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SPEAKERS
Brittany Brewer, Amr The Internet Guy!
Online with Amr the internet guy! Stream it today on your favorite podcast platforms, this podcast focuses on entrepreneurs and business owners helping them become more successful in conducting their business on the web without being stuck with technology getting a headache pulling their hairs out or buying expensive software.
Hello everyone and welcome back to online with the Internet guy first of all I would like to apologize for being Mia for a real long time but as you know life happens uh I promise I wouldn’t disappear for that long again and hopefully I would not disappear again so today we’re discussing something very important and a big issue that actually every entrepreneur and business owner suffers from it’s too much to do with too little time what do you do then how do you scale you know if you kind of do everything your own in your business you don’t really have a business, you have a job where you are working for yourself so you are the employer and at the same time you are the employee you don’t want that you want to scale your business to the point that it can run and be profitable without you how do you do that let’s go in and find out what are the suggestions that work that our guest will discuss with us so without further Ado let’s meet Brittany Brewer.
Hi Brittany
Hi Amr how are you? thank you for having me you are somewhere exciting right where are you right now I’m currently located in Mexico actually are you North Center South of Mexico um no so I’m in the Yucatan Peninsula area okay I have no idea where that is good food there’s a car called Nan yeah near some good food and some Mayan pyramids oh my God that would be a great area to visit yeah it’s incredible I’m from Egypt originally so we have our own pyramids too yeah yours are pretty impressive the Mexicans are pretty good too yeah so you’re you were telling me earlier before we went on air that you live in Florida in St Petersburg yeah um I live in a town called Dunedin it’s sort of a well it used to be a little sleepy Beachside Town um but it’s exploded in the last few years so it’s becoming quite the destination spot but um St Pete is where our home office is so that’s the track that I usually make what’s behind that explosion you know it’s so strange because um when I moved to Dunedin there it was really just a lot of mom and pop like small businesses and um I think that around like right before Co happened a couple of shops opened and then when Co happened um you know Florida didn’t really follow suit with the rest of the United States yeah and a lot of new industry opened a lot of new businesses and word kind of caught on about how cool Dunedin was and um it just it’s exploded there’s so many new businesses it’s kind of a funky town there’s a lot of um locally owned businesses still a lot of entrepreneurs there um somehow Dunedin has managed to keep out a lot of like chain businesses and chain restaurants and things like that so we all like to say keep Dunedin weird because it’s a little bit a little funky yeah but uh definitely a lot more people at the festivals and things like that than there used to be that’s nice
I mean I’d love to visit one day you know when everyone who lives in the cold country like Canada for example they want to retire somewhere warm so Florida is the number one destination oh yeah Dunedin is actually um it’s home to the it’s the Blue Jays training City so the Toronto Blue Jays uh they come down and they train for spring training and Dunedin gets a lot of Canadians in that area yeah I mean that’s good because like you know the Blue Jays they play Outdoors so I guess in Winter it would be pretty hard to train in Toronto exactly so you know you mentioned like there’s a lot of or there were a lot of mom and pop shops and then uh the city has been exploding with new businesses and uh many entrepreneurs and this is interesting for me.
For example because I’m a web designer so I always work with entrepreneurs and the thing that comes up all the time is so much to do so little time and I know that where you work is trying to solve this problem so I wanted to ask you first is uh what’s the idea behind you know what you do
Ok, let’s first let’s tell people what you do and then let’s go to the what’s the idea behind it yeah for sure so um I am the free up operations manager and basically what we do is we put businesses and um entrepreneurs in touch with Freelancers who can either take things off their plate or take care of skills that the business owner entrepreneur doesn’t necessarily know how to do so you know let’s say that you’re you’ve got a restaurant and you just started making your own hot sauce and you want to start selling it and you need a logo created and you need a website to start a sales page and you need to start funneling Le we at free up could do for you we can put you in touch with a freelancer who can take care of all of that so that you can focus on what you’re good at which is running your business and making your poot sauce so that’s sort of where um where freeeup kind of hangs out is just connecting people who are at an at that kind of boiling point of wanting to scale but having so much to do and so little time or just not necessarily knowing how to do it so free up is the brand right that’s right I like the name because like free up right free up your time free up I mean we say that being an entrepreneur is 24/7 job and you to a certain extent it is, But the most successful people are those who learn how to scale uh yeah if I speak on behalf of all the small business owners they’re usually two things that scare people the first one is with the freelancer that I’m hiring know what I like you know sometimes people advertise skills that they’re not really good at or yeah you know like.
How can I make sure that the freelancer who I’m hiring to do a certain job will actually do a good job the other thing that scares people who would be not yet looking to hire a freelancer is because they think it’s expensive so what do say let’s take it Point by point so the first one is like how do I know that the person I’m hiring is actually going to do a good job and in case they didn’t who would I talk to yeah so here here’s the thing you can hire John Doe to come and work in your office and something terrible could happen the same way something terrible could happen if you hire Jane do online who you’ve never met the way that we mitigate that no matter whether you’re hiring someone to work in person or remotely as a freelancer is vetting that’s the biggest thing and it’s something that we took very seriously in the beginning it’s like we don’t want to just put some entrepreneur who’s trying to scale in touch with some random person um and then you know have that triple their business and have them lose everything that they’ve been working for so we do a pre-vetting process and we’ll do identity verification and fraud verification we have some tests that we’ll have the Freelancers do to measure competency and that is all of those happen before we ever put a freelancer in touch with a client an entrepreneur who’s like hey I need help we’re not just throwing them anybody we have a network of people that we’ vetted that we trust that we PA them with and then if something does go wrong with our platform it’s not true of every freelancer hiring platform but specifically with free app we’ve got 247 Round the Clock um support you know if a freelancer quits for some reason we’ll find them a replacement we’ll get them some credit so that they’re not their project isn’t delayed and that they’re not out a bunch of money um it just sort of like concierge level support versus just kind of going out into the nebulose and being like hey I pick you work on my project yeah and the second point is how expensive I mean I understand of course because I’ve been in yeah that business as well but um I know that it will depend on who you’re choosing what’s
the skill level years of experience uh what exactly you want to do what’s the time that you want but in general people are scared because they think that hiring someone is going to be costly and I wanted to you know address that point yeah um so
I tell people two things the first thing is our least expensive freelancer it starts at $5 an hour and that includes our free up fees we’ve got a really transparent fee it’s 20% with a $2 minimum so you can get a freelancer for five bucks an hour to do basic admin tasks and VA tasks you know but when people talk about they think it’s going to be too expensive a lot of times I tell them it’s going to be more expensive for you in the long run if you don’t bring some on because your business is boiling over you’re losing your ability to scale if you don’t bring someone on so you know that initial upfront cost of hiring someone and bringing them on might seem scary but think of what it’s going to look like five months from now five years from now if you don’t do anything and then you decide oh now it’s time think of all the money that you’ve wasted because you didn’t have the support you needed but in short the basic of the basic Freelancers to do you know General admin stuff like email management create spreadsheets for you that starts at $5 dollars an hour Perfect I mean I heard this over and over again um and uh you know I understand that people sometimes are scared to spend money especially if they’re a small business but if you don’t hire somebody to work with you to help you uh with the things that you need done what happens is that you don’t actually have a business you’re an employee and an employer at the same time it’s like you’re working for yourself yep and you’re working for 24 hours for so little pay and the only way to go uh is to scale because when you scale things are done you don’t have to be involved in in every little detail and that frees up your time to look after your customers so that they can you know refer you get more clients and the ball gets rolling but if you’re and this happens with like even like I used to be a freelancer I’m to a certain extent I am um but what happens is that you get this cycle of ups and downs because you when you have some free time you connect with your customers you send newsletters you’re active you’re marketing yourself and then you get like a couple of projects you get so busy because you want to deliver those projects on time and you want to do it with great quality so you get really busy you have no time anymore to go out and sell so while you’re busy you’re not selling the project ends once you you’ve you know finished these couple of projects and you have no nothing in your pipeline so you go out again and start hustling again so when you look at your income on an annual basis you see like spikes and then it drops all the way down and then it spikes back up and that’s not good I mean it’s not good for your mental health it’s not good for your pocket it’s not good for your family so the only way to have stability is to have the business running literally without you yeah and I’m not saying that one freelancer would do that or but you got to start somewhere a lot of people because of that they get nervous and you know they’re like I don’t even have time you know I’m running a business I’m trying to do what my skill set is I don’t have time to manage people I don’t have time to hire a freelancer and those types of people we really recommend our managed service because we have project managers that can take over that side so that you can focus on where your skill set lies you know no matter what that is um you know you can f like coaches for example we have a lot of coaches um a lot of Consultants on our platform and they take advantage of the managed Services because you know they’ve got um all of this information a wealth of knowledge but they need a project manager to organize it they need somebody to get it um how do you get it o
ut to the public it’s like how do your head so they need a project manager to kind of get them into shape and organize everything so we have a managed service that we’ll offer where we’ll give them a project manager we will lump some you know what they’re going to pay per month and have the Freelancers just kind of take it off their hands so that they’re not like pulling their hair out stressing about deadlines and timelines and what needs to be done they can focus on the big picture stuff yeah they can I mean you can just be creative you know what I mean like focus on your why you got into the business at the first place I don’t think anyone gets into any business to do admin or to do HR or to create their own website unless their business is web design uh but um in general it’s like there’s so much that an entrepreneur does that has nothing to do with their main skill but it’s important to the business and the biggest part in my opinion I think it’s also anything digital um you know everything is digital now and many people are still a little bit afraid of technology and what happens also technology itself keeps on changing like we have ai now there’s an AI in in in this recording and I think I don’t know I haven’t used it before it’s the first time I used the zoom Ai and I’m hoping that it will summarize the thing for me because I used to do that manually right I used to go just listen to the recording write my notes and then uh create a post later and then attach the video to the post so people can watch it on my website and of course it goes on the regular podcasting networks and YouTube but as I’m saying like technology keeps on changing yeah and there’s so little time to keep learning I mean it’s great when you learn so it makes you feel good but there’s so little time to learn everything so let other people learn and use them it’s as simple as that yeah I mean it’s just like you know if you think about it like you buy a house all of a sudden you have to become a little bit of an electrician a little bit of a plumber um a little bit of a landscaper and sure you can do a little bit of it and maybe it’s okay but then two or three months down the line that pipe that you fixed bursts yeah and then you then you hate the house that you love so much that you wanted to buy um so it’s really where we try to focus people so much and come at it from an empathetic place because you know for your business it’s your livelihood it’s everything that you care about so we don’t want to just put people with random free Freelancers and just say okay here you go good luck we want to make sure that we’re providing um a service to them as well not just a connection with a freelancer we want to make sure hey how’s how is this going um you know what was your outcome what was your expected outcome um what can we do better next time we’re constantly learning and we’re evolving especially with like you said things like AI like the amount of job requests that came through for Freelancers who have ai experience when um chat GPT launched it was insane and everybody wants to be you know everybody wants to be um involved in the next big thing and make sure that their business is in line with where other people are and we it’s our job to kind of be ahead of everyone and make sure that we understand and can anticipate the client’s needs the problem with their is are so General like it’s a huge it’s a huge thing so there’s no like it’s very hard to say I need someone who has experience with AI well which part of AI like what do you need them to do exactly we get a lot of people who want like um they’re like I want uh I can go on chat GPT and I can get a thousand-word article written in 20 seconds and to that we say like okay well that’s not really good for uh you know Google’s eat standards it’s not good for your SEO but if you feel like you know that’s what you want to do go for it um and we try to you know explain to them the differences and
like what to expect you know AI can be a great tool but it definitely shouldn’t take over your entire human element especially yeah the best thing is a human with AI not AI on its own so someone who knows what to do and they use AI to save a little bit of time so you know they exactly do more in less time um yeah I’m interested to know roughly what are most of the requests like I know like with a platform like yours so let me just explain it to our listeners who haven’t had this experience before there are many platforms including free up of course who would connect you with someone with a skill set that you need for your business with something very specific that you can hire based on an hourly rate so if you don’t want to hire somebody in your company like an employe who comes to your office or your shop or whatever and you’re paying them monthly uh and you know every one of these methods they have pros and cons uh I know that your platform and other platforms as well they have a multitude of skill sets and different things I wouldn’t even be surprised if plumbers exist but no I’m just kidding one day yeah but uh what seems to be the thing that the majority of people are looking for these days um you know so we started and we still are heavily in the e-commerce space so we get a lot of people from Amazon um you know a lot of eBay sellers people um in the Ecom space who need people to do anything from General VA work to product sourcing and product listing but an a growing hugely growing Marketplace is marketing people don’t want to deal with it they don’t want to deal with running email campaigns they don’t want to deal with writing emails they don’t want to deal with their social media um they just want to push that off on someone else and we’re the perfect place for it because they can start scaling for any number of things at any skill level that they need if it’s something super basic like I just need somebody to automate my emails that’s all you know you can get someone coming in at five to seven bucks an hour but if it’s something a little bit more intense like I need someone to take a look at my current marketing efforts and really tell me you know what are my strengths what are my weaknesses where are my opportunities that’s a consultant level and we have those kind of people too um so yeah marketing is huge right now people are really interested in that and there’s a lot of um you know everybody has an opinion about everything and um there’s a lot of consultants and coaches out there right now who are really seeking help and um they come to us because they know we have such a variety of different skill sets even from getting a logo designed to building out a sales page for their website they can do all of that in one place at free up so there’s a question that you probably get asked a lot and I didn’t want to ask it but it’s just posing itself now what makes you I mean you kind of alluded to it a when you said that you vet people and it looks like from what I can sense that your vetting process is like a good long detailed process so is that you know nobody falls through the cracks like if somebody’s trying to pretend that they know something and they don’t know they will either not pass the test or not pass the interview or like something would you know a red flag would pop at some point and I’m thinking that probably sets you apart from uh some of the I don’t know is it safe to say the older platforms like I don’t know who’s like I don’t know because there used to be five or six platforms and then they all merged into one and then now we have the one
I don’t know I don’t want to say the name it’s okay we get a lot of that other one’s cut customers coming to us because they weren’t satisfied with their experience so we’ll just leave that at that let what sets you apart cuz I’m pretty sure that sometimes when you want to like when you have a good business idea and you want to take on someone who’s more established who’s got deeper Pockets who’s been there for like I don’t know 15 years or more and you feel like ah you know how can I compete and it feels like a mammoth task in the beginning but then once you find you know your I don’t know I want to say cliche like unique selling proposition but once you find like what makes you different what makes you tick why you thought that I’ll do this better than them right yeah so what sets you apart for real well I the first and first and foremost we’ve been around since 2015 um we’re under new ownership since then but the owner now still has that same vision and its Grassroots we look at clients holistically and I know I already said this but we really try to treat all of our clients with empathy with respect we it’s not just a number you know a new client new client you know let’s get them in and just push them out we offer comers like support um we do the vetting like you said but probably the biggest and most unique thing that we have is we will manage Freelancers for our clients so for somebody who has never hired a freelancer and um or somebody who’s hired Freelancers and just doesn’t have the time to deal with management anymore that’s so huge we will manage um the interview the job requests the bringing on the freelancer we do all of that for them and it just like the weight that gets lifted off their shoulders when they realize that they can pay a flat fee for us to do that is huge um I tried hiring Freelancers before I tried on my own first without using any platforms and I hired somebody who I thought was pretty good yeah the interview we had together was good she was you know like A1 during the time that we were just getting to know each other and I’m giving her the task to do and whatever but over the time what ended up happening is that the efficiency dropped so I’d be charged like 10 hours and I’m not objecting because you know
I agreed to that hourly rate and I’m okay but when I look at the work done it looks like this work can be done in three but I was charged 10 and then you know in the beginning you think okay they’ll get better as time goes by but then it stays the same so it looked like somebody’s trying to inflate a little bit yeah and I mean I don’t know sometimes I don’t blame them because if you set your hour rate at $5 of course that’s not that much so you know you want to make every job a little bit bigger so that you can earn more but maybe you should look into pricing yourself fairly to you and to the client so it’s kind of a win-win instead of you know because at the end I ended up not continuing it was like after I don’t know four five months I felt like I can find somebody who will do this better um then I used the platform and um as you said I felt like I’m just a number like there was no there was no interaction between me and anybody from that company it’s like it’s like just a Matchmaker so they look at some of the keywords in the stuff that I want to do and then they match me with a few people who have that these keywords listed but then you know you could just fill your profile with useless keywords anyway like it doesn’t matter you could put yeah things you know and things you don’t know and then the algorithm would just pick you anyway yeah it’s like you know how people used to fool Google to get a higher SEO ranking by just soiling the website with keywords I mean that doesn’t work anymore but it used to be the case a few years ago and it was like you’re um fooling Google right so
I feel like what you’re doing the best thing about it is that a and correct me if I’m wrong if I use your platform if I use freeup I will have to speak with somebody from free op so that they can learn what I want to do you know what my goals are what type of business passion whatever and then they would have spoken so you’re like a I don’t know you’re like a recruitment service in a way because you interview the Freelancers and you test them and so you kind of know who would be the best
match for the job so it’s kind of a yeah it is similar to being in in recruitment right there it’s one of two ways you know you can go through your entire experience with freeeup and never ever speak to anyone on a call okay so the sort of funnel that happens is the client signs up they create their free account there is a create job request button that they can click and then we limit the amount of keywords or skills that they can put because we want to make sure that they’re getting the most out of it and if you put a 100 skills Yeah it’s you’re going to need more than one person um so they can put a job requests in and then we have an actual ticket matching team not just an algorithm that’s throwing people their way um ticket match matching team will look at it and if they think it looks great they’ll push it through if they think hey this client seems maybe a little green or hey we need clarification give them a call alternatively though before the client ever submits a job request if they want to hop on a call Monday through Friday 9:00 to 5 they can call a phone number and there’s somebody that will answer Monday through Friday 9: to 5 um but then we also outside of those hours because we have clients in Australia we have clients in um you know India all over the place they can use the 24-hour live chat system it’s not an AI bot it’s a real person that’s there to answer their question yeah so you know some people they just like to get in and get their hands dirty they don’t really want to talk to anybody they just want to do what they need to do and they know that we’re there if they need if they need us they know we’re there no that’s good you’ve got both yeah both got both options exactly and um I’m just like you know I’m thinking there’s so much that you know one needs to do these days it’s like you could you could look for someone to edit your videos for you it’s the part that I hate the most a podcaster you need that we have people who edit videos all day long it’s really an easy job to source for and it’s something that a lot of podcasters are like oh I don’t want to do this I just want to do the fun stuff Tak hours yeah exactly I enjoy interviewing people but I don’t enjoy sitting for five or six hours and trying to make it look good at the end.
I mean I got to a point where I said I want to do my podcast Audio Only so yeah so it’s like it’ll take me an hour just to get it out and distribute it yeah well that’s what we get a lot of um podcasters coming in wanting exactly that they’re like I need time to just do interview give somebody else the editing and that’s such an easy thing to scale for I’ll give you the pipeline you yep um there’s another thing that like I’m sure you’ve seen that we’ve all been hammered with spammy emails people who want to do your SEO and like I oh my God like I still get about five six a day and the funny thing is it’s like dud do you know what I do it’s like yeah you know why are you sending me stuff that I do like yeah you know uh or oh we’ll do your website it’s like dude I’m a website developer is like what are you doing your marketing terrible yeah exactly so I guess they buy an email database and just like spam everyone but what I realized that the majority of small and medium business owners they don’t really understand what SEO is and they after you know when you get like 10 emails a day at some point you would respond to one of these spammers and you end up working with the wrong person and I know SEO has lots of different bits and pieces it’s not a one thing and um I I’m just curious would you have I mean you would but like I’ll ask you anyway
Would you have somebody who would write on behalf of the client and not only write the post but also share it on social networks and um maybe sometimes try to even create a little bit of buzz around it and so on like a freelancer to share uh specific post and create something for a business owner to create the post first and then distribute it all over the place yeah for sure we do that we utilize freelance talent for that on our own you know when we appear on podcasts we have people who will post on our socials who will you know repost it’s at their discretion of course who’ll post on our LinkedIn who’ll prepare the text create all the copy link everything tag the right people that’s a super easy ask because as a business owner sometimes you don’t know what you need that’s the thing like you know you need help but you can’t formalize it you can’t really say uh what exactly is the job that you want taking care of uh it might be a few different jobs it might be social media Management on its own yeah and it might be the other part is copyrighting and one part might be I don’t know like posting on your behalf or whatever yeah that’s where the managed service really comes in a lot of people who are like that they’ll want to group everything into a package deal and say this is what I need I’m going to tell you what I need I’m going to try to articulate it as best I can you help me organize it and then you delegate it and that’s what the manga service is they the client will kind of delegate or um brain dump everything onto the project manager and the project manager will cure at exactly what the client needs and delegate the tasks because that’s the hardest thing sometimes like I know I need help I know I’m drowning but I know what to ask for no sometimes you don’t know what even if you have a freelancer you don’t know what to tell them like you have I mean EXA okay in this day and age you could maybe record an audio explaining but like sometimes if you’re just going to send someone an email it’s hard like you don’t know how to articulate yourself to the point H and it’s good to use some tools like you can record an audio on your phone you could record your screen and explain what’s wrong that needs fixing uh there are different things like that and uh I feel like sometimes you need to coach the clients the business owners into you know doing it in a certain way that’s going to be a win-win oh for sure sometimes people uh you know business owners they come in and they think they know exactly what they want and they’ll say something like oh I need somebody um to I just need somebody to do my Facebook and then they’ll get to talking and they as they’re speaking they’re like after the conversation like okay so we heard everything we just said right you need a lot more than somebody to just do your social media but it’s good that we had this conversation because now that you know brain dumped all of that we can organize it and we can get you the help that you need you know when he said e-commerce earlier sometimes people think all what they need is someone to uh publish the products on their favorite e-commerce platform whatever they’re using but what they didn’t realize that the picture quality like the is terrible yeah exactly so you probably you need to retake all those photos of your products or maybe you’ve taken the photos of the products but each one of them is humongous you cannot publish it as is it has to be resized and compressed for web use so yeah there are little tasks that people are unaware of they just think I just post my products uh but then every product that will be posted could take an hour work like yeah exactly those are the little things that we can kind of help clients work through when they when they say oh I just need somebody to do this we’ll ask them those kind of probing questions to see okay do you really know what you need or do you need a little bit extra that you’re not quite sure about just yet and uh
Is it safe to also say that the free Lancers are also your clients like you’re appealing to both right because you want to attract more talent and so how is it different from the other platforms well I mean the Freelancers are the lifeblood of the business we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are right now if we didn’t have such an amazing group of Freelancers in our Network um we even utilize some of the freelance Talent um internally some of the people who work day in and day out at free up are Freelancers and they’re incredible um so we really try to make sure that we like if for example you know there’s always going to be hiccups every now and again um but we never try to blindly take one person’s side over the other you know if the freelancer is saying you know hey I really did all the work here is everything that I did we’ll do an investigation we’re not just always going to side with a client you know we want to make sure that everything is being um reviewed and that we always make Fair outcomes because without the Freelancers we have we have no business so you know we try to other things for them like we’ll position them um to get more clients within their certain space um every freelancer on our platform has um their own we call them a free app partner and it’s basically like a mentor and you know we do newsletters and we’ll tag specific Freelancers who’ve been doing a great job on the platform and just little things like that so that they know like Hey I’m not just some random freelancer in this uh Network that you know doesn’t matter we try to make sure that the people who are really working hard and doing their best to get connected or recognized so here’s something that happened on another platform you people would figure out which one it is I have a great friend who’s also a we developer uh he does more freelance than I do I mainly I’m like a backend guy so I am the Mr. Fix It the website isn’t working or the email is not firing out or uh my emails have a problem or the DNS is down or we need to migrate from somewhere so I’m kind of a functional person you know and I also most of my work is in e-commerce of course because it’s very important to keep things running to have like you know uh I would say an hourly backup but we do it even every half hour so that if we have to restore from a backup you don’t lose an order so things like that but I have a friend who’s like a web design Mill like he I don’t know he works on 20 projects a month I don’t know how he does it but he does it he’s got many helpers so when he started on the other platform he realized that there is an algorithm that will never recommend him because he doesn’t have any completed jobs yet so he started to give money to his family to hire him through the platform so that the algorithm can pick up that he’s actually completed some projects and now he could be pushed to and I felt like this is counterproductive because if you if you’re good in what you do even if you haven’t completed any work on that specific platform you should have a fair chance to you know be recommended to a client yeah that would never happen on free app um we have a double kind of vetting that happens so when the client puts in a job request that goes into our job request list and every freelancer in our Network can see the open job requests and if a freelancer with um you know the skill sets to complete a job request let’s say it’s a website design and a freelancer who’s in our Network says oh I think I’d be a great fit for this they would click on that to apply to the job our ticket matching team is going to make sure not that this freelancer has an x amount of completed jobs um but that they have the skills that the client needs does they do they have Usui have they if the client wants a web a WordPress Bild do they have WordPress experience that’s what we look for we look to make sure that the Freelancers have the skills um and that they are in the uh location preference of the client and that they’re in the client’s budget those are the three parameters that we’re looking for before we send them to connect with the client and we have less competition you know we don’t have as many Freelancers
We have higher quality Freelancers and because of that for our for our client sake we generally match between like three to eight candidates per request some of these other platforms the Freelancers are fighting for their lives with you know 30 other applicants one job that doesn’t happen on this also put me off like it put me off being a freelancer on any platform I’m just I use my name my reputation my website but I don’t I’m not anywhere else because it feels like why would I be competing with 10,000 people overseas somewhere else whose hourly rate is like 15% of like I’m not going to win in that situation because the algorithm would just pick the person who’s completed the most projects regardless of the quality of the work they did or the complexity of like you know it could be like I can create a template and then use it for every single client that comes in one year yeah I just change the logo change the font done but it’s all the same design it’s not really something that speaks to your website visitor or the people you’re trying to reach right exactly so I feel like no it will put some people at the disadvantage it’s just built I don’t know I mean I don’t want to say that but it felt like it’s built for like younger kids who just you know learned a skill or two and who want to mass and there’s nothing against it I mean it’s good for them to have a platform but the algorithm part if it has no human being it becomes I don’t know like counterproductive in my opinion it is it absolutely is that’s why we don’t do it and all of the Freelancers on our platform have to have at least three years experience um so that in and of itself kind of even if it’s somebody who is more on the basic level they still have to have that that experience level to come into our platform but we have you know different tiers for a client who wants somebody like you for example who has um expertise level uh experience doing back-end things for websites that pricing would be reflected um and the customers know you know you’re if you’re hiring somebody at $9 an hour to build out a complete website for you um they’re more going to be in the basic to intermediate level doesn’t mean they’re not a smart switched on person but somebody who’s been doing it for 15 years and who’s you know done a lot of different work and who understands the complexities of website design and website build you’re going to get a different product yeah for sure I mean I I’ve had a couple of projects like usually when you’re building a new website you try to coat for the whole project but sometimes people they’re not really sure what they want to do with this or they don’t have all the content ready or maybe they just want a landing page for now so for these situations you price per hour and people don’t understand sometimes that some of the work takes so much time that you haven’t as I said earlier for example something like resizing your images like you know if you’re going to send me I don’t know 20 images taken from your phone and they’re great quality but they’re like I don’t know 13 megabytes each yeah right and then they’re so big they won’t show unless you compress them and make them smaller and whatever and sometimes the lighting is wrong or something like you have you end up fixing stuff before it goes on the website then there’s the email part like okay anyone can build website great you can build your own website and I’m sure many business owners have done that already right what about your back end somebody fills your form and you get you don’t get the email you get nothing yep or they send you an email through the website but they don’t get a confirmation so they don’t know whether you got it or not like little things little bits here and there that people actually Overlook they think it’s just oh it looks good
Okay does it work are you are people able to contact you like y we try to talk about that with the clients you know and help manage expectations and let them know about things that they might not have thought of before they put a request in or after the request is
in like hey you know you’re working with um this freelancer right now and it sounds straightforward but you got to keep in mind you need your images resized you need um better quality the lighting’s really bad a lot of the font on your website um it’s not matching it’s not reasons yeah so you know those are things that we try to explain and we off try to offer guidance to our clients too before we just throw them out like I said you know we want to make sure that they understand what they’re getting into and manage expectations this is perfect how would people find you Britney if there they have a question if they you know yeah for your for your listeners we have um $50 in credits that they can use to get started um and they can also book a call with us to have a one-on-one like you and I just did if they go to free up pod. com freeeup pod p freeeup pod. com you know what I’m gonna do I’m gonna sign to your platform with different emails and get 50 no I’m just kidding five times 50 watching you try to hack the system no this is pretty good like I’m excited actually to try it for myself so uh I’m going to try it both as a like it’s funny because I’m a you know I’m a web designer but I’m also a business owner so I need some work done for me but I can also do some work for others so you know I’ll join twice perfect thank you Britney and I hope like you know we didn’t interrupt your plans or holiday I don’t know you said it’s not a holiday but the word Mexico for me means holiday No not at all it was a pleasure to be able to speak with you thank you very much have a great day you too thank you.
