The Future of Work

The future of work is already changing how many of us do our jobs, and shifting the power away from old-fashioned companies and to us, the workers.

in 10, 20, 30 years, I believe this is what the vast majority of the workforce will look like: There will be talent and there will be entities that need talent. They'll find each other just like drivers and passengers find each other on Uber or travelers and hosts find each other on Airbnb. That supply and demand efficiency hasn't happened in the job market at mass scale yet, but it’s already happening in many spaces. According to a 2019 report, 35 percent of workers today are contractors, and I would not be surprised if that balloons to over 50% in the next five years, meaning that half the workforce won't work for a company in a conventional sense. 

A lot of people are talking about this now because of COVID-19, but it’s been happening for years. And the pandemic and its economic recession is only expediting the transition, because people are realizing they can work from home, they don’t have to commute all this time, they can come and go as they see fit, and they don’t have to report into a boss. 

Overall, I think people should consider it more. Not everyone has a marketable skill set, or they've been working at a big company doing a broad spectrum of things, but sharpening your skill set into something that's marketable provides a lot of power and flexibility for your future as a freelancer. It’s when you ask yourself what you’re good at, which of your skill sets is marketable, and how you might transition to a space in which you are both your own boss, and the product, that you can see exponential growth in your work and career. 

Why Freelance? Why not?

One of the major benefits to the gig economy ecosystem is simple: There’s a lot of potential to make more money.

One of my first employees for The Hub was a UI/UX designer, and at the time all I could afford to pay her was $45,000 per year. She was an incredibly hard worker, and as she got better, I paid her incrementally more over the course of her time with us. By the end of her time with us, I was paying her $100,000 a year, which was really stretching our budget at the time. So, eventually she quit, because startups are intense, she wanted to expand her client roster, and she thought she could make more money. She now charges clients by the hour, at a higher rate than I could ever pay her. As a result, she works 40 hour weeks with minimal stress. She also picks her clients, and works with a roster of four to five clients at a time. 

We’re in a modern age where technology enables us to find clients easily, and therefore a lot of people can make double what a company could afford to pay us. So why would my old employee — or anyone else for that matter? — ever work for a company? 

Historically, people have looked to companies for job security and healthcare benefits, but the trends towards layoffs are proof that job security simply doesn’t exist anymore. Not only that, there are more and more companies that are offering healthcare to freelancers. Thanks to the internet, it’s also so easy for supply to find demand. So if you're a worker, you can find work very easily. If you're a company and you need work on a contract basis, you can find workers very easily. And so the security that comes with working for the same company for 10 or 15 or 20 years isn't necessary anymore. There's security in the internet, and there are ways for you to find business and not need some institution to pay you a consistent paycheck.

Treating Yourself as the Product

Let me say that again: You, and the skills you can offer to clients, are the product. 

What do you offer? What makes you different? The tighter that story can be, and the more you can tighten your value proposition, the better and more quickly that people will respond to you. 

One of the ways The Hub makes money right now is that I consult — I have three or four clients at a given time and bring in monthly revenue for the company. The way I stood it up is by creating a holding vessel. Historically, this would be a résumé, which lists everything you’ve ever done: The schools you went to, the extracurriculars you do, the other jobs you've held and what you did at those jobs. A website's probably the best version of that now, and mine features case studies and testimonials from previous clients, as well as a logo wall of all the brands that I've consulted for. I can send that to people as if it were a digital résumé, and it increases the percent chance that someone converts from considering working with me, to working with me. 

The next step is simply to have more people look at that information, and consider you for their needs. A couple months ago I emailed 7,000 brands whose emails I had through The Hub: I got 42 sales calls, and landed four clients. I’ve talked about the e-commerce sales funnel before, and it’s important to remember that any funnel is going to be pretty devastating, especially when it comes to convincing people to spend their money. As a safe rule of thumb, you lose a zero at every step. So if you email a thousand brands, a hundred will consider you, 10 will get on the phone, and you'll get one client that's conservative.

Working smarter — and harder — than ever

You need to start with hundreds or ideally thousands of brands you reach out to so that some of them will consider booking some time with you, so that some of them will get on the phone with you, so that some of them will convert to clients. But you can also enlist people to help you get started, especially if time is of the essence.

Let’s say I’m helping a designer who has worked at an impressive design firm, and for three or four impressive brands. So we make a website, and we highlight all of the work she’s done. And let's say that she really wants to do branding design for food and beverage companies, so I’d recommend going on Upwork, and hiring people to compile spreadsheets containing a first name and email address for food and beverage brands that have one to 20 employees. 

I say that number arbitrarily, but if you target smaller companies, chances are good you're getting to a decision maker faster. Not to mention that bigger companies extensively have bigger budgets, and have probably already solved the problem to which you are the solution. If you're a big company, you probably have a designer on your payroll. You don't need a contractor designer. And if you do need a contractor designer, you probably have processes you go through to find said designer. Small companies have a need. They do not have a designer on retainer. They don't know how to find her. And if you email enough of them and say, Hey, I'm a really talented designer. I love your brand. And I want to work for you, you can get yourself some phone calls with brands that have that need.

After a day or two of using Upwork to outsource your research, we’ll likely have leads for several thousand people. I’d then recommend using mail merge software like Streak, and customizing your merge tags to create a personalized message. You can say, “Hi, [first name]. My name is Jessica. I'm a designer. I absolutely love [brand]. I'd love to talk about potentially doing some design work. I've worked for [past brands], and I used to work at this fancy design firm. Here's some nice things clients said about me, here's my schedule, book some time if you're interested.” When the emails get sent, it will look up on your spreadsheet and fill in the name field, so it still seems very personal, even though you're sending one email blast out to a thousand people at the same time. 

Again, we’re talking about a funnel, so it’s important to ask yourself what people want to read. The subject line will indicate the open rate. A 20% open rate is good, but if you do a good job, you can get 30% open rates. That's a big difference because if you send it to a thousand people and 300 people open it, that's way better than 200 people opening. The funnel starts with your subject line, and your email: what you say and how you say. It also starts with your website and how compelling it is. Every step of the funnel matters, and that might be just to get 10 phone calls, and maybe you get a client or two and that's it. 

It’s also important to not zoom into every interaction as an indictment on your ability. If every client call is like, “Am I good at my job?” You’d get mostly nos. And you can’t let that mess with you. Baseball players know that the odds are stacked against them. Entrepreneurs know the odds are stacked against them. You have to know that the funnel is stacked against you. If you do this 1,000-100-10-1 rule, and you don’t get a single client after sending a thousand emails, then maybe I’d start worrying a little about whether you’re emailing the wrong people, or sending the wrong messaging, or maybe positioning yourself the wrong way. But you have to view it as a macro process, and take the win as 1 in 1,000 and not a game of 1 in 1.

You Landed Your First Client. Now What?

Overdeliver for them. Do an amazing job, kill yourself, and give them way more value than they deserve. 

I think a lot of people want to capture their value early on. They want to be paid what they're worth, and don't want to work more than they said they were going to. They make the mistake in which they get their first two or three clients, and they’ll say, “I said 20 hours and this is my rate.” They get in fights with clients, who then don't recommend them to anyone else — and then they have to start completely over. 

But my advice would be to work double the hours that you said you were going to bill for. You won’t lose any money from your past job, most likely, because the hourly rate you can charge is probably double what you were getting paid at your old job. You can leave your company tomorrow and charge $100 an hour with confidence because you've been priced at $200 by the market but were being paid $50 an hour, so you can technically bring in double the money. If you work 40 hours a week and bill for 20, but you're getting paid twice as much, those 20 hours will pay the same as the 40 hours that you were working before in the beginning. So you're not losing any money, at the outset.

This is important because your initial clients are your lifeblood. If you crush it for your first three clients and two of them tell their friends, you'll grow your business through word of mouth and with little to no extra effort on your end. Ideally you’ll have retention, and clients who stick around for a concerted period of time. A lot of the consultants that I know — whether they're designers or writers or animators or photographers — have clients that are consistent, and they grow their business primarily through word of mouth. So once you have your initial three to five clients, if you're good at what you do and you work hard, you should have a self-sustaining business that grows itself. 

In order to invest in your business and yourself, you need good case studies, testimonials, and reviews. You need your clients to really love you so that you can get more clients. At some point you can harvest some of that value. At a certain point, you'll have 30 people that want to work with you, but you can only work with a few at a time. Then, you can be more picky and then you can fire clients and you can really hold them to what the contract says. But you have to earn the right to be sort of entitled and irreverent. 

But until then you want to do is be okay with overworking, and make sure that you provide an inordinate, undeniable amount of value to your first three, five, 10 clients who will then recommend you to more people and more people and more people. Those first clients are proof of concept. They're not the main event. The main event is when you have a line off the door and you have real freedom because you can say no to people. 

How to Decide How Much Time to Put In for How Many Clients

The future of work is all about choice: You can go full capitalist and focus on what pays your bills — the stomach kind of work — or you can be very selective and adhere to a specific set of ideals — heart work. 

I could go full capitalist, say yes to anyone, and any project, and work 80 hours a week. I could make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Or, I might decide I want to spend time with my family, or I want to spend time in nature, or I want to spend time with my hobbies, or I only want to work with brands that are aligned to my value structure. So then I’m turning down a lot of brands, so I won't get as much business, but I will have freedom. 

In some ways, aiming for work that aligns with your heart makes the game harder because you're limiting the funnel, and the number of people who might have interest in you — but you probably feel more connected to your work. Some people become contractors because they want to make way more money than they would have at a company, and some people are doing it because they don't like the fact that working for a big company means they have to give up their sovereignty. It's a push and pull of what do you care more about: Money or your values? And you can pick wherever you want to live in that spectrum. 

Because I run a company, and there are other people that depend on me, there's more at stake for me than simply making a little less money one month. So right now, my work probably skews a little more capitalist — more for the stomach than the heart than I'd like right now. At the same time, there’s always a big element of heart. I have a vision and I have something I believe in, but I have to keep the company alive, lest it fail and eight people lose their jobs. 

For freelancers, there’s the same give and take. You need to pay the bills. You need to be able to afford the lifestyle that you want or need. I think if you get good enough and you pick a lane, word will spread within your specific industry and your case studies will be very relevant to everyone you're pitching. It's not like they have to close their eyes and ask, “How does this relate to me?” 

If you get very tight around your heart, and you get very good at doing work that aligns to your heart, in theory, you could get pretty close to a hundred percent heart, 0% stomach. That would be my hope for most freelancers in the coming years. And it’s entirely doable — if you remember to stay smart and apply your know-how to yourself as a product, and adjust accordingly. Pay attention to what skills you can bring to the world, sharpen the story on that, and don’t be afraid to participate. You’ll have so much more freedom that way.