Freelancers are often no great marketing people. In a call with my friend Tobias, we realized we've been part of the problem. We found out one of the reasons why freelancers are challenged more and more to get jobs over the past years: We failed to share the value of Freelancers to our customers.

The employee vs. the freelancer

There’s a fundamental difference between most employees in a company and a freelancer working with many clients over time, always living with the uncertainty of losing a project suddenly.

Freelancers have to think about building a successful enterprise that pays your living and ensures a calm and continuous workload. They have to organise themselves, find solutions for edge-cases and live from solving problems that others can’t solve. They are often in projects to challenge the status quo.

Employees care about the goals they get from their managers and strive to do their work best in the agreed amount of time. They have to ensure to not work over-time, to be nice to colleagues and to their managers. Their main goals are to create a safe work environment for everyone, keep institutional knowledge in the company and provide useful work that’s requested by e.g. managers.
Sometimes freelancers see this as conservative mindset but it’s not: It’s certainly a good idea to be in a calm mode and ensure that you work together nicely with all your colleagues so the team and jobs stay consistent.

Freelancers are hidden in the forest

For the past years most freelancers failed to share success and customer value stories. Instead of sharing about the benefits, the value of our work, they (me, too) shared technical blog posts or ranted over technical problems. How should companies and people working on projects know why hiring a freelancer might be the success story for them?

I myself realized this a couple of times when influential people from big corporations (or small companies) were surprised that they could hire me. And while we talked about it, I realized that decision makers in companies simply never thought about hiring externals and don’t exactly know how to do and what for.

For a big German corporation I helped them architect an entire website ecosystem for their global infrastructure. As they did hire an agency before and the project failed, they realized that they don’t own enough knowledge and therefore hired initially five freelancers (later more). We built teams with internals and together made decisions and could create a well working architecture while coaching employees to keep the knowledge in the company. The project was acknowledged as highly successful and leading example by the corporation and outside by media and other companies.

What can freelancers do for companies?

I usually am hired to help building new projects or help with existing projects or teams. For myself, I can help with the following things:

1. Frontend coding and coaching
   I can build frontend systems, scale them, refactor with my experience in mind. That means dozens of different projects over time. I have experienced a lot of different styles, solutions and problems in a variety of companies. That is the knowledge I can apply when coming into a company. Internal employees simply don’t have that experience and are happy to hear my thoughts and expertise. I also specialise in accessibility and browser standards and can help not so experienced engineers learning new things.

• Analytical reviews and problem solving
  This is mostly a combination of the former two topics. As freelancer in a company, I try to find out how to best help the team and company:

  • If I find out it’s the process/workflow, I suggest to care about that.
  • If I find out it’s about the frontend codebase and quality standards, I try to focus on mentoring people while fixing and refactoring the actual code.
  • If it’s the communication between different layers in a company, I become the person to speak and translate between them.

• Agile management and coaching
  Most of the companies I join, I realise that they struggle with project management and clear focus on building value and how to define good goals. It’s not that they don’t try but as someone with an external view, independent of managers, I can often help finding out the real issue behind processes and then, together with the managers and the entire team, redefine processes, workflows to be effective: Calm work, solid processes that don’t waste time and high quality results.

I was hired by a startup that had built their MVP but struggled with huge performance issues. They realized that I’m able to help them and within the first four weeks we shipped a 200% performance improvement to production. I had to do all the coding on my own and it was coming with quite a few challenges as it was a widget integrating into other websites. However, the startup could quickly see less customer complaints about performance. We continued working together and I helped them find frontend talent, build teams and scale their frontend application over the next years. I accompanied the startup for four years, sometimes full-time, sometimes only a few hours a month, depending on their needs.

The costs aspect

A freelancer is not necessarily cheap to hire. But compared to the full real costs of an internal employee it’s usually not more expensive.

However, a freelancer is hired for gaps in the company. This means they start immediately while companies still search 3 months for an internal position. A freelancer stays until the project ends or the end of the agreement is reached. Often you hire freelancers for e.g. 6 months — so you get a lot of value but only pay half a year.

Beyond the costs, here’s your main Return of Investment (ROI)

If you hire an experienced person, it enables your employees to be so much more effective that the costs are negligible compared to the benefits you get as company. A good freelancer takes care to do a good job — it’s his reputation and most freelancers do their job with passion.

Most freelancers stay for a while until things get stable. Then they switch to another opportunity where they can again add their value. I’ve had it a couple of times that I’ve been at the same company again and again for different projects. In between, I worked on a different project and could gain more experience.

I was asked to help a company stabilizing their frontend codebases by introducing a component library. While I spent some time solving this, we realized they have a more urgent challenge where I could help them. A customer asked for accessibility compliance and they struggled to get up to speed here. I helped them audit the relevant application, suggested a roadmap and detailed plan how to solve this and within just three months of time, we managed to fix over 95% of the problems. The team and employees learned a lot and appreciated that I was able to not only help them fix a problem but also coach them so they can now continue working on

Do you have thoughts on hiring freelancers? Let me know! Do you think I can help your team or company? Send me an email!