July 11: What the redundancies in the marketing sector will mean for working with freelancers.
Now is the time to think proactively.
We're seeing LOTS of movement of strategy people right now, huge headcount cuts are happening in the big networks, especially Omnicom/IPG, WPP, but across the board - and strategy folk are often affected heavily.
We've had an influx of folk coming to our community, and I'm getting daily messages from strategy folk sharing their story, or looking for advice.
But this post isn't for them, it's for the team leaders and businesses who are losing strategists, and for the businesses who are wanting to access strategy, but have hiring freezes.
Right now is a brilliant time to rethink your approach to working with strategy freelancers.
Redundancies can often lead to a bump in both a) the number of freelancers available in the market and b) the number of projects available to freelancers - as organisations recognise they are less able to service their accounts and customers, and need to bring back talent on-demand.
So we often see an upswing in freelance briefs just after redundancies. However, it’s often messy. Teams are stretched, and the reality of not having people on the team hits hard and fast, leading to last minute briefs and shout-outs on LinkedIn to look for people.
The old model of "brief on a friday, hope they're around on monday" doesn't, nor has ever worked - and only ends up with poorer experience for freelancer and hirer.
So there’s a number of things which progressive businesses can take the opportunity to consider now, especially with regards to strategy:
1) Set out your stall - develop a clear ambition and role for how you're looking to work with strategy freelancers and independent partners. Do you use them to react to incoming briefs? Do you use them to scale up expertise? Do you use them to create confidence in areas you don't have expertise?
2) Build a bench - don't wait for the brief, start to reach out to people you've worked with before, or get recommendations of new people, and start chatting to them NOW. Do a chemistry, capability and commercial check. Sort out all your compliance and contract nonsense now, so they're ready to go later. It's also worth auditing your existing bench of freelancers - are they still around? Do they still want to work with you?
3) Add a half-day of preboarding - get them up to speed on your company, process, models, products, language, chat to your team, whatever double-diamond or figure of eight you use, so they're ready to integrate into your way of working. One agency's "Brand Platform" is another's "Big Idea".
4) Don't brief and forget - invite them into your alumni programme, to keep your best freelance talent closer. Engage your community and network, so they're more likely to be around for the next brief.
5) Build network intelligence - don't just think about capabilities, cost and availability. Think about background, experience, passions, interests, culture, and build tools to match your people to your briefs. Use AI for the busywork and people intel, not the strategy.
This model works well for all freelancers, not just strategists, but building a bench, if you’ve already got a strong alumni doesn’t make sense. Auditing and reviewing your existing pool, and re-engaging the top talent saves £2k+ per head per project, so start there.
The coming 6-12 months is going to get harder to find good people, because there are going to be SO many people applying to your posts. Get ahead of the noise. And if you need some help building and engaging your virtual strategy network, you know where we are.
Other news.
We’ve just produced the first “Freelance Feedback” report for a business. They polled their pool, and scored 73/100, which is excellent - scoring highly across experience, reputation and relationship. The report has helped them to identify a number of key areas for improvement, with an opportunity to save upwards of £40,000 over the next 12 months.
The Freelance Feedback audit is now available for organisations with freelance pools of 30 and above.
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We were at the Mind UK Mental Health at Work Leadership Council meeting this week, representing freelancers towards government and employers. We’ve fed into a new piece of research work to ensure people taking part are accurately describing how they work, especially with regards to ‘multiple employers’, as most freelancers have.
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We held the inaugural Community Coalition meeting this month, with 10 community organisations represented, coming together to create a more connected and collective voice for freelancers. More to come on this over the rest of the year.
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Outside Perspective - our community for freelance strategy folk has opened its doors to those facing redundancy, to provide additional support and guidance to anyone unsure about how to step into self-employment. We’re actively working on updated guides to support this group.