Eight months ago Shull packed his bags and headed west with a serious case of dot-com fever. By day he works for BBQ.com (think grill gear) in San Francisco, as director of customer service. By night, in the heart of the Valley, where there are more business plans than film scripts in Hollywood, Shull is launching his own start-up, Pyke.com, to sell downloadable music, movies, books and software. But he needed help. So he logged on to eLance.com to hire a gaggle of freelancers to help him build his business. Through the service, he found people in Canada, Italy, Kiev and Yugoslavia to write a business plan and design his site–all from the convenience of their own homelands. Though he refers to his company as “we” (as in, “We’re hoping to launch in April”), it’s a one-man show. “I come off so small when I say it’s just me,” Shull explains.
Shull survives because of a new class of services that allow people to sell high-level skills at basement-level prices. They’re called e-lancers, available through companies like eLance.com, Guru.com, FreeAgent.com and eFrenzy. They leverage the Internet’s key strengths: its ability to find the weirdest needle in the digital haystack and to make markets between buyers and sellers, collapsing vast distances between people who need work and those who need workers. This is no-frills commerce with the database-specificity of the global Web. “We’re matching high-supply areas with high demand,” says Beerud Sheth, cofounder of eLance.com. Are you a feng shui master, or do you need one? No problem. Need a clown? Send in Chuckles or Dumb-Dumb. They’re all for hire on the Internet.
A confluence of trends is accelerating the rapid growth of such free agency. Roughly 25 million American workers aren’t on a company payroll. The plunging price of communications and access to the Internet have enabled information to flow as easily around the globe as down the hall. “A lot of digital services will move to where the workers want to live,” says Thomas W. Malone, professor of information systems at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Freelancers gain control of their destiny. They can stay at home, watch bass fishing on TNN, take midday naps and say something to their prospective bosses that few staffers can say today: “No.” It’s a boon to businesses, too. They can reach new levels of efficiency. They don’t have to pay for benefits packages or for time when workers aren’t needed.
But for many, free agency is a high-stakes gamble. You never know when your next paycheck is coming, let alone from where. No one is managing your retirement account–if you even have one. And it can be wickedly lonely. Online talent brokers have gotten the message. Companies like Opus360’s FreeAgent.com service offer e-lancers group life insurance and retirement plans. Other services like Guru.com host galas around the country so people can meet. Even the stigma of being a homebody is gone. “People are proud to say they do serious business in their boxer shorts,” says James Slavet, Guru.com’s cofounder. (A moment of thanks that Web videoconferencing still stinks.) Some e-lancers are doing better online than they did off. Mark Fertig, a 27-year-old graphic-design professor in Virginia, posted his logo-design service on eLance.com six weeks ago, and, at this rate, he could outpace his offline take by 40 percent. “I’m gonna make a boatload of money,” he says. He’s accepted 35 jobs out of 50, and when he gets really swamped, he raises his prices to control demand. He’s come to think of his new income as “free money” that gives him free time when he wants it. “I just got a check today from a guy in New Zealand,” Fertig bubbles. How sweet it is: that same day, he got a new set of golf clubs.
