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There was an interesting article in the Washington Post this morning: “Covid-proofing air is a $10 billion dollar opportunity.” It got me thinking about the application of “hunters and farmers” to freelancing. Am I more of a hunter: the kind of freelancer that, as an individual, is going after new opportunities, ensuring my skills and focus is on trend, and actively seeking interesting and attractive projects? Or, am I more comfortable as a farmer or “gatherer”, focused on reinforcing and mining established client relationships rather than an emphasis on seeking new ones, actively collaborating with colleagues, and focused on areas where I have established expertise?
Let me start by being clear: hunting may sound more exciting but most of us aren’t Elon Musk or Jack Ma, and farming/gathering – exploiting what we are best at and know well – is as likely to lead to financial success and an enviable reputation and client list. Two paths, but either offers the potential for success.
It’s the same with freelance platforms. Most are farmer/gatherers despite a hunter appearance; seeking to provide a flow of project opportunity through the marketplace that is distributed to platform members.
But some – an increasing number – are starting to think and act like hunters, in the knowledge that, as Mike Morris, CEO of Topcoder explained to me, “We’re missing a good deal of opportunity by not better helping our freelancers to work more closely together, and expand the pie of interesting work.”
We’ve seen more and more freelance startups – Contra, VentureL are two examples in the tech space that are beginning to focus on teamwork – or hunting in packs as I’ve called it elsewhere – by structuring the marketplace so that members nominate other members and, therefore, a level of trust and potential for collaboration is baked in. Vrootok in Macedonia, Marteamo in the US, incredibble in the UK, and Mash in Australia are good examples in the marketing or agency space, bringing what we might call full-stack marketing teams to support both product launches and marketing transformation.
Meet Vicoland, a great example of a hunter operating from Frankfurt but supporting corporates and startups broadly. Think of it as a startup of startups, creating semi-autonomous virtual organizations or Vicos, each of which is a hunting and delivery party of a half dozen tech and other professionals. There are 35 Vicos now, and they work in a variety of industries and offer a range of capabilities from software design and development to data science and visualization. And while project opportunity does come into the landing page of Vicoland, growth is fundamentally driven by the ambition and competence of individual Vicos, and their effectiveness at sourcing work. In turn, the Vicoland platform provides an administrative infrastructure.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Hans Freyberg, the founder of Vicoland, a serial entrepreneur who has started, built and sold a number of companies. Vicoland is, perhaps, the philosophical culmination of his entrepreneurship. As he put it, “I’m not sure how many Vicos we’ll create, nor can we know now how many will succeed and which ones will not. But, I am sure that the combination of ‘mother ship’ support and the determination of Vicos to succeed will create something important.”
Without question, the hunter approach of Vicoland has had early success. For example, a Vico made it possible for a major publishing company to move a new application from concept to launch in two weeks, 4X their previous experience. For a major medical products company, a Vico built and implemented a performance marketing plan that was operational in five different countries within a month at a substantial reduction from agency costs.
But farmer/gatherer approaches are also viable. Meet FreelancingTeams, operating from Houston Texas. Like Freyberg at Vicoland, CEO Raj Kal has led a number of startups on the tech side, with expertise working with Fortune 100 clients using agile methods. As Kal described the origin story of FreelancingTeams: “Tech is complicated and typically needs a team approach. But, pulling together the right set of freelancers takes time and there’s always collaboration risk. We wanted to cut the time and risk to zero.”
As the name implies, FreelancingTeams brings freelancers with diverse skills together into market-ready teams offering a quicker turnaround, less costly , and simpler approach to bring a freelance team together. As Kal explains it, Freelancing Teams eliminates the need for team building, instead, offering clients the alternative of ready-to-go teams, saving cost and time.
FreelancingTeams has done so by pre-organizing over 300 market-ready freelance teams from twenty countries, and involving over 1000 experts and including, as needed, expertise in project management, design, development, QA and operations engineering expertise. Not all teams are working at a given time, and FreelancingTeams is focused on increasing their penetration of larger corporates, and increasing project size and duration. Currently, their focus is on startups and SMB clients.
What’s the future of teams and teaming in the freelance revolution? Jay Desai, founder of Universal Consulting and Stratlancer in Mumbai India made an interesting point about platform success in general in our conversation earlier this week: “We need to get three strategic capabilities right: the ability to focus and build real expertise and reputation, the ability to scale, and the ability to govern and assure quality, cost efficiency, and great client relationships.” I think his comments apply well to both Vicoland and FreelancingTeams. Whether your platform is built on a culture of hunter or farmer/gatherer, focus, scalability and good governance is key to success.
Vicoland and FreelancingTeams are good examples of a new but quickly emerging strategic approach to freelancing in the independent management consulting and marketing spaces, and is increasingly important as organizations turn to freelance platforms for help with large, complex, often multi market, transformation projects. More about how this is influencing and changing how platforms operate in future articles.
Viva la revolution!
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November 19, 2020 at 01:17AM
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Vicoland And FreelancingTeams: Two Exciting New Team-Based Freelance Platforms - Forbes
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