Good freelancers are incredibly cost-effective. They come in at short notice, get up-to-speed straight away, hit the ground running, bring with them a huge amount of experience and expertise gathered from an eclectic mix of sources, get on with it and do a fantastic job, then leave when it's done. And you know what you're paying for and what you're getting - right from the start.
I have over 20 years’ experience as a hi-tech, B2B PR and Marketing Consultant and at various stages of my career have worked as a Board Director at a major multi-national PR agency, Publications Officer for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Press Officer at No. 10, implemented strategic Pan-European media relations campaigns simultaneously across six countries, been responsible for budgets worth hundreds of thousands of pounds and managed multi-skilled teams of a dozen people, yet since I became a freelance consultant I’ve discovered that you have to work at least twice as hard as a freelance agent to be taken seriously.
Good freelancers are incredibly cost-effective. They come in at short notice, get up-to-speed straight away, hit the ground running, bring with them a huge amount of experience and expertise gathered from an eclectic mix of sources, get on with it and do a fantastic job, then leave when it's done. And you know what you're paying for and what you're getting - right from the start.
Instant Karma
When illness, maternity leave, new business, compassionate leave or jury service visits your company, you are only a telephone call away from help. Professional freelancers are worth their weight in gold - they operate best practice gleaned from their multitude of past employers, bring in new ideas, a fresh pair of eyes and yet demand no lasting commitment from you.
Yet, without the status of a job title and a well-known company name behind you, freelancers have to start from scratch to establish their credibility and build confidence with prospective clients, who are seemingly willing to pay hundreds of pounds per day over the going rate simply for the security of using a well-known agency. It’s illegal for recruitment agencies to charge candidates in order to find them jobs, but candidates frequently pay indirectly by having to lower their daily rate/salary in order to avoid pricing themselves out of the market. If the client has a fixed budget and the agency has a fixed percentage mark-up fee, it’s the candidate who gets squeezed into reducing their fee.
Value-Add
You would think that employers would be delighted to employ somebody who has all the skills, expertise and resources (subscriptions to media contact directories, trade magazines, future events services etc) of an agency, but without any of the expensive overheads (office premises, office equipment and technology, healthcare, paid holiday, National Insurance, etc.); comes with no strings attached (if it doesn’t work out, you can sack freelancers with minimum notice, don’t need to use them again or feel obliged to train them or develop their skills); has high availability and flexibility (most freelancers are used to working out-of-office hours and meeting tight deadlines); offer reliability and speed (given an assignment, most freelancers focus on the task in hand without the usual office distractions and meet the deadlines they’ve been given). Yet, there is still a stigma attached to freelancers – as if they’re not quite trustworthy, not quite “right”, unreliable mavericks with no known provenance, who ignore the rules and miss deadlines.
The reality is that experienced freelancers have been in the business a while, know the ropes far better than many permanent members of staff who may have only a few years’ experience under their belts, have worked at the same company in the same job for years and learnt their trade from the same small group of people or accounts and who have no incentive to develop their skills or expertise. Remember freelancers have their reputation on the line with each and every single job they do – they can never be complacent about quality or output. Freelancers typically have to pass the equivalent of a job interview every few months, so they are constantly having to “prove” themselves anew.
It’s a fact of life that employers expect 100% availability from the people working for them, yet because a freelancer is not a member of their exclusive team, their availability can be a disadvantage if they are on a deadline for someone else or turn down your project due to prior commitments. But why should you take their availability for granted when you are not prepared to pay a premium for it? Most freelancers are flexible enough to work outside of normal office hours when required or to take on your work at short notice and so add value to your business in other ways.
Up-To-Speed
Of course, no one can understand your business like you do, and until you’ve worked with a freelancer for a while, they may not fully understand your company, its brand position, messages, etc. Some employers, as part of the business agreement, consider building in research time, so that freelancers can get up to speed on these issues, before starting the “hands-on” work.
There used to be advantages in employing large agencies for big jobs. Economies of scale, strength in numbers, experience and access to resources were benefits of the big agencies over the lone ranger. Nowadays, this just isn’t true. All a freelancer needs is a computer, an e-mail address and a mobile ‘phone and if the job becomes too much for one person, they can simply call on someone else in their network of freelance associates to help.
In the past, I’ve registered with a number of” recruitment” or “head hunter” agencies and yet I’m always surprised by how much employers are prepared to pay in agency commission fees (typically 20% - 35%) for the perceived value of “administration” or “screening” that they bring to the recruitment process. I’m not anti-agency – they provide a valuable clearing house of CVs for employers in a hurry who want to outsource the whole process and don’t have the time to assemble and sift candidates themselves, but they do they really check what sort of “added value” service they are bringing to the process? What information do they bring to the process that employers couldn’t find out directly themselves?
Cost Effective
The journalist and author Andrew Bibby (www.andrewbibby.com) produces a “Ready Reckoner” which shows the total annual cost to employers of employing permanent staff, and the equivalent day rate allowing for bank holidays and annual leave.
By his reckoning, and assuming that freelancers have around 70% billable time, paying a permanent staff member £30,000 gross per year actually costs the employer around £47,008.00, the equivalent of £206.00 a day. The equivalent for a freelancer would be £346.00 a day, yet many freelancers charge far less than this, despite the added-value service that they offer. It’s time for employers to appreciate the flexibility and insight that freelance consultants bring to their work and stop seeing them as second best stopgaps until they can find the “real thing”.
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Sara Paine is a PR and Marketing consultant with over 20 years’ global high tech PR, marketing, new business and senior management experience. She has successfully led the positioning, messaging, PR & marketing communications for Microsoft, Nokia, HP, Siemens and IBM as well as many other smaller start-ups and larger client companies. For more information, please e-mail her at: sara@verona-pr.com or visit: www.verona-pr.com.
