Careers – Pick of the pack

Careers - Pick of the pack

The advantages of freelance working are becoming ever more attractiveto both consultants and their employees, says Mick James. He looks at theattractions of the single life and the skills needed to make a success ofit.

According to the mercurial Charles Handy, we are all either freelancers already or on our last permanent job. Although this view overeggs the pudding somewhat, the advantages of freelance working are becoming ever more attractive to both consultants and consultancies alike.

However many consultants end up stuck between a rock and a hard place: corporate life may well be unbearable but sole trading is too uncertain.

Freelance consulting should be distinguished from setting up as a sole practitioner, although the same individual may well operate both camps at different times. The sole practitioner develops his own business and client base, whereas the freelancer is a “hired gun”, providing specialist or short-term skills to other firms’ assignments.

This mode of operation has several advantages for the consultant who goes it alone. Without the contacts or branding of the firm behind them, the fledgling loner often finds it hard to get under way.

A recent survey by Drake Beam Morin showed that when people initially set up their own businesses they underestimated the importance of sales and marketing skills rating them fifth and sixth in importance as success factors. By the time they had been running their businesses for six months, sales and marketing were rated first and second.

It’s a generalisation, but professional people often have extraordinary cultural difficulties in mastering the disciplines of sales and marketing.

Freelance working can solve this dilemma, in that the assignments at least are already sold, and all one has to do is market oneself to other consultants.

Not only that, but recruitment consultants are increasingly operating in the freelance market, so that one can even have a “broker” for one’s skills.

One such is Bath-based Armadillo, whose head, Henry Morris, believes that the attractions of freelance contracting are such that the area is ready for radical expansion:

” If you work as a sole trader you’re more likely to develop three or four client accounts and work with them,” he says. “As a freelance you could be working anywhere in the world for all kinds of different companies.

Instead of developing accounts, you can concentrate on developing your own expertise and skills.”

Different firms have different attitudes to freelancers says Norris: some say they will not employ them under any circumstances, others believe the ideal mix is one-to-one, permanent with freelancers. He has even found similar attitudes co-existing in the same consultancy. However, the skills shortages in some areas – such as telecommunications – are such that it is becoming a case of “needs must when the devil drives”. Many individuals, even at partner level, are finding it more profitable to take themselves and their skills out of the partnership altogether. In certain very tight niches, it may well become impossible to keep the necessary skills in-house at all.

Under these circumstances the freelance consultant can score an immediate financial advantage: not only is there a bidding war for their skills, but the daily fee rate translates pretty directly into income, as they no longer carry the overhead of the firm. Not surprisingly, some clued-up client companies, who are adept at scoping their own needs, are beginning to cut out the middleman and staff assignments directly from the freelance pool.

However, the attractions of the freelance life are not merely financial.

One of the latest trends to cross the Atlantic is “downshifting” in itself an answer to another of Handy’s paradoxes. Handy noted that the trend in employment was for fewer and fewer people to be working longer and longer hours for more and more money. Downshifting is an attempt to break this vicious circle, as highly paid individuals realise that their salaries are increasingly useless to them, being burned up financing leisure and status activities which are in themselves only attempts to compensate for the nightmare of their working lives. The trade-off of a lower income for a simpler and, one hopes, happier lifestyle is extremely attractive.

However, corporate structures are slow to adapt to these demands, and freelancing can be a way to achieve the balance. Morris has a consultant on his books who, although a “partner-in-waiting” at a Big Six firm, became a freelancer so that he can work only three days a week and pursue other, non-financial interests in his expanded spare time.

Even those who do not desire to drop their utilisation rate find significant advantages in the freelance lifestyle, says Morris:

“It’s about having control over one’s own life,” he says. “You can probably earn as much or more money and have more control as well.”

Another bonus is an end to the office politics that can sour any professional life:

“You’re not fighting on a ladder anymore,” says Norris. “You think ‘isn’t this a better way to live?’.”

Though, he points out, there is another side to this particular coin: “A lot of people don’t want to go freelance because they’re never going to have an army that way.”

Morris does admit that as he got into this area of the market he was surprised by the number of consultants who want to return to permanent jobs:

“It’s about 30 per cent,” he says. “I thought it would be insignificant.

But the 70 per cent who stay become committed 100 per cent.”

The decision to go freelance is obviously a combination of personal factors and an assessment of the business environment, but as far as Morris is concerned the business case is compelling.

“There’s a low reliance on freelancers at the moment but it happens to be increasing,” he says. ” In two years time, will those firms that have made it a policy not to use them be able to maintain that? If they do they will have to have the most successful recruitment policy ever.”

However, the individual contemplating a freelance career must be prepared for some searching self-analysis:

“The cold measure is, have you got the skills that are needed, yes or no?” says Morris.

Even if you have the skills, you might worry about retaining the freshness of that skillset away from the training infrastructure of a big firm, but Morris says this is not necessarily a problem:

“Freelancers keep their skillsets up far more than you would think, he says. “They’re always involved in new initiatives. If, for example a company is going to install a new telephone system, they’re not going to put in obsolete technology.”

Sole practitioners often go through a “feast and famine” cycle: after the difficulty of the initial start up they are swamped with work which they are afraid to turn down in case they aren’t asked again. Freelancers don’t have this problem, says Morris.

“Having to say you’re not available now doesn’t work against the freelancer,” he says. “It’s not like a company that turns work away and loses that account.”

Whether we will all be freelances soon or not it is clear that it is now a well-established career path. So if the only thing that has been holding you back up until now is fear-go for it!

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