It was on my first day of work that I realized I had walked into a company in the primordial stage of existence—a company still struggling to make sense of the world.

—RICH GARDNER, HEAD OF SALES, CATALANT (NÉE HOURLYNERD)

Many have dreamed for a long time of a work life that meant more than a daily commute to a job they didn't particularly like. But before the Internet and before remote collaboration tools, most felt like their choices were limited. They suffered through the 9 to 5 and lived for the weekends—and the precious few weeks of vacation they were afforded each year. For the brave and the few, when the pressure became too much, they threw themselves into the job market and more often than not ended up in another dead‐end job that simply shifted the pervasive sense of dissatisfaction from one company to another: another soul‐deadening commute, another job description, perhaps even another town. It did not take long to see that the work/life balance problem was more pervasive than we knew. Or as David Byrne of the Talking Heads put it: “Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.”

Prior to the advent of mobile technology, the freelance life, at least by reputation, seemed mostly limited to the creative classes. Going out on your own came with an implicit understanding that you were different in some way: an artist, a writer, a musician. Freelance did not apply to the mass of men and women—those living the fabled life of quiet desperation. However, as technology became pervasive, the balance started to shift, and that was the cue we picked up on when we brainstormed our HourlyNerd concept to life. There were more opportunities, more of an acceptance of a change in attitude, and, as we were learning, a growing share of the population who were willing to consider the risk of a life of free agency.

This was a unique bunch, trailblazers if you will, who trusted in their abilities enough to tap into their networks—or look for new ones—in search of meaningful work. Take Anshul Agrawal, whom we met through HourlyNerd in the fall of 2013. Anshul had earned his MBA at the University of North Carolina's Kenan‐Flagler Business School and then put in two years as director of engagement at a New York–based company called Next Jump, before deciding the mainstream course was not for him. He took the leap to venture off on his own in 2012. Newly free, Anshul returned to his hometown of Toronto and decided to specialize in market research projects in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) space. He got busy on our platform, bidding on something like 50 jobs before finally securing his first project. It proved to be an auspicious beginning.

One advantage of our site is that we maintain a detailed ratings system for every project a Nerd encounters. Succeed at a task and the system kicks in and leads to goodness for all involved. In Anshul's case, he thrived at his first assignment and got the scores to prove it. He quickly won his next project, then another, and then what morphed into a steady stream of business after that. To date, he has completed more than 100 projects through the site. In fact, Anshul's success within the system was so good that to keep up with demand, he had to hire others to farm out the overflow of work coming his way. From working as an exploratory freelancer, Anshul turned his one‐man consultancy into a boutique consulting firm. Now, on his LinkedIn page, he lists market leaders in the beverages, software and consumer industries as companies he has helped explore potential growth opportunities.

Anshul was a storybook success tale for our business. Not only had he broken free from the shackles of a steady, go‐nowhere job, but he successfully crafted a work/life schedule more to his liking. Since signing on with HourlyNerd, he has been able to pay off his business school loans and take his wife on their first‐ever vacation. We sensed he would not be looking back anytime soon.

We were high‐fiving in the office about Anshul's fantastic trajectory, yet in the same breath it illustrated the challenges laid out before us. We were rapidly accumulating talented people like Anshul, but we had to fortify the demand end of our business with a much larger pool of companies willing to test out our site. This did not simply mean knocking on more doors. We had tried that already, and after making introductions at about 300 places of business, we had a whopping total of five customers to show for our efforts. This was not a model that was going to bear fruit in the short term. We had to make a case to the wider marketplace that HourlyNerd was not just a matchmaker but a whole new way of doing business.

Disruption in the workplace has been rightly identified as a digital revolution, nearly since the advent of the first clunky desktop computer. Famously, Moore's law came about in the early 1970s, suggesting that computer speed was going to double every two years. This concept was quickly adopted by the burgeoning IT industry and then spread like an inkblot in the turbulent waters of the changing workplace. In a word, everything was changing, and it was going to continue to as processing power, then mobility, amplified. Everything we see—and that the new workforce experiences today—is the direct result of the speed of change. But while the focus has been on the explosive growth of technology, it has taken infinitely longer for the social changes it brought about to catch up to the worker and employer and grab a foothold in the lexicon of work. Essentially, we created a workforce that could run at 150 miles per hour, but we left the talented experts on a track designed for 60 per at best. These men and women could adapt and do the job and do it well—but companies were many miles behind at adapting and figuring it out. Our idea was on a collision course with reality. What if we created a flexible workforce with nowhere to go? That could only spell big trouble down the road.

We'd heard from top managers that they were having trouble finding the right people for the right jobs, and yet we were not having the success we anticipated—and needed—to sign them up. What we were learning on the fly was that the only way we were going to get these companies to consider change was to shine a light on their pain. We asked them over and over again: Do you know where the skills and competencies in your company lie? And over and over we heard the same misinformed answers: “Technology, innovation, collaboration. That's what we're good at.” We respectfully disagreed. These were paradigms, not people. You can't walk into someone's office and say, “Hey, we need some innovation on the 24th floor. Can you send some up?” People have to be attached to tasks and deliverables, and that's where companies were coming up short. And the numbers bore it out.

We asked our contacts at one large client the same question—Where are your core competencies in your workforce?—and they laughed. They said they had no idea! A double‐barreled no: they did not know the talent they had inside the company and they did not know how to find it. What this underscored for us was that large companies were unlikely to thrive and succeed in the long term unless they came to the realization that they were not tooling up for the future. If they were planning to rely on a full‐time workforce and they couldn't even identify their talent pool, how would they retain their most valuable asset?

Marisa Goldenberg signed up at our site in the fall of 2014. She had earned a degree in computer science from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard. She had started her career in enterprise software start‐ups, but after the dot‐com boom and bust of the late 1990s, she joined Dell as a corporate strategy consultant, working in the office of chairman Michael Dell. By the time she left the company in 2009, she was director of its global business operations. Marisa knew the ins and outs of the company that employed her, but did they know anything about their employee at all? Marisa describes herself as an “extreme introvert” who still managed to thrive in the workplace. But as an introvert, the constant noise and interruptions in a cubicle environment often sapped her energy during the day. “I had always received top performance ratings, despite not operating at my full potential,” she said, which left her wondering, “How much had I left on the table?”¹ (Dell has of late become a true pioneer in the flexible workforce, with a 2020 goal of a 50% remote workforce.)²

After leaving her large corporate role behind, Marisa explored several start‐up ideas of her own. She picked up consulting projects on the side through her own personal network, and upon discovering HourlyNerd was intrigued by the business model and the potential to greatly expand her business. Marisa quickly proved herself on the platform, and soon was winning large enterprise projects with C‐level stakeholders at Fortune 50 companies. She could deliver tremendous impact for clients while working remotely with just a phone and an internet connection. As her business grew, Marisa recruited a partner and a bench of consultants who were happy to collaborate remotely on project work. The on‐demand industry had lit a spark in Marisa, which was “fueled by the positive externalities” she found—including enhanced productivity. “The remote setting allowed me to conserve my energy rather than drain it in the overload of stimulation from a traditional office,” she wrote. “I am more productive and higher performing than I've ever been. Which makes me wonder—how much productivity do companies lose when their introverted employees don't work in their ideal environments?”³

The traditional workforce's loss was Marisa's gain. But that was a message that needed to travel far beyond most company's walls. We got it. It was practically our raison d'être. We existed solely to custom‐tailor jobs that suited people at companies that needed help. But if those companies did not see this, our growth was going to become extremely limited in very short order.

Our founding team existed on an interesting plane when it came to crafting strategy, putting out fires, or both! While Pat was viscerally, emotionally moved by the challenge of helping people liberate themselves from the tyranny of work, Rob had a tendency to think more philosophically; he was as much a hard‐charging entrepreneur as a would‐be economics professor. The two approaches worked well together when it came to shifting corporations as much as minds.

“There is a market elegance to our proposition,” Rob explained. “The existing system, as it is structured, does not create as much employment as it should. And it creates needless shocks to the system and volatility, because when demand falls 10 percent, the unfortunate existing answer is to lay off 10 percent of your workforce.”

Rob reflected that today's employers were operating in the dark on a system that had gelled decades ago during the manufacturing and production boom. “If you were a traditional CPG company,” he said, “the mission of your company did not change that much. You got good at manufacturing and you got good at marketing and you were good at distributing cereal. The way to win was getting slightly better at that.” Companies, he said, were still operating on that 1950s premise in a twenty‐first‐century economy. “The existing system did not set us up for radical innovation because back then people got trained to do something really well, about 2 to 4 percent better each year. If there was radical thinking, it typically was coming from outside your organization.” Therein lies the problem, he said.

If companies were still operating under the yoke of dated thinking, the new breed of employee most assuredly was not. Kara Yokley was seeking flexibility when she discovered HourlyNerd in 2014.⁴ Like so many of our Nerds, Kara had the kind of blow‐away resume we knew would impress potential clients. She had gone to Harvard undergrad, where she studied applied math and economics, and then managed a group of global researchers studying the high end of the hardware market (Silicon Graphics, Cray, Sun Microsystems, IBM). She'd earned her MBA at Wharton and then went to work for J.P. Morgan. Even with that kind of enviable, blue‐chip pedigree, apparently she was looking for more, because she would learn about us while reading a blog post talking about nontraditional paths of work. She checked out the platform and felt heartened, Kara told us, because she came across so many projects that aligned with her skill sets. If only her employers knew that she was not scoping the competition, but rather, a different lifestyle altogether, they might have been able to retain a top talent.

“I always knew that I wanted to have a life that provided flexibility to explore the world,” Kara said. “I had the sense that it would be difficult to do that in a traditional corporate job. And so it made sense to align work and some of my private passions as well.” Kara, based in Chicago, would take on a wide range of projects she located through our site, including one for a company exploring alternative directions for its business. “The work I did informed the board,” she said. “It was gratifying to know that my research and presentation would be helpful in guiding their discussions for the strategic direction of the company.” Kara was having the kind of work experience and impact she had dreamed about but that seemed so elusive to her—and to so many trapped within the corporate world. And that corporate world, we knew, was operating at a knowledge deficit.

If we were going to capture the larger marketplace, we were going to have to pinpoint for management the very pain points they seemed to be missing. And this meant, at the most foundational level, we had to illuminate how work had changed. From an HR standpoint, the hunt for talent was still an analogue process. They had a job that needed filling, or perhaps it was a “role” or responsibility that existed on some dated flowchart. If they could not fill it with the existing head count, they would run an ad, or put the ask out to an agency that then ran an exhaustive and expensive search for the talent to fill that position. This was not only costly, but it was a way of thinking that refused to adapt to the changing times.

What companies needed—and we knew existed—was a whole new mind‐set with which to view their workplace. Instead of playing to the role, why not play to the deliverable? To put it in the vernacular of breakfast cereal, you could hire or fire as the demand for cornflakes rose and shrank—or you could change your strategy in such a manner that it allowed for a whole new way of thinking about breakfast cereal. New products, new markets, and a whole new way of defining your business created agility. Technology‐based industries had gotten that message from the git‐go. Think back to the golden age of the Internet start‐up. Was Amazon just about books any longer? Facebook simply a place to connect with college classmates? And perhaps most ubiquitously, look at Google. A dozen years ago we had barely come to terms with the word “search” as a business. How could anyone possibly monetize that?

Technology may have led the way, but now it was clear to us that it was time for the rest of the business world to catch up. And that means a wholesale change in thinking about how they view their internal workforce. Naturally, we don't expect the corporate structure that has existed for decades to fold up and die. But “outside‐in” thinking is going to prevail, and that means the leaders will have to look at, feel, and touch their workplace differently. They will have to become flexible in their grander scale of thinking if they hope to keep up and more so, take advantage of the strategic opportunities that agility provides. And if they don't see the writing on the wall, their workers are going to spell it out for them. If this seems obvious to us, it's not because we took better notes at B‐school. The growth of HourlyNerd was shouting out the message loud and clear. We want change, our workers were saying, and if we can't find it at the office, we'll find someone or some way to locate it ourselves.

Anshul had gone from a dead‐end job to running his own Toronto boutique. Marisa had expanded her client reach and impact, and enabled her team to collaborate in ways that maximized energy and productivity. And it's no surprise, given Kara's background, that she's been so successful on our platform as well. In many ways, Kara exemplifies the change we foresee best. She became so busy that she brought on someone to help her with the workload. Soon after, she brought on four other like‐minded consultants to join her team. She and her husband had their first child and like any new parents found their life turned upside down. But instead of massive life and job upheaval, they were able to adapt and change their work to fit the lifestyle they had chosen—not the other way around. That hit all the right marks for Pat's deeply felt position on work/life balance and, in the same breath, captured Rob and Peter's belief in the inevitable changing economic equation.

“With the Catalant (formerly HourlyNerd) platform, clients are most concerned about your capabilities, and your ability to deliver the product that they require,” Kara told us. “Our family could be in Taiwan or Costa Rica and I would still be able to do interesting, fulfilling work without compromising on lifestyle. A platform like Catalant (formerly HourlyNerd) really gives me the flexibility to do that.”

Experts like these had sent a strong message that we were on the right track. Now the only question was, would corporations hear the same message and follow suit?