Scale Faster With a Freelance Workforce

With today’s fast-moving technologies changing the business landscape at an unprecedented pace and scale, we are expecting to see growth follow suit. The explosion of computing power, massive expansion of data sets, and vast improvements in the way users access technology mean it is cheaper and easier to develop, launch, and scale than ever before. In theory, companies looking to grow should be able to do so easier than ever before.

Yet relatively few can.

Traditional growth cycles have often been driven by a fear of falling behind the competition during periods of hypergrowth or have been focused on lean operations and rapid scale to move into new markets and launch new products. This can often mean overinvestment in R&D and marketing, accompanied by rapid hiring sprees to double a workforce, only to go through huge layoffs when the market changes along with shifts in focus and budget. Others add innovation and expansion work to the remit of the existing workforce, typically the most skilled and capable, disrupting well-functioning workflows, risking upending core elements of a business or losing talented employees.

This lack of expertise and agility and inability to focus on testing and learning can mean a risk of stagnation.

It doesn’t have to be like this. We believe there is a different way.

Enter the fractional worker

Ever more workers are choosing fractional or freelance roles. In 2023, 73% of US workers say that they plan to either start or continue to work in a freelance capacity. As we have observed in the ever-evolving Fiverr communities, they work on a contractual basis, with multiple part-time clients simultaneously, preferring to tackle advanced initiatives and then move on, rather than being tied to a single employer.

They often enjoy being a catalyst, inventor, and creator, bringing cutting-edge skills and a portfolio of experiences to the table, often with deep sector expertise and a career’s worth of connections. They blend in seamlessly alongside full-time staff, requiring little to no oversight, able to operate outside of company politics, which boosts productivity and results. Today, fractional workers span every function within an organization, from technology and marketing, to HR and finance. They are output focused, agents of change, and drivers of productivity.

Adaptive staffing models and teams

It’s time to shift outside of the feast or famine model of staffing to drive growth. Platforms such as Fiverr Pro enable enterprises to easily build experienced, fluid teams across skills gaps, projects, and departments. This connection means businesses can quickly plug highly skilled freelance professionals who have been carefully vetted by the Fiverr team, into projects and workstreams.

Instead of hiring and firing, or overloading existing workers at the risk of losing top talent, companies can choose to build flexibility and organizational resiliency. Turn growth into a variable cost that can increase and decrease directionally in line with projects, innovations, and market changes. Make scale a variable cost to allow for testing without huge consequences when it comes to the workforce.

Businesses must become more adaptive, dynamic, and organic, working with a mix of full time staff and fractional workers to enable their next phases of growth. Success in this new era will emanate from the center of networks and ecosystems, fluid organisms staffed by teams of highly-skilled workers, whatever the terms of their engagement. They are the ones rapidly iterating and evolving to enable us all to ride the waves of innovation to success.