionary practises within freelancing has been a topic of interest for me.

Last week, I posted a poll on LinkedIn to ask where people found their work as a freelancer - with the top answer by a country mile, being “via existing networks”.

Where recruitment processes in employment need to nagivate any potentially discriminatory practises, hiring freelancers is often still very much a game of “who you know”, with personal connections often being the route to finding work above all else.

Yet, even on platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, where networks should matter less, there seem to be bias too, as demonstrated in this paper from Northeastern University.

Diversity and inclusion has been a hot-topic in employment circles for a number of years - and despite many initiatives not lasting very long, and budget cutbacks seeming to affect any DEI projects and roles first, there are some checks and balances in place - such as reporting.

Firms which are listed on the London Stock Exchange are expected to disclose information on their diversity policies, public bodies are required to publish information on their compliance with the Equality Act, there’s gender pay gap reporting for organisations over 250 people. It’s not enough, but many companies also voluntarily report on their board and employee diversity figures.

Diversity isn’t really the goal here, but rather inclusive culture - an integrated diverse workforce which feels welcomed and well-supported, not just performative actions to make a board “look” different.

Yet - freelancing is rarely subject to any of this reporting or hiring process. There are no checks and balances, and hiring (or choosing not to hire) individuals is more often than not, entirely subjective, and subject to the conscious and unconscious biases of those making the decisions.

Do platforms like YunoJuno, Upwork and Fiverr need to do more to address the issue? Does there need to be reporting on supply-chain diversity? What can be done to reduce the power of the “personal network”, and highlight talent who don’t have access?

I don’t have the answers - and no single individual will be able to solve the challenges, but anti-racism demands that we take an active approach to tackling the issue, of which I’ll ensure we’re designing into this platform.

“Move fast and break things.” “When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel.”

There’s always been lots of talk about how it’s okay to fail, in pursuit of success - but when you’re self-employed, the idea of embracing failure is a little harder to swallow, than when you’re an employee with a company that’s got your back.

Whilst learning from failures is invaluable, actively leaning in to risky experiments can feel much harder when your personal livelihood is on the line.

So, a useful framework from my innovation days is the “70:20:10” rule.

70% of your time spent on business as usual, 20% of your time pushing into new spaces, and 10% of your time can go on more risky outlandish bets.

When freelancing - perhaps this means building a portfolio of offerings, some which are core to what you already do, and some are stepping into new areas. Perhaps it means spreading your approach to new business. Perhaps it means trying new things when it comes to engaging with clients.

But the central idea of a proportion of your time being spent on trying new things is crucial. What works today might not work tomorrow, and continually learning and growing helps you develop as a freelancer.

Do you have an ‘innovation mindset’ for your approach to freelancing?

https://www.itonics-innovation.com/blog/702010-rule-of-innovation

Do we need to rebrand freelancing?

Self-employment as a term is misused. Sole-trader means something legally but is used freely to mean people working on their own. There are so many interchangable and poorly defined terms that are all often used badly. I keep reading about the difference between freelancing and running a business – which is just plain wrong.

And there are so many connotations around freelancing, positive and negative, which are so often misleading.

Is it time to reposition and rebrand? Which agency would do a good job? Or should we use freelancers? ;)

Is this the future of tackling latepayments?

WeTransfer have just launched functionality to support “pay before you download” using their platform. Rather than hitting that link to grab the zip file of assets, and then chasing an invoice - the payment happens before your client gets the work.

Such a small but powerful shift in the workflow of many freelancers.

“I’ll share my work with you on screen, you tell me you’re happy with it, but you’re not getting any of it until I’ve been paid”.

Too many freelancers have their work taken, and then run the gauntlet of chasing down invoices or in many cases, not receiving payment at all.

This doesn’t work for all freelancers - many of us aren’t providing assets and outputs that can be behind a paywall like this, but there are probably similar shifts in how we share work and deliver work which can also be put in place.

For instance, those of us in strategy will almost always present our work on screen or face to face, and then provide a longer form write-up which can be shared and built upon across teams internally.

Personally, I’ve built a tool which prevents proposal ghosting, that forces the client to respond or reject a proposal, saving me time and effort in chasing and wondering what’s next.

There are going to be lots of subtle but smart redesigns of how freelancers work with clients that we’ll see in the coming years, which rebalance the power dynamic and I’m all for it.

See more

• WeTransfer’s Sell Files Get Paid
• Alexandar Vassilev on why this matters

In 2017, NYC enacted new laws to protect freelancers, namely the right to a clear contract in writing; the right to be paid on or before the invoice due date; and rights to sue their client in the case of non-compliance.

It echoes some of our laws in the UK around commercial debts (the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 is what we have to protect us against late payments, and allows us to surcharge and apply interest fees).

Some year on, a review went to show it had improved payment practices, and the stronger legal protections were welcomed - although enforcing the act, and awareness of the act by both freelancers and clients remains low, along with some retailation to freelancers acting upon their rights.

I’m interested in what learnings came from the NYC act, and what improvements we’d like to see in the UK to further support freelancers to acting upon late payments.

I see similar issues here around a low awareness of freelancers rights in terms of dealing with late payments, plus the emotional posture of many freelancers being almost apologetic in asking for the money which is owed of them.

Labour’s manifesto and new Business and Trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds have spoken to improving legislation around late payments, but despite legislation already in place, we still see around half of SME invoices being paid late.

The NYC act allows them to sue for twice the amount owed - do we need to look at more significant penalties in the UK? Do we need to have a channel to chase payments which are arbitrated away from the freelancer, so the non-paying business faces the wrath of an independent party, rather than an individual freelancer?

And what can we do to improve the visibility and understanding of the current laws, and support organisations like the Office of the Small Business Comissioner and the work which Liz Barclay and team are doing?

https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dca/downloads/pdf/workers/DCWP-Freelance-Isnt-Free-Act-Five-YearReport-2023.pdf

When businesses are struggling to retain their best people and 25% of people in the UK have a side hustle - do businesses need to embrace their people having more than one job and one focus?

Rather than just working with freelancers as external resources to augment our internal teams - should we also be looking at how we support our internal teams to build their own businesses too?

Imagine …. if every microbusiness had the support of a parent business for access to resources, financing, tools, collaborators - would we see more success? And the benefit to the parent business - an equity share in a hundred small businesses, which could go on to be the next Apple, Amazon or Google.

This white paper from Henley Business School is fascinating, and prompts some interesting questions on what modern work needs to look like.

https://assets.henley.ac.uk/defaultUploads/PDFs/news/Journalists-Regatta-Henley_Business_School_whitepaper_DIGITAL.pdf

Does #SethGodin’s advice for freelancers to charge 2.5x what they’d expect to make in full-time employment still make for good maths?

It’s ten years old as a blogpost, but I still see references to it.

I’m interested in what people think, does the algorithm still work for 2024?

https://seths.blog/2015/03/double-and-half-freelancer-math/

I missed this when it was first published - LSE’s report into the pressures of the self-employed market post-covid, lower incomes and a feeling of being “trapped” within self-employment, authored by Maria Ventura et al.

Makes for a harrowing read, but also clearly a number of core themes which a) the support ecosystem could work together to tackle b) a number of areas for the new incoming The Labour Party government, Jonathan Reynolds and team, to think about how and where the self-employed can be better supported and c) for freelancers to be aware of the risks before taking the leap.

As this data shows, even before the election, ,there was a shift from the Tories being the party of small business, to Labour (36% say they would vote Labour in a general election), and of the 5.5M SME in the UK, that’s a sizeable portion of people the new government need to engage and support.

https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cepcovid-19-030.pdf

The first Fellows cohort was hosted today, 30 first-time freelancers came together to start a shared journey of building their businesses together. I’m super excited to see what the cohort creates together, and the insights which are generated from observating and supporting a group of people directly.

We’ll be publishing regular insights for our partners on key themes and observations, contact me if you’re keen to subscribe to and access the data.