Last week I ran my company from the cottage. I had decent enough internet, but I didn’t want to to be too good, since the point was to relax as much as I could while keeping the wheels turning. Over the course of 9 days, I probably averaged close to the mythical four hour work week, most of which was spent emailing status updates and coordinating with staff, and I picked up a few lessons and insights along the way:
Lesson 1: hourly billing is broken. Well, it’s broken if you only work four hours a week, anyway – unless you can find a way to charge $500/hour. The thing is, it’s actually possible to earn $500 (or more) an hour, with actual clients, if you’re paid on a results basis, but it can be trickier to convert some kinds of work to this model. I have a direct response copywriting client where it’s super-easy to do this, but I also have custom programming clients where the mindset is more that they need someone to do what they do, but for coding, i.e. sit in a chair and work. Except they only want to pay for the work parts, and not the other stuff that they and their co-workers do, like lunches, coffee breaks, and so on. Which brings me to lesson 2:
Lesson 2: (many) salaried jobs are broken, or at least breaking. It’s super-hard to hire someone in a lot of companies these days, and often for good reason, so more companies are reaching out to remote freelancers to fill gaps. And it sounds like a sweet deal for the employer: like I said above, you only have to pay for the work being done, you don’t have to pay for breaks, idle gossip, meetings you get invited to “just in case” and other things that fill up the day. And on top of that, the hourly rates often work out to not much more than you’d pay a full time staffer!
The problem here, and I don’t think enough people realize it, is that they’re one corporate memo away from being replaced by more freelancers.
When you have in-house, full time employees, you’re paying for more than just the work that’s getting done. And just to be clear, I know a lot of full time employees who work very hard, and I’m not knocking anyone here, just questioning some institutional issues. You’re paying the construction fees for a cohesive team, you’re paying human storage fees for institutional knowledge, and you’re paying a redundancy tax so that a few key people leaving at once doesn’t destroy everything you’ve built.
But I don’t know if the people at the top of the pyramid realize this as much as they should, and I don’t know if the people in the middle are fooling themselves if they think they’re high enough up that they can avoid the next round of cuts. Just some more stuff to mull over the next time I sit back in the hammock overlooking the lake.
Leave a Reply