Every time another platform launches purporting to be a ‘boon’ for freelancers, Australian freelancers let out a collective yawn.
The newest kid on the block is Speedlancer, which was launched by a 22-year-old Melbourne entrepreneur. It claims to apply a fair price for the work.
$29 for logo design within four hours? Paying one cent per word for your company blog? Good luck with that.
We just hope that clients understand that your project won’t being handled by an Australian. You won’t find great home-grown freelancers working on these platforms. We avoid them like the plague.
These low rates insinuate that anyone can design a logo. But if you pay peanuts, as the saying goes.
Cheap PR, anyone? How many author corrections do you get for your pennies? What happens if the media list isn’t up to date? And how would the client know?
We get it. Freelancing is like manufacturing – it’s being off-shored. But Australian clients need to remember that there’s professional freelancers… and then there’s all the other freelancers.
But what we want clients to remember is that they don’t actually need a gatekeeper. They just need to be able to track down top talent quickly. That’s always been the hard part.
Which is why a small group of Australian creatives built The Freelance Collective. We don’t claim to be entrepreneurs. We were simply frustrated by the growing numbers of platforms and agencies entering the market landing corporate clients and turning around and offering us a far smaller fee to undertake the work.
So we put out hands in our pockets and came up with a solution. We let the freelancer tell the world what they’re good at, we check them for quality and ensure they’re Australian before pushing their profile live, and let the clients reach out direct and start building working relationships.
We’re building momentum, too. Support has come from The Walkley Foundation, Media Super, MOO, among others.
We are specialists. We don’t want to be commoditised, or rush the creative process. We don’t want small projects that don’t even pay enough for us to buy lunch that day. We’re better than that.
What worries some of the country’s talented freelancers is that clients will start to think that locating and hiring a freelancer is somehow difficult.
But we’re right here, waiting for you to pick up the phone and give us the opportunity to solve your creative problems.
We went out on a limb to work with you. We left our cushy corporate job to give you the best of our creative skills on a freelance basis. And we want to work directly with you, the client.
There’s a whole community of Australian freelancers that aren’t part of the gig economy. We’re professionals undertaking major and smaller projects for big Australian brands working 80 hour weeks to get the deadline met. We’re up before dawn to get that copy sparkling, or that website or company video perfect. This is our profession.
We’re the independent creative thinkers you hire to write your company blog and get it bang on message every time, photograph you new product range, build your new website or write the copy for it, handle your social media, create your company’s explainer video, get you in the media headlines, or build your company brand with a slick new marketing campaign.
We’re running our own small business. We’re handling our own marketing, accounts and managing the work flow. We’re proud of what we do, and we’re not relying on small gigs to feed our family.
Sure, we get it. Sending elements of your creative needs offshore has its place.
But we worry about what the future going to look like if too many businesses buy into this.
With predictions are that our workforce will be largely freelance in years to come, what’s going to happen to thousands of freelancers hitting the market in years to come?
Here’s what we want clients to know.
Rushing the creative process isn’t smart. A logo in four hours for $29? As we say, good luck with that.
A key part of the creative process is consultation, which is pretty limited when you’re communicating by tapping out a few dot points on a platform for someone known only as ‘Rami’ to interpret.
We don’t want clients to think of freelancers as an outsourced commodity, but rather an important part of your team. If there’s a platform between us, you can’t pick up the phone to discuss project milestones or give feedback.
When you’re after a creative freelancer with skills you don’t have in-house that’s able to guide you through the creative process and ensure the project fits in with your overall business goals, you probably need the freelancer’s full name and phone number so you can get in touch.
Also, bear in mind that if you opt for a platform to get a creative project met, the freelancer won’t have heard of your business, and won’t understand local context. The spelling might be dubious, and the freelancers’ loyalty lies with the commissioning agent, not the client. Oh, and the freelancer may be living on the poverty line.
We earn our living by increasing our online visibility so that clients can reach out direct based on our skills. We’re not a commodity. We’re individuals with different skills and experience, we all charge different rates, too.
And the best part of our day is when your email hits out inbox asking to chat about an upcoming project, or a prospective new client who found us online calls.
We just hope that the creative work undertaken offshore doesn’t leave you with a bad taste for freelancers. Because there’s awesome talent here in Australia, if you know where to look.
Nina Hendy is the founder of The Freelance Collective, an online community of curated Australian creative freelancers.
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