We didn't really know what we were doing as far as sales. None of us did, including the founders. But we all were working for the same goal and that led us to be successful, even if early on it just felt frustrating.

—PAT KNEELAND, CATALANT EMPLOYEE #2

Try this on for size for a thought experiment. Tomorrow you take over as CEO of a Fortune 100 company we'll call the XYZ Corporation. The XYZ board of directors has chosen you specifically because you're an outsider. Shareholders complain that XYZ, a once‐great company, has grown bloated and calcified. The business press mocks the company as an aging relic. You're the change agent brought in to transform the company whatever it takes—no matter how unpopular—even if it means closing down offices or jettisoning large quantities of employees. Your mandate is to reimagine XYZ for a new era.

Or, to take this exercise one step further, what if you could imagine XYZ as a blank slate, to be reconfigured as if a classroom full of MBA students instructed you to focus on the business side and not the social costs? Where would you begin?

We'll give it a shot. For starters, you probably keep many of the people. Companies need at least some full‐time employees for continuity's sake, for institutional memory, to set and adjust a strategic vision. You might make changes in the C‐suite or among the division heads and other managers, but you're not eliminating those positions, either. Let's surmise that XYZ is an industrial giant and needs full‐time factory workers to populate its plants and stamp out the wide range of products it sells to businesses and consumers. The company still needs a complement of full‐time support staff: receptionists, administrative assistants, mailroom workers, and such.

Now, what do you do about the rest of the enterprise? How about the comptroller's office, for example? You have to keep some full‐time employees. But what about relying more on free agents brought in as each quarter demands, to work on your quarterly filings? Similar changes could be made in finance and accounting. In each case you'd want full‐time people—for continuity, and because management requires a full‐time devotion that does not come from a temporary employee. But think of the flexibility if there were a robust platform of people derived from the kind of operation we were building. We, of course, think about this day and night.

What about all the other departments populated by white‐collar professionals? What if you need to devise a new marketing campaign? Or new advertising, a website, and social media? Enlisting outsiders means both a fresh perspective on your vision and continuous right‐sizing of talent to economic need. It also could mean access to top‐tier free agents who otherwise would be outside of XYZ's reach, contributing to your corporate mission. These are people who might never agree to uproot themselves to come work full‐time for your company. Maybe they like where they live or have kids smack‐dab in the middle of the formative years of their grade‐school education. Or perhaps they prefer to remain independent because they have the skill set that allows them to do so. Mobility and technological know‐how have made that ever so much more real. Skilled workers have extreme value, and yet they do not have to accept the golden handshake. But what if they'd be happy to take on a stimulating project that might require a trip or two to your headquarters, but otherwise allows them to work from wherever they like: home, the coffee shop, an Internet café during their travels through Croatia? How are you going to enlist this group?

Meanwhile, back in the marketing department at XYZ, it's time to execute on that new fall product plan and you're short of bodies. Do you start a hunt for three new marketing people, a couple of product experts, and a software person—or do you temporarily increase the department's head count by fishing in a talent pool like the one we're imagining? We suggest Plan B, because then you can easily ratchet down after the short‐term need has receded, without the trauma and cost of layoffs. The project is completed, people are paid, and then they are free to do whatever they want until the next time XYZ needs their services. Bring in the right skills for the right projects at the right time and you are satisfying all your constituencies.

You can apply this same model to your sales department. You want people who devote their full attention to peddling the products that XYZ produces. But what about the talented salespeople who move on? They get a better offer, or need to move to be close to an aging parent, or just need a change of scene. Despite their successes—and the time and money the company has invested in them—they do leave. Why not employ a core staff of salespeople who express an interest to stay and grow and devote all their working hours to XYZ, along with their attendant leadership? Then supplement that loyal (and happy) core staff with those who might prefer to work part‐time for you and yet still commit themselves to other things. In your downtime, they are not your worry. But when new products or demand calls for it, you can summon this temporary staff. The heavy hitters lead while the flexible workers pinch‐hit. Not only does this cover your head count in busy times, but it is also a sensational recruiting tool. Draw people to your company on a project basis. And those who seem a good fit can—if the desire is mutual—be segued into a full‐time posting.

In a time when the economy is calling for consistent fresh thinking and dynamic resourcing, from legal to communications to strategic planning, we are not advocating to offload people wholesale to make room for the new, free agent contingent. Institutional memory is important. So, too, is continuity and culture. But there needs to be an appreciation of a rebalanced workforce, as well, because workers are gravitating to this new lifestyle choice, and management is even less able to forecast the shape and size of its future needs. This is not a boutique concept. It is inevitable and it is coming fast.

Scaling back on your full‐time staff load means a more nimble business, better able to react to new opportunities in real time. There is great advantage if XYZ can rapidly grow or shrink its head count depending on workload and deliverables. The platform we envision has the potential to give XYZ access to a far wider, deeper talent pool. Via online marketplaces, you will be able to find the technical people you need: the graphic designers and all those content kings and queens who have deep experience working strategy or brand management at corporate giants such as Procter & Gamble or Coke. Find the former SAP or Oracle salespeople who might help you find new customers in the enterprise. See if they'll bolt themselves to you for 6 or 12 months as your team aims to penetrate a new universe of potential buyers. If not, buy their time on a shorter‐term basis for leads and sales training and supervising.

In this rejiggered world, we foresee the ability to travel light—and give yourself the leeway needed to survive the next wave of change. You will be rewarded, both for increased operating flexibility and innovative thinking. Think of it like this: As CEO, you have a set of problems to solve. The company, perhaps since its founding countless generation ago, has been locked into a dated hiring model. You're not going to bring back MS‐DOS and dot matrix printing into your workspace. Why insist on perpetuating a labor model that technology is increasingly relegating to the dustbin? The old adage is that your most valuable asset is “human capital,” but who says you have to stack it, file it, and pay for it in the same way? What if technology gave you a different way to craft your spend on human resources?

There's a load of pain manifesting itself inside corporate America. The more due diligence we did to pursue our idea, the more obvious that became. As we built our business, the McKinsey Global Institute, the consultancy's well‐regarded research arm, started asking big businesses about their troubles recruiting talent. They found that 4 in 10 companies in the United States—40 percent—were having a hard time filling open positions. The Boston Consulting Group warned that there was $10 trillion at risk because of what the third giant rounding out consulting's Big Three called “the global workforce crisis.” Based on its research, McKinsey was predicting that 40 million people could benefit from the “flexible talent access” platforms being built by companies like ours. McKinsey found that these new marketplaces could generate up to $2.7 trillion in global economic impact—equal to the gross domestic product (GDP) of Great Britain. Maybe more relevant to the enterprise, McKinsey also estimated that they can improve a company's profit margin by up to 3 percent.

Another pain point is the high price of adding a new employee. The typical company spends as much as 150 percent of annual salary to locate, vet, and onboard a new management employee, according to the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California–Berkeley.¹ Even if it were half that amount for other professional employees, spending 75 percent of an employee's annual salary is extremely expensive. There's also the cost to the bureaucracy of an approval process that can often take anywhere between three to six months inside a Fortune 1000 company and the sunk costs of training that employee before he even gets up to speed. In a word, adding head count is expensive.

And yet these days someone holding a job for three to five years seems a long time. Amazon and Google, for instance, or Mass Mutual and AFLAC, are among the companies where the median tenure for an employee hovers at around 12 or 13 months.² Therein lies the rub. The system is set up to keep employees for many, many years, and it is utterly cost ineffective to lose and then retrain one. Yet the culture is shouting out at us that people don't stay.

There is an added drag to this inefficient equation. Understaffed businesses regularly burn out existing employees by making them take up the slack. At what company do you hear cheers on a Friday afternoon when the manager announces that everyone is going to have to work all weekend because they don't have enough bodies to make a deadline?

The whole strategy seems self‐defeating. Adding to an overworked employee's stress load only increases the chance that the employee might leave. And, of course, those most likely to find the exit doors are the ones with the talent to secure another job—precisely the people the company wants to keep.

There is a default option that large companies have traditionally turned to when they need a knowledge solution or professional services: the big consulting firms. These organizations are well known to be generalists with massive margins that charge around 10 times the rates they pay the consultants who actually work on the project. This kind of thinking may have kept Brooks Brothers and Johnston‐Murphy flush for many years in the 1970s and 1980s dressing the young and the eager in the uniform of the Street, but today that feels a dated solution to a modern‐era problem. Electronic Recyclers, an innovative Fresno‐based company that allows customers to dispose of digital devices in ways that are both environmentally responsible and safe, has been using HourlyNerd since 2013. Company CEO and cofounder John Shegerian had listened to pitches from the large consulting firms, but the prices were so high he demurred. John told Inc. magazine, “I have to dial 911 after I read them. Seriously, who wants to pay for that overhead? What Uber did to the black‐car world, these guys at HourlyNerd are doing with the consulting world.”³

It made us wonder: In a world where talent is king, what if business leaders were looking at the problem all wrong? What if the recruitment and retention problem was really one of access? At HourlyNerd, we felt management was making too great a distinction between “us” (the in‐house employees) and “them” (the growing free agent workforce). We said, look at projects and deliverables instead of head count—and adjust the workforce accordingly, as if calibrating an engine. Clearly, the war for talent was on, but employers were not yet hearing the battle cry in the marketplace. It was becoming a simple truism that there is more talent outside company doors than in. Is this a trend managers could play catch‐up on, or did they risk waking up to an office full of empty cubicles, with all their best talent defected to Starbucks, We Work, and every wired city park in America?

It was exciting to think that we were working on a solution to such a core problem for so many businesses. As we saw it, we were offering businesses a different way to organize themselves. Rather than dishing up whatever cosmetic rewards companies could offer to ensure people sit at their desk 50 weeks out of the year, what if business leaders focused instead on making work a place people wanted to be? Obviously for some employees, that was the case, and with the inducement of steady pay and some sense of stability, they could make up a business's core team. The rest of the head count needed a new way of thinking, however. Unhappiness was apparent—and rampant. Maybe their hang‐up was geography or the commute—issues a business can't do much about. Maybe people heading for the doors (or wishing they could) saw the work they were doing as too narrow or confining. Work can be like food, and some folks really enjoy the all‐you‐can‐eat buffet. Could a company keep employees happy if they had access to a wider body of creative and stimulating projects?

We understand that dropping out or going off grid was not the solution for many, or even most. But what if those who were looking for change and were willing to take a shot could find meaningful work through a platform like ours? We could provide the opportunity for the renegade worker and then help the businesses gain access to the very talent they so desperately needed. Workers still get paid and HQ gets vastly improved flexibility. Sure, it was a new way of thinking, but progress has shown no inclination to stand still. And with technology and mobility driving a generation that has never known anything but change, clearly something in the corporate wheelhouse was going to have to give.

While we were confident we understood the market forces that were going to force management to course‐correct, we still had to prove we could provide enough talent on the supply side to make ends meet. As we quickly learned, it wasn't only pain driving the other side of the equation. People weren't sure that if they walked out one door, another one would open up anytime soon. It used to be that independent work was largely the province of a few professions: writers, accountants, lawyers, graphic designers, and people with some pretty specific skill sets. But in 2002, Daniel Pink published his groundbreaking book, Free Lance Nation (subtitle: The Future of Working for Yourself). A decade later, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman published The Start‐Up of You, which encouraged people to be more malleable in the way they looked at their career. Maybe that would mean working for a company for a few years, but it also might mean working as a free agent and selling your skills to the highest bidders.

An article published in the Harvard Business Review in 2012 documented the rise of the “super‐temps”—a growing sector of people working for themselves because they could, not because they had to. More recently, a PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that nearly one‐third—29 percent—of employees in China, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States wanted the chance to take much greater control of their work life: to work where they want and how they want.

In other words, people in the workforce were growing more comfortable working for themselves at the same time businesses were hunting for a new way to access talent. For the first time in at least a century, more humans seem to prefer work as free agents than as full‐time staffers.

There are any number of explanations for this. One factor is the impact of the millennials descending on the workplace. This generation insists on getting more human satisfaction from work every day, and they are quick to seek alternatives when things aren't a good match. Technology is also playing a role. There is the stress of working in the 24/7 world. You need to love what you're doing given the constant demand of always being available. At the same time, technology points the way to freedom. Broadband is cheap and long‐distance virtually free. Google Docs lets people work from home, at night, and on the weekends. Videoconferences happen all the time across time zones and cultures with coworkers who are calling in from every corner of the globe. Thursday night in New York is Friday morning in Asia. That means business is calling, and it knows no boundaries. Also, there is the new self‐motivated marketplace known as eBay. Etsy. Self‐publishing. Airbnb. And all the other creative and entrepreneurial opportunities afforded a generation that shudders at cubicle life and dreams of taking conference calls from the back of a motorbike in Phuket. Why should anyone stay with a company 50 hours a week for 30 years? It is a question we ask ourselves over and over again.

The bottom line is, a much wider range of specialty workers are drawn to the freelance life. But they still need to be fed, motivated, and inspired. There was a time in the 1950s and 1960s when the coolest people in the business world were the “whiz kids” of Ford, who introduced management controls and the discipline of metrics to today's corporation. Then came the Jack Welches and Jeff Immelts, who installed pillars of management theory interwoven throughout the workplace. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs took the stage and dominated it, followed by Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and the rest of the Unicorn generation. Much of this transformation was fed by the venture capitalists, who introduced a whole new class of zillionaires who had figured out their own way to write a ticket that looked nothing like the previous generations'.

Leadership in a black turtleneck and jeans became the Holy Grail, but to us, the king of the mountain these days is the intrepid freelancer.

Society doesn't make it easy on today's free agents. We speak of liberation for the working masses, but freedom, as famously put, indeed can just be another word for nothing left to lose. That is not how we envision it. The self‐employed are a class that needs to be recognized, empowered, and, in our view, celebrated. As it stands now, if you go the indie route, you are going to pay both halves of Social Security rather than sharing the costs with your employer (from the official IRS site,⁴ “if you're self‐employed, you pay the combined employee and employer amount, which is a 12.4 percent Social Security tax on up to $118,500 of your net earnings and a 2.9 percent Medicare tax on your entire net earnings”). That equates to 15.3 percent of your annual wage, up to $118,500, or basically twice what a full‐time employee would pay.

Even so, intrepid freelancers are striking out on their own, emboldened with the knowledge of their talents and their intrinsic worth on the open marketplace. They've also done the math—folks on our site tell us they make more on a per‐hour basis than they did previously while full‐time employed. Businesses are in a tough spot when their choices are adding to their head count or hiring one of the Big Three. The talented flexible worker has figured out he can work one‐third fewer hours and make 50 percent more playing the arbitrage between the going rate for top‐tier talent and the sunk costs of adding a full‐time employee or hiring a consultant. There may be 200 reasons people prefer working for a corporation, including safety and security. Yet still hordes are venturing out to bushwhack their own way. Our culture rightfully celebrates the entrepreneur. And what are itinerant freelancers if not the ultimate entrepreneurs, absorbing 100 percent of the risk in seeing through their vision?

The pain point for these pioneers, before the marketplace era, was the uneven flow of work. There were few online outlets to help writers and lawyers seeking work. We found a few tiny folks trying to do something similar to what we were, but largely abroad. There was no market for the broader business community here in the States.

It is estimated there are somewhere around 29 million Americans working independently. We have no doubt there'd be many more if people knew they had convenient outlets like ours that can help generate demand opportunities. Demographers and economists have coined the phrase “alternative work” to describe those who have already joined this accelerating section of the job market (which includes freelancers and temp workers alike). Many were there by choice, but not all. For the countless others, who at their very core knew they wanted to be unshackled, they would need help finding work in a more efficient manner. Craigslist made sure there would be no more classifieds in the back of the local newspaper and a red pen to circle the jobs. Randomly knocking on the doors of the country's 29 million–plus businesses also seemed a daunting task.

It was exciting to know that our marketplace for high‐end talent was a potential solution. The demand was there; the key would be to help the two sides find one another. The Nerds were finding us without much effort on our account. If we could attract enough work to our site, we could help freelancers of all types smooth out the inherent lumpiness of their month‐to‐month work life. It was a true scratch‐our‐heads moment. What had we stumbled on? Was this a niche market that we'd tap out in six months or a year, or did we have a chance to be the eBay of human capital, except it was heads, not used baseball cards for sale?