Steve Pruneau

For several years I’ve been interested in how employment in the US economy is evolving from permanent full-time jobs to more transient project-based work. It seems increasing numbers of people are moving from employer to employer, job to job, project to project as we pursue our trade skills and professions. That description fits me. I’m a software project manager and I see this in my work.

An early inspiration for me was Dan Pink’s famous article and book called “Free Agent Nation”.

After those were published, I assumed someone would create a solution for all the administrative needs of Free Agents, Freelancers, Independent Contractors. But I never really saw one appear.

Then in 2008 when the economy crashed, I really became interested. Not only from the perspective of so many people on the street out of work becoming reluctant independent contractors. But also from my own perspective. What if I lost the job I was on, the project that I was on? How would I find work quickly? Here are the options that I looked at.

First, we can become 1099-contract employees. There are fewer 1099-contract jobs out there because companies don’t want to be exposed to the legal and regulatory risk that goes along with hiring 1099-contract employees. Comanies really want the separation of a corp-to-corp contract. And I don’t want to limit myself to just 1099-contract jobs anyway, so how do we work under a corp-to-corp contract? We can work through a temp agency, staffing agency or consulting firm. They place us with their clients under their contract. I looked at some of these hoping to find one or two that are Free Agent friendly. But I really came away disappointed. They are the gate keepers. They want to control the client relationship. Some don’t even want to tell us the rate that’s billed to clients for our work. This isn’t ideal for Free Agents.  So what’s next? How else can we work under a corp-to-corp contract?

A lot of independent contractors create their own company and work through that. And they do this successfully. But it takes discipline and a commitment of time. You have to know what it takes to keep your company in compliance with various regulatory authorities and then you have to actually perform the administrative duties to keep it compliant. For many of us, this is not an ideal solution. So where does that leave us?  Working through an agency or consulting firm isn’t great, managing our own company isn’t great, and exactly… that’s what inspired me to create Free Agent Source.

Free Agent Source is really the company that I want. It gives me the company resources that I need and I’m still free to pursue the profession that I want to pursue.

I would love to get your feedback about all this. Feel free to post comments and questions in the forum at FreeAgentSource.com. Or even better, send a video response. Thank you and good luck to your endeavors as an independent professional.