Episode 5
Guest: Peter Johnston, Founder and CEO of Kalo
Air Date: October 17, 2018
Chad Nitschke:
Hi Everyone, my name is Chad Nitschke Cofounder and CEO of bunker and
also host to this podcast. Ready.Set.Work. Ready.Set.Work is a podcast series focused on the future of work, specifically highlighting all different perspectives from the gig economy, to on demand platforms, and more. Join us each episode to hear from thought leaders paving the way for the future of work.
Chad Nitschke:
All right, so we are back with another episode of Ready.Set.Work. I’m excited to have Peter Johnston joining us today. So Peter is someone that I’ve known for a while. He’s the founder and CEO of Kalo, a freelance management platform that helps some of the world’s largest companies manage their freelance and independent workforce. So thanks Peter for joining us. It’s great to have you here.
Peter Johnston:
Yeah, likewise. Thank you for being interested in talking.
Chad Nitschke:
Yeah, definitely. And maybe to kick things off, can you describe a little bit just how Kalo works and just how it facilitates the freelance economy?
Peter Johnston:
Yeah, absolutely. So we’re, I guess for lack of a better term we are freelancer management platform. We were born out of a pain point that I had experienced like five years ago working at Google in that the broader enterprise ecosystem really wasn’t set up to manage 1099 freelance workers. We came from a background of working in big enterprises where there was a managed service provider who really took care of WGU payroll contractors. Obviously EHR was really owning the full time worker space and as a design team in Google at the time, it was just really, really difficult to be able to engage a freelance worker. Not necessarily find a new one, but really we had a roster of people that we’d worked with before but just the ability to engage them quickly. The pace at which our department and organization wanted to it was incredibly difficult at a big company like that. And a lot of the infrastructure and processes weren’t set up to onboard them, vet them quickly, get them integrated into the tools that we work with day to day or even pay them on time. So our reputation as a studio was pretty bad at the time. So Kalo today, I guess facilitates quick compliant engagement of freelance workforces. Really gives large organizations the system of record for the first time for the freelance workforce. So everything from visibility for the C level, or simply answering questions like, well, how many freelancers are there in the business today? It’s often referred to as like the invisible shadow workforce. So we really helped bring that visibility to C level and central function, but also allowed teams to quickly deploy and engage freelance talent in their network.
Chad Nitschke:
Yeah, it was really interesting. And so you said you were at Google and you kind of saw the pain point from their perspective?
Peter Johnston:
Yeah, I think what inspired me to kind of start the company was a pure personal pain point and some of the big ones being we would – I think most can relate to the fact that a lot of teams are probably sat in spreadsheets today for managing their freelancers, the central functions like contingent workforce procurement, strategic source and probably think they have a relatively good idea of how those teams are engaging the freelancers or how many there are in the company. But the reality was that it was probably going to take two to four weeks to get a freelancer onboarded at my previous companies. When we did get them on boarded for the most part, the project was coming to an end and we’d already started working with them.
I think even if we focus in a little bit on that onboarding, the onboarding piece being so painful today that made sense. That world made sense for working with a contractor that was going to spend three to six months on site. Like next to you. Because the time pressures weren’t really there, but the reality is in particular in the technology, in an the media industries that we focus on they need to engage a freelancer literally tomorrow. In particular across like production creative editorial teams – it’s very real. And if central functions are taking really any longer than 24 hours to onboard a freelancer background check them and get them access to the right tools to do the job productivity suffers. So it really was a case of two to four weeks to onboard someone.
And I can speak for myself, but I do know that a lot of our customers today, before we arrive, a big pain point within the compliance department or contingent workforce department is, look, the teams are just going around us because we kind of keep up. We want a solution to apply and enable them to deploy talent quickly, and right now today, because there are only option’s to come to us and it’s going to take two to three weeks, they’re creating what we refer to as backdoor transactions, which introduces liability of the business that are literally starting to work with freelancers directly and put them on a credit card, which is a huge problem obviously for legal teams, particularly in California. So the onboarding piece was a huge pain point. I mean, as a designer at a small team in London, we just wanted to get access to talent quickly. I think the other massive pain point was obviously that this workforce is totally decentralized and distributed and it’s incredibly powerful and the issue with the centralization of procurement and contingent workforce functions today really is that they are centralized and that requires playing ping pong and when the volume and velocity of freelancer engagements taking place at the line of business level is just so high and at such high velocity they can’t keep up and processing break down and it introduces friction and that wastes time and it drives inefficiency. So I think even with it centralized, once we got them in the door, it was incredibly hard to get them integrated day to day into tools because quite frankly there was no established procedures around, well, we know how we’re going to treat onsite contractors, but we really don’t know how we’re going to treat this one freelancer who’s going to do a video project for two days.
So just the overhead and the administrative burden simply to use someone for two day project at a large company is incredibly high today. And then the final personal pain point I guess around what inspired me to start it was reputation with high end talent is in the most paramount thing, particularly here in the Bay area, and in a lot of kind of big, big cities, and if you don’t pay freelancers quickly and are going to treat them the same way you’re paying a vendor that you’re paying a 90 day terms, they just kind of live their life that way. And our reputation as a design studio started to suffer. Google really became the logo that wasn’t worth it. In terms of freelancers were just like, well, I can get that it’s Google, but I can take a project with a more nimble, smaller company that’s willing to pay me quicker, and really we were asking freelancers to sacrifice a lot and be on our standard sort of net 30 or net 60 day terms.
And the reality is that freelancers and independent workers need a lot more stability when it comes to income. I mean a lot of the pros or the freelancer world are the freedom of getting to work where you want and work on exciting and new projects and varied projects, but they still need that stability. And we were not able to often in that as a big company. So all of these pain points just really amalgamated into enough of a reason that I felt passionate enough to go out and try and solve.
Chad Nitschke:
That’s great. It’s funny, I don’t know if I ever shared this story with you, but part of the genesis of Bunker so my background is from the insurance industry and Kind of had this idea, hey, we want to make insurance easier for freelancers and independent workers and my wife is in HR and she was actually working for Twitter at the time and she kind of shared exactly what you just described, right where you were trying to onboard independent workers – the manager was trying to do so – and it was just really cumbersome and slow to do that and she kind of told me she was like, why don’t you just go to the enterprise and talk to the enterprise about just making it easier and streamlining it. And it’s funny because that’s ultimately kind of what led us down the path of – it’s a different problem I think then what you’re solving, but kind of the same pain point.
Peter Johnston:
Yeah. No, no, I mean completely. And in fact, what Bunker does, it comes up a lot. I mean the fact that it’s a low bar today for the improvements to be made, I think. But it comes up a lot that if a contingent workforce or a strategic sourcing professional, at Twitter can’t even tell the number of freelancers they have in the business because they’ve tried to avoid the managed service provider put in place because of time constraints, they definitely don’t know if they have the right insurance. That’s for sure. And that comes up a lot at the moment. In all of our conversations it’s, okay, step one, let’s get visibility over them. Step two, what does it mean? Like what’s our onboarding criteria look like? And insurance – particularly professional liability insurance in California – is number one, along with with background checks. I mean I can’t even tell you how many perspective customers we meet that we ask, well, cool are they interacting with your company, your people, so you’re background checking right? And they’re like, I don’t think so. They’re probably gonna need insurance. They’re probably gonna need to be background checks before they interact with another human. So yeah, it’s a huge issue.
Chad Nitschke:
Yeah, definitely. And I’m curious, you mentioned some examples I think of why top talent is choosing to be independent, but just based on the users that are on the Kalo platform, what do you guys see and hear in terms of this is why workers want to be independent?
Peter Johnston:
Yeah. Great question. I mean, I think first and foremost when … I guess I’ll take a step back and sort of – there’s a spectrum, right. It’s kind of called the gig economy and I love and appreciate all the meaning behind the term, but on the spectrum of sort of the freelancers that work on the Kalo platform and engage with the enterprises that use our software, it’s on a different scale of Uber drivers and people delivering your food. It’s much more on the sort of like, we’ll work with Ideo today and like where the system of record there. So a lot of those freelancers are billing thousands of dollars a day for the projects that they work on, to Google and some of their freelance engineers. And I think the biggest reason is because when they get to that level of talent and when their skills are so specialized and so in demand they realize that they can not only earn more money, but the benefits of having that freedom to really only use their super powers and not have to deal with like the usual administrative burden of a full time job – it’s kind of like are we really using our hard skills more than 25% of our day jobs? Probably not. There’s a lot of kind of like ops and back and forth and admin and I think the biggest reason, and we survey our freelancers pretty regularly, and one of the biggest reasons is still just like freedom of choice to work on what we want. And in particular, what’s becoming bigger and bigger and might speak more to a macro trend of just, I think everyone in the world because of kind of the state of everything right now, particularly in America, they want a little bit more control and independent over their own lives. And a say in what they do day to day. So I think there’s something slightly bigger driving a lot of it. Not to mention, obviously, there’s just tax and pay benefits to being independent. But I think for us the biggest theme is just wanting to work on something meaningful and realizing they can charge a premium if they are a superstar.
Chad Nitschke:
Yeah, no, that definitely makes sense. And certainly consistent with what we hear as well. And I’m curious kind of the flip side of that question. So you don’t need to share like names or anything, but I’m curious if you’ve got any kind of war stories for like what not to do if you’re an enterprise in terms of maybe making it unappealing to freelancers.
Peter Johnston:
Yeah. Well, it’s funny you mentioned Twitter actually with you said your wife worked there before.
Chad Nitschke:
Yeah.
Peter Johnston:
There were a number of … I mean we partnered with a lot of managed service providers. I know that we don’t work with Twitter today, but we were initially brought in for a consultation and some of the pain points of the creative team there were really that, seemingly, the only option is that everyone’s going to be defaulted to W2 and creative don’t want that. Like imagine the burden of like the very fact of the freelance economy is that you get to hop around from project to project that you want to work on. And it comes with a lot of the benefits of being on a 1099. And the reality is when large companies like Twitter or others that are really putting a service provider in place whose motivations are revenue-based and not really aligned with the creative studios, or the design teams, or the engineering teams, is that they’re gonna default the W-2 payroll because of a seemingly inherent compliance risk. The reality is, a lot of these workers will refuse, and they had. They did. They said, “We’re starting to see that freelancers are refusing to engage as if they want W-2,” because the last thing a freelancer wants, particularly someone who can pick the projects they want to work on, is to be asked to go through the administrative burden and tax complications of being W-2 payrolled by multiple businesses at once. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Until there’s really some sort of consistency or standardization across businesses in terms of the understanding and agreement upon the fact that there needs to be a consistent way to engage a 1099 worker. I mean, today, it’s up to the subjectivity and the risk profile of the business. I think right now, a lot of the risk profile will default to anything to protect our employment liability. If there’s a managed service provider in place that isn’t strategically aligned, like I know Andrew Karpie talks a lot about this in his blog, but if MSPs have an opportunity to be more strategically aligned with the business and focus on productivity and reputation, but when the reality is, they make a lot more money if these workers are W-2 payrolled. Freelancers do not want that. They decided to step away from what came with being W-2 payrolled. That’s a huge, huge piece we see freelancers wanting to avoid.
Chad Nitschke:
Yeah, no, that makes sense. I’m curious. You touched on this a little bit, so onboarding. I don’t know to what extent you guys kind of get involved in onboarding, but what are, I guess, some of the differences or even the similarities between onboarding an employee or a freelancer for an enterprise?
Peter Johnston:
Yeah. I mean, I think that consistent onboarding of freelancers is really tough at a large company because there’s a big, big lack of … There’s just a gap between the legal understanding of what a freelancer is and the terminology that is thrown around a business. I’m sure you’ll see them, but I can’t even tell you how many different terms we’ve heard used for an independent worker. We’re brought into a company that will be like, “Well, we’re using contractors for this.” I was like, “I’m gonna stop you there. What are they actually doing? What’s the nature of the work? Are they contractor? Do you have the same understanding of that as you do freelancer or as you do temp worker?”
The lack of consistency there just introduced a ton of onboarding issues. I think our, you know, enterprises, I think, are struggling to really identify because it is complex. I mean, it varies state by state, particularly in the US, and it’s really hard to come up, particularly as the laws are changing seemingly like the wind right now, it’s incredibly hard to come up with a consistent way to engage a freelance worker and ensure that it’s compliant, but I think the biggest thing that we spend a lot of time on is really trying to nail down with customers, what are you comfortable with being your onboarding criteria for a 1099 worker? Then once we have that, let’s translate that into language that means that the hiring managers that work at a line of business level can actually understand it so that it doesn’t feel like this legal definition that they have to learn. Not everyone is a legal expert. Employment lawyers are few and far between, like good ones, anyway, in the Bay Area, so I think there’s a huge, huge piece of work to be done there. I mean, I’m curious what Bunker has seen in terms of helping streamline those onboarding requirements, but it’s where we spend a lot of our time.
Chad Nitschke:
Yeah, no. I would agree. Part of it is just maybe even a generational shift, right? So, like, convincing attorneys and getting several different stakeholders involved into the discussion to align just expectations around what success looks like. So, from our perspective, right, it’s not three or four attorneys kind of going back and forth on what insurance should be required for each individual engagement. It’s like, hey, let’s talk about the services that the freelancer is providing, and then based on that, understand, like, what is the exposure to the company? Then set something that is reasonable for everyone. Like you said, it takes a while to have those discussions, and even just getting kind of the right people to the table just takes a while to do that. It’s a good segue, too, ’cause I’m really curious on, what do you think … If you had to fast forward the clock five years from now, what do you think of the freelance economy or the future of work looks like?
Peter Johnston:
How long have you got, man?
Chad Nitschke:
Yeah.
Peter Johnston:
I guess it depends if the politicians play ball. I don’t know. So, I think that there has been a lot recently in the press around … I think we should be thankful, but not so thankful to the Ubers and Lyfts of the world for putting the spotlight on the labor economy and the workforce in the US. Thankful in a way that it’s getting some attention, and finally, I think this … But the attention is in the wrong place. I think that, for me, will have a big say on what the future looks like. I have an idea of what I think might happen and an idea of what I would love to happen when it comes to what the future looks like for this workforce.
Today, it seems like seemingly, you wake up every morning and there’s a new article about how some state is teaming up to crack down on a legal engagement of independent workers. The reality is that the workers … We need new definitions of these workers. The fact that independent contractor connected from a tax perspective to a 1099 is the bucket of professional that … I mean, it must seem a little odd that a Lyft driver will be under the same bucket as a professional freelance engineer that might contract at Facebook, for example. I think that as long as there’s lack of definition, literally, up as high as from a political standpoint and a legal standpoint on those workers, I think that we’re gonna continue to see these fires popping up in terms of different states deciding to introduce different initiatives to kind of crack down on it, when really, there needs to be … I mean, the future of work is here. It’s not this, oh, it’s gonna happen in 2020 thing. It’s like, no, it’s literally happening right now. It’s today. I think that until someone really steps up and decides, okay, cool, there has to be – it can’t just be binary. It can’t be you’re either a full-time worker or you’re not, and then within the not category, falls everything, falls these contractors that’ll work three months at a time, these more freelance-related workers that might do a project for two to three days, and then these kind of gig workers on the side of Uber and Lyft. I think the suppression of these workers continues to happen, due to a lack of definitions from more political and legal standpoint, I actually don’t know. I mean, I hope that we see the growth of it, but I’m skeptical. I think what I’m hopeful for is that it’s complete – that this incredibly powerful, positive emergence in new independent decentralized workforce is just gonna kick ass. I mean, this is the future, right? I mean, our ability to work with individuals that aren’t tethered to being in the same location, provision in the building, that’s not necessarily from the US., like, dude, that’s how we put a man on Mars. You know?
Chad Nitschke:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Peter Johnston:
I think our ability to connect talent that way – and at the moment, there’s just too much control, and too much structure, and too much archaic legal complications over these different types of workers. What I want to see is a world where, in 5 to 10 years … I mean, I’ll do the sales bit here. Our trademark tagline is literally, “Work with anyone anywhere.” That’s what we aspire to. I think everyone, yourselves included, and other great companies like Catalant, trying to move it forward – I think our job is to enable that future of talent, to be able to engage talent, regardless of border boundary or state by state complications. There should be a worldwide currency or a worldwide fluidity to being able to engage talent. I’m not talking state by state in the US. I mean, country by country. I think productivity will come from the best minds being put together. I literally didn’t say the best minds we put in the same room ’cause I think the opportunity is that we can engage this talent anywhere at any time. The administrative and legal burdens of a workforce like that, regardless of state or geography, can empower us to bigger and better things. I think the reality today is that we just need way … I mean, you know, you’ve been in Bunker for a few years, like three or four years?
Chad Nitschke:
Yeah, about three years, almost three years, yeah.
Peter Johnston:
Yeah, and same with us. We’re coming up on our fourth anniversary. I think it’s a trillion dollar market. It just needs more funding. It needs more funding. It needs more companies trying to tackle it from different angles, like us from a system of record perspective, you guys from an insurance onboarding requirements perspective, and the marketplaces have a big role to play, too. I have a view of the reality in front of us, and I have a view of what I would like it to become. I’d love to hear your perspective on both, your fighting a good fight, too.
Chad Nitschke:
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think, like you said, I mean, the future is already here, and so all of these things are happening today, and they’re gonna continue to happen, right? There’s momentum kind of moving in this direction of independent workers. That momentum is not going to stop, even in lacking the right legislation or having the right state laws that are in place. I think that could potentially alter the momentum or change it, but ultimately, like you said, I think it’s more that the laws and the regulation that’s in place could be an empowerment to what’s already happening or it could be kind of a slight hindrance, but either way, it’s already happening. And so it’s interesting, like the Dynamex case, which gets talked about a lot in California, in print, you would read that and think like, whoa, that’s gonna have significant implications in the state of California, but the reality is, people haven’t really changed their behavior all that much following that, and so I think to your point, there’s a lot that needs to be caught up on from a regulatory and from just a legislative perspective. It’ll just be interesting to see how long that takes, but it’s like this is already happening. You can’t really stop that momentum, but maybe I’m too Pollyanna about it. I don’t know, but …
Peter Johnston:
The case that you just mentioned, I mean, that was probably one of the most ludicrous things I’ve ever seen, right? I mean, and again, back to the differentiation and definitions that we need from a gig worker to a professional freelance worker, is that that law is … I mean, to an extent, I think what they were trying to accomplish was that there needs to probably be a little bit more rigor and a little bit more control and taxation of gig economy businesses, like Uber and Lyft, who, at the moment, enjoy an incredibly handsome margin on the fact that they are allowed to engage their – effectively, their product is their drivers. They’re allowed to engage them, not W-2 payrolling them, meaning the margins for their business are incredibly attractive for venture capitalists. I totally get that, but what that Dynamex really effectively did was completely disregarded the fact that it was gonna impact every other professional freelance vertical and industry within California. If you look at that definition per the usual course of business, like if a freelancer is doing work for the usual course of the business, think about what that’s gonna do to the publishing industry in California. I mean, I know it’s a lot larger in places like New York, but it goes without reason that a lot of the publishing industry is surviving today and because of their ability to engage freelance writers, but the writers create content. The content is their business model. I think that, for me, is, like what you said with that case, is a perfect summary of why there’s a very nearsighted view being taken on the roles that are changing, even in a legal legislative minefield like California. I think that I never – Like California. I think that, I never thought I’d say it, but coming into this from a designer background, and getting started, and really just wanting to impart, particularly, the creative and design world to engage these workers quickly, and be productive, and knowing that I was going to need a lawyer every time in the meeting to get it done is a learning. And, believe me, it’s something that you’ve got to adapt to. I mean, we work with a lot of worlds like fortune 500 businesses, and become their system for this workforce, but there’s always a lawyer in the room, and there’s always the client’s people, and there’s always the HR and the strategic sourcing. But the reality is the world is taking this – as you said, it’s this force it’s never going to stop growing, and the reality is the engagement of these workers is not happening at a centralized level.
So, it’s a little bit too powerful for, I think, any – given the numbers, given the growth rate was at 35% year over year for freelancer economy in the US that 2027 is predicted at being the year at which there’s more independently classed workers than there is full time workers – I mean, I dare say it, but there’s no way legislatures and/or enterprises will be able to keep up unless they start embracing more tools. And there’s no way they can unless there’s more funding put into more companies like us.
Chad Nitschke:
Yeah, I’m curious. So, shifting gears a little bit here, you mentioned designers as being kind of one of the skillsets that you see quite a bit of on the Kalo platform. What are some of the more common types of workers, and then, also, maybe what are some of the more surprising types of work that you guys see in your platform? To give you some context we recently interviewed someone, and they were talking about goat yoga instructors being in high demand as independent workers. And so, I’m curious what you’ve seen.
Peter Johnston:
Yeah. That’s a great question. I’ve seen almost everything. So, we just hit a quarter of a million freelancers on board, which is a big milestone for us, but, oh man. So, we work only with technology businesses. Meaning initially when we started on everything. Construction burns to hospitals wanting to use us to manage their 1099 workforces, but we only work with technology first businesses.
I mean, but it varies. I mean, obviously, you have the usual. You’ll have your freelance designers, engineers, creatives, anyone building anything for the online world. But then we’ll see – like we had a guy … A lot of the time a lot of these workers have a full time job, but they do a lot of kind of freelance work on the side, so we had a dude from NASA that was coming to speak at one of our large enterprise customers was added to the system. We’ve had freelance violinists literally going around doing different … These Bay area companies we’re all fans of our happy hours, and our employees want to play music in the lobby. I mean, it just varies. But mainly we focus on the digital space.
Chad Nitschke:
Yep. Yep. That makes sense. So, we talked about kind of the future of the freelance economy, and what that looks like. And what do you think … So, this is more of a question for kind of the makers that are the listeners, so people that are out there thinking about building something for the freelance economy. What do you think some of the biggest gaps are that still exist that are kind of ripe for innovation?
Peter Johnston:
Oh, man. Actually, what a question. Like we always talk about this with our investors and our board a lot about how there’s so much. It’s just green field right now. There’s so much we could do as a business, and trying to work on what we should do, and what we should focus on is just it’s tough. I think there’s, obviously, and I’ll not spend too much time on it, because we chat a lot about it, but there’s a seeming lack of compliance tools available in this space to help organizations automate and understand that. We have our own, but I think we always end up partnering with other compliance companies, and more service based providers. I think there’s a lot of potential for disruption in that compliance space. I just don’t even know if a startup could keep up with the amount of legislative changes they’re having.
I think the marketplace space is super interesting, though. I think that, unfortunately, the lack of funding in marketplaces is pretty incredible, and I think different marketplaces really struggle to scale beyond like certain skillsets, or certain geographies, and I just don’t think anyone has really cracked the providing an excellent marketplace piece. I know LinkedIn had like an interesting foray with ProFinder recently. I know that UpWork is used for like particular types of outsourcing of sort of like lower skilled tasks. And then you’ll have these like super niche like really, really specialized kind of like talent marketplaces that are localized to a vertical and to a geography. Like Top Towfries in the Bay area that really focuses on like engineers and design. I just think there’s so much more that could be done in the marketplace space. And I think that eventually there really needs to be a clash between the traditional staffing agencies and marketplaces, and we haven’t seen that yet. We’re starting to see it a little bit like Matt Pierce – I don’t know if you know Matt…
Chad Nitschke:
Yeah. Matt’s great. I’m a big Matt fan, yeah.
Peter Johnston:
Yeah. I mean, Matt’s into really interesting stuff in the healthcare space in terms of replacing a traditional model of staffing healthcare professionals inside hospitals, and I think we need way more of that. Way more of those guys that are willing to bring the talent to the … I mean, we focus purely on the technologies. I just think, I mean, the marketplace is so exciting. There’s 55 million freelancers in the US, and so many areas that need disruption. I mean, I’m curious what you think.
Chad Nitschke:
Yeah. I would agree with that. I mean, it’s interesting because you look at the data, and there’s just so many independent worker transactions that occur offline. I mean, kind of the offline world of independent workers existed for a long time, and that element of the workforce is growing as well. And so, I completely agree with what you said around … I think the trends are just more, like from a marketplace perspective, specialization. So, you have what Matt is doing with Trusted and really, really focusing on specific types of workers that need to work, and want to work independently, and then kind of matching those with the right enterprises. And you have platforms like UpWork that are incredibly successful, an IPO coming up. But I think more of the trend is around specialization, and really finding kind of what are those specific types of workers, and how do we enable them to work independently. So, I totally agree with that.
Peter Johnston:
Yeah. I mean, any more full time people wanting to go freelance – get on that.
Chad Nitschke:
Yeah. What’s the best to engage with Kalo? So, if you’re an enterprise out there that needs help, or if you’re a worker that ultimately wants to be on Kalo?
Peter Johnston:
Yeah. Good question. So, we actually have more freelancers coming inline to us than enterprises. Although, you can’t get on Kalo, actually, if you’re not invited by an enterprise, ’cause really we don’t focus on any marketplace dynamics. We focus on giving the businesses the solutions to manage. So, for the most part it’s the companies inviting the freelancers on, but, I mean, we were fortunate enough – I work with a lot of the big technology guys, and super excited about it – so, just happy to work, and I think if there’s any message I think it’s probably … As I mentioned, I started the business because of personal pinpoints within the enterprise. And then I’ve been a freelancer myself during university 12 years ago, and now I’m kind of doing it for other reasons, which is I just think this idea of people having complete control of their own destiny, and having this independent lifestyle in workforce is incredibly, incredibly inspiring. I say that working 40 hours per week for one company, but I just think it’s a lifestyle that is only going to be picked up more and more. So, I think that that my ask is just of the enterprises that currently consider – I guess, first of all kind of wake up a little and see that there’s a very big difference between freelance workers that might not come on site, and aren’t provisioned in your building, and to start treating them like first class citizens. ‘Cause, and I’m sure you see this all the time, but they are just not. They’re an invisible workforce. They’re either held at arms length through an MSP, or they’re paid at 90 days, and the reality is, as this trend shifts, If businesses do not get ahead of this in a way that helps them engage these freelance workers and treat them well, talent retention can be impacted, productivity is impacted, and when that starts happening those businesses start to lose. So, my ask is to start really treating them like first class citizens, and going from there.
Chad Nitschke:
Yep. I definitely agree. I mean, there’s ultimately … I mean, it’s capitalism, right? So, I mean, with unemployment at kind of three to four percent like workers have a lot of options, and a lot of choices, and so whether it’s a W2 employee or an independent worker, workers have choices. And so, if you’re going to make it really prohibitive for somebody to join as an independent worker like they’ll probably just go some place else, and that’s not what the enterprise wants.
Peter Johnston:
Exactly. That is it, and that can only … This is the thing it’s win-win. If the legislatures get on board it’s win-win. The businesses will be able to engage the talent, and create talent, and retain them, and the freelancers get treated better. So, I just don’t see it, there’s no losing part of this equation in the freelancer economy really.
Chad Nitschke:
Yep. Cool. All right. Well, thanks again Peter for sharing your perspective on this episode of Ready Set Work, and thanks again to our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in, and hope you can join us again on our next episode.
Next Episode: “Agility in the On-Demand Economy” ft. Rob Biederman, Founder and CEO of Catalant