To hear Xenios Thrasyvoulou tell it, all the world’s a marketplace, and all the men and women their own employers.
Thrasyvoulou is founder and CEO of London-based PeoplePerHour (PPH), an online platform connecting small businesses with freelancers offering a range of services. He’s a champion for the growing economy of self-determined employment, and has the bona fides to back it up–he’s an entrepreneur, after all, having founded an early iteration of the company, called PAperHour, at just 22 years old.
The antecedent version was more of a staffing organization–totally offline–connecting an assemblage of personal assistants that could, as the name suggests, be hired by the hour, or project.
“I had people skills and knew it was something where I could do the initial work myself, then scale up,” says the Cambridge graduate. “Most jobs require a specific skill set–this one didn’t.”
The company grew, successfully but modestly. Within three years it had a staff of about 50 people, and provided enough for Thrasyvoulou to buy a house and a car. “But looking at it then, I knew it would take 50 years to grow it into a multimillion dollar, 100 million dollar business,” he says. Long-term scalability issues and a shift in the market away from organizations and towards freelance work were in the front of his mind when a client approached him with a suggestion.
“He said: ‘It’s a great idea, but why stick to just personal assistants–why not expand?’, and thinking of what eBay was doing at the time, connecting buyers and sellers, I figured, ‘why not become a platform?’”
Thrasyvoulou had both the client and supply base, both of which he had taken care to nurture, from the previous company–all he needed for the new venture was an expanded focus and some capital. He acquired both. Today, PPH has over 44,000 clients and almost 130,000 registered freelancers in various parts of the world–an inarguable success story made more interesting by the CEO’s views on the current evolution of the freelance economy: While other platforms approach outsourcing as a cost-cutting measure, saving some cash by finding work for cheap, Thrasyvoulou sees a quality freelance talent pool as filling a fundamental need for new and growing businesses in today’s marketplace.
“Businesses need to be more extroverted today, they need to put themselves out there in front of the massive amount of talent available to them. As freelancing becomes more mainstream, start-ups have begun building flexible working situations into their growth plans from day one, as they should.
“Take digital marketing,” he says, noting the “amazing demand” for the skill in the modern economy. “A 20-something who ‘gets’ social media, who lives on Twitter and Facebook, actually has a highly marketable skill. Almost by definition, though, the person you want handling your digital marketing is probably not someone you want in-house, dedicated to one space. The person who is out there blogging, mirco-blogging, finding new ways to connect across a number of spaces in different situations–that’s the person who will work miracles for you.”
Freelance, though, is not necessarily to say faceless; this is not an updated version of Elance or Rentacoder from the ’90s. About 85 percent of hires, in industries ranging from programming and web design to legal/accounting, translation, secretarial–even textiles–are local hires. It goes back to Thrasyvoulou’s idea of filling a need based on quality, not cost:
“There are two schools of thought on freelance work. The first is that the Far East is the future, that as it develops it will be able to compete with the West in terms of filling western companies’ quality needs at a cheaper price; the second point of view is that, even should the quality gap close, there are still certain things, like cultural differences and misunderstandings, that can’t be easily overcome across that space. So hire local.”
The quality-over-cost idea is one that PPH’s client base seems to have taken to heart. According to PPH Economy, a online board of comprehensive real-time PPH-derived data, the average hourly rate paid out for freelance work is over $29, and a full 93.5 percent of jobs go to the highest or mid-range bidder (5.1 percent and 88.4 percent, respectively).
However, the self-empowerment and lifestyle advantages provided by the right kind of freelance work, made possible by companies like PPH, have come back to bite Thrasyvoulou, albeit in a minor way.
“On a few occasions I actually tried hiring some of our freelancers for full-time positions,” he notes.
“They all decided they liked freelancing better and declined.”
