A Better Future for Freelancer Founders | Interview with Rachel Renock

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It’s an exciting day because this is the first episode in season 4 of the podcast that I have an interview guest with me on the show. In a season where the topics are all about the future of work for creative professionals, it’s hard to think of a better guest to have than Rachel Renock.

Rachel is the co-founder and CEO of Wethos, a platform that is transforming how freelancers find work, do work and earn a sustainable income. 

There are many things that make Wethos different from other freelancing platforms and networks, including their focus on working within teams, winning large contracts and how Wethos pays their freelancers. What Rachel and her team are building truly is revolutionary, and it makes me even more excited for the future of work.

In this episode we discuss:

• The challenges and limitations of how the freelancing economy typically works for creative professionals

• How Wethos is disrupting the industry by creating a platform that allows freelancers to work as teams on bigger, higher-paying projects 

• What makes Rachel most excited about the future of work, and how Wethos is both creating and adapting to it

A Better Future for Freelancer Founders | Interview with Rachel Renock

Jennifer: Rachel, welcome to the career foresight podcast.

Rachel: Thanks so much for having me.

Jennifer: I am so excited to have you on the show. As a way to get started, I would love for you to introduce yourself and share a little bit about who you are, where you live, and what you do.

Rachel: Sure. So my name is Rachel Renick. I am the co-founder and CEO of Wethos and we are a platform that enables freelancers to connect and form teams together. My background actually is in the advertising agency space. I used to be an art director and I would shoot commercials and do a lot of social and digital campaigns for big brands like Covergirl, Hershey and even shot a commercial for KY once, which was weird.

I quit my job in 2016 and that's where I met my co-founders in the agency world to build this platform predominantly to help independent freelancers connect and win much larger projects, earn more money and do more meaningful work. And that's been our mission for the last couple of years.

Jennifer: Wow. I have so many follow up questions after that. So you were previously an art director—to me, that sounds like a job that requires like expertise and the abilities to do like a lot of different jobs.

Rachel: Yes. So I went to school for a communications design outfit Syracuse university and that touched on like pretty much everything. And as an art director it was sort of a mixture of both. Creating assets and more of the art direction side of things, which is really more like, “Okay, we're going to have a photo shoot, what should the set look like? Who are we going to cast what location are we going to use?”

And that was a little bit more on like the traditional media side of things. So I've definitely touched a lot of different stuff.

The challenges and limitations of how the freelancing economy typically works for creative professionals

Jennifer: So, when you moved into the freelancing space what, like what was the offer that you as a freelancer were offering to companies? Was it art direction or was it one of the various skills that you have?

Rachel: What got me into freelance actually was this desire for more meaningful work. It's fun to work on big brands, but at the end of the day, you know, selling one more chocolate bar can get a little, I guess exhausting, especially as a creative person. So I actually started freelancing on the side for a bunch of nonprofits here in New York. Because I wanted to use the design and the communication skills, which is really what design is, to help people who are promoting causes that I cared about and I thought were important. So that's really what drew me to freelance to begin with.

From there, really I think the skills that helped the most from a creative standpoint was definitely the ability to take like large swaths of deep and complicated information about education or about the LGBTQ community and turn it into some sort of visual asset that was much more digestible for the everyday sort of person who maybe doesn't know all of the nitty gritty policy nuances and issues.

Jennifer: All right. So, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's, it sounds like when you were working for these nonprofits, you were fulfilling like all of the duties and all of the roles that an agency would for them. So, I'm wondering if that was work that you were all doing by yourself as a freelancer or if you had begun to kind of build a team and outsource some of the work?

Rachel: Yeah. So, yeah, totally. So I think like what really ended up happening was I was doing a lot of the heavy lifting from like a creative and strategy standpoint, which was a place that I was comfortable playing in, given my background. But then they started asking me for more resources, and if I knew different type of creative professionals who could do various jobs for them.

Then a sort of light bulb moment happened for me because I had had this big network of creatives and digital technical engineering types that I knew I wanted to do more meaningful work.

We really wanted to create a place in which, you know, the people solving really hard problems like poverty and hunger and homelessness had access to that highest quality talent. And I think that's sort of the best of both worlds because on a team they can earn more than what they would be doing individually.

Jennifer: Okay. Fascinating. I was definitely wanting to ask you this at some point, but this seems like the perfect time to ask it. I know you have co-founders, but I'm curious about what made you decide to scale this idea? Like, what do you think made you decide, “Let's create a platform that allows this to happen all over the place,” rather than like building up another agency or something. I’d love for you to speak to that difference between finding a solution, making it happen, and actually going like a hundred times bigger than that to make it something other people can do, too.

Rachel: A couple of things have led to that. So the first thing was to your point, I didn't want to start an agency because agencies lack scale. And what I wanted to do was create a place in which we could impact millions of people. From just like a traditional standpoint, systemically, I just don't think agencies are the right setup anymore at least.

And I definitely felt that, you know, given not just the creative freelancers that I knew in my network, but that freelancers or founders. They’re full stack business owners, whether or not they, they call themselves that or recognize that like they have to do everything from sales and business development to back office payments and taxes and paperwork to, you know, actually delivering the work itself and managing the client.

That's a lot of jobs for one person. And the natural progression from that is to then potentially form an agency. But agencies are really risky. They're expensive to form. They are really difficult to scale and they're very volatile in terms of workflow and growth really. So I wanted to take us to the next level and really just help people start thousands of them, but temporary ones that could basically come together and then go you know, collapse again once a project was over, which after, you know, a lot of user interviews and insights and doing a lot of this manually we learned was really the better approach in terms of creating a more sustainable way to do this.

Jennifer: Did you also find in your interviews and your research with this any evidence that this is a much better model for creatives to work in as well? Like do they thrive more in that kind of short-term project basis or is it depending on the person?

Rachel: Sort of, it depends on the situation on the person. I think the number one thing when you, when we talk to freelancers and we hear about this stuff is steady income. And so, although a lot of people that we work with are higher-earning independents, which is like a very specific segment of freelancers, it didn't matter whether or not they had in the past worked on Nike or a huge brand or whether they were working with small brands or clients.

There was always a moment in which they ran into like a dry patch in terms of growth or project opportunities coming across their desk. It's not necessarily that that's what they chose, it's just the nature of the situation because a lot of people and a lot of companies are hiring on a project basis.

And frankly I think it totally depends on the type of person you are in terms of whether or not you like that. I think a lot of people prefer to have a couple of retainers going as a baseline, you know, for income and just to ensure that they have more predictability and stability in terms of growth and, and their income plus projects on top of that.

And so for us, the way that we see this solution fixing that problem is basically you know, only 22% of freelancers are actually finding work on marketplaces like Upwork. The rest are going through their social media channels, their professional networks and friends and family, it's all about the network, right?

So teams naturally lends itself to that. Meaning, when you work on teams with other people, you are naturally expanding your network and therefore more opportunities will potentially come across your desk in the future. So I think with a space that is already predominantly sort of like relationship oriented and referral based. The first generation of freelance platforms just are not meeting those needs. And that's sort of where we come in and why we see this as, as a better solution at scale.

Jennifer: Okay. that's fascinating to me. The 22% stat, I did not know that. But it makes sense because I have hustled on Upwork before and was overjoyed when I landed like an ongoing contract because I was like, I can cut out all of this chasing things and not getting a response. It's a real hustle.

I bet a lot of people that are listening to it are probably very intrigued with Wethos and may be wondering like how they can be part of it. So what types of creative professionals tend to be on the teams or who does Wethos work with?

Rachel: Yeah, sure. So we right now focus predominantly on four different types of teams holistically. And those teams the skill set on those teams are sort of varied in terms of makeup depending on what people need. But basically we do growth teams, so that's more like the paid media paid marketing, SEO side of things. We do brand teams, which is more like the communication strategy and the, the visual identity and really like market positioning and audience persona kind of space of like, who are you as a business and where do you fit in market, which is really what brand is, right? Then we do content teams. That's more the organic editorial kind of content creation, which to me, content has evolved far past what we used to call it content creation. It's really like brands are launching, you know, arguably full like media platforms sometimes.

We’re also thinking about, you know, what types of things that we need to layer in there to encourage people to work with folks outside of their network. Whether that's as simple as like location you know, you have a bubble in New York versus a bubble in LA. Of course like diversity as it pertains to race, gender, sexuality, disability and everything in that regard. And just thinking again about, you know, it's the most fruitful for people to expand their networks as much as possible because again, that leads to more opportunities. And so really thinking more about how can we incentivize and encourage people and thinking deeply about bias and the algorithm itself to meet new people and diversify their own experiences and networks.

Jennifer: Wow. This is exciting. As I'm listening to it might be a little bit slow to respond sometimes because I'm just processing it all. I mean, I've definitely been in that world of freelancing and I do like working with other freelancers that I outsource work to. I'm just thinking about how beneficial all of these changes are to really changing how the industry works.

Rachel: You know, there's always powers and there's power in numbers too, right? And so freelancers have been beat up for a really long time. We've been underpaid, we've been undervalued, we've been overworked. We've been taken advantage of. We've been not paid at all. Some people just decide, “I'm not going to pay that invoice,” which is crazy.

Then, we've been told we're independent because we can't get a job. And I think one of the most powerful things that we do from a community perspective is bringing people together, not just on teams to do work together, but to build that community, to build that power in numbers. We have payment protections in place. We enable people to charge more than they normally would. We landing bigger contracts. You know, sometimes these are $40K, 50K, $60K contracts being split between like three people.

Jennifer: I think that's totally true because even just how empowering it is that you take the stance that freelancers are founders. To me, that makes so much sense. Do you get pushback from saying that?

Rachel: Yes, but only from people who haven't been freelance or don't understand freelance.

How Wethos is disrupting the industry by creating a platform that allows freelancers to work as teams on bigger, higher-paying projects 

Jennifer: Exactly. I'm thinking about it and all the people that I know that are freelancers or that are doing some freelance work and it is so common to hear things like, “Oh, well I'm just doing some freelancing,” like kind of this dejected tone about freelancing. And so I love that that's something that you're changing and adding like this empowering element, even in just the perception of what a freelancer is.

Then also adding in all of these other dynamics, like the team that gives you power in numbers and being able to actually negotiate and earn and win bigger contracts, which is huge because I mean, just because you're a freelancer for it doesn't mean that you don't want to be working on cutting edge projects, you know, like it’s usually the opposite. Many freelancers want the ownership over their work that they can’t attain working at an agency.

Rachel: Definitely. I mean it's, it's systemically broken to a certain extent. And I think there are a lot of brilliant people in the agency world. But the way that those businesses are structured just, I just don't believe it's working anymore. And I think a lot of incredible talent is trapped in a system that's broken unfortunately. And that's the thing that we sort of want to unleash and unlock with all of this. Cause I think a lot of people choose to freelance because they want the freedom and flexibility to choose what they work on. And there's so much power in getting to the point where you're able to start saying no to people honestly.

And I think you know, as creatives and freelancers in general have internalized a lot of this messaging around, you know, not having value. And unfortunately it reflects in the rates that they charge and how they're treated and how they treat themselves and how they think about themselves.

And I think when I say freelancers or founders I want to speak directly to the freelancers first and foremost, because a lot of people might not yet recognize that. But it's the truth, no matter what kind of freelance you're doing, you are a full stack founder and everybody's got a story about how or why they took the leap. Even if they are just moonlighting. Yeah.

Jennifer: Once the teams are built what does it feel like to be one of those contributing specialists? Does it feel like you're a remote employee for the team on this short term project? Or does it feel more like you're a freelancer managing your own portion of the project? Does it feel more like you're a freelancer just kind of fulfilling your one part of the job, but you also have this team to reach out to?

Rachel: Definitely. So one thing that was really important to us from day one was transparency. The experience that you have working on a team really comes down to good communication and good transparency. And when I say transparency, I mean like who's doing what and who's getting paid for what and what, how much is Wethos taking home? From a scoping perspective, so we built a complex basically like a pricing engine that helps people scope really complicated work very, very quickly. Awe developed that around a point system. So ethos charges clients $300 a point and all freelancers earn $200 a point regardless of what their skillset is or what their role is on that team.

So these things are broken down as granularly. So from there, that spits out a price and then everybody knows like, "Okay, I'm getting X amount of points to be doing XYZ and this," and then we pay out every 30 days regardless of when an invoice actually gets paid. That was a big thing for us too, setting up a system in which you can feel more secure that you are going to get paid on time, every time. Because in my opinion, I don't know how anybody does their best work worrying about how they're gonna pay their bills. We wanted to set up a relationship that showed people you don't work for us, you work with us.

A huge part of that is payments. Honestly, that's the fastest way to build trust.

Jennifer: This is incredibly fascinating. I feel like on every level you have completely transformed this model that I think so many people have been frustrated with or have found really challenging to make it work. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I don't know of anybody else really blowing it all up and saying, "Hey, there's another way we can do it." Is this something that is completely on a unique path that Wethos is paving?

Rachel: I think our execution in particular is extremely thoughtful and unique. I think this message has been rumbling under the surface. I think that we might be one of the first voices to stand up and start saying it louder to people that aren't ourselves or each other. But I do really feel like the biggest insight, and honestly I hope that other companies follow suit is the fact that, you know, independent people deserve the same level of respect as the founder who goes and decides to start a tech company. Or the person who decides they're going to stay in-house at a brand and climb that ladder. Like changing the fact is is that we aren't giving people the dignity and the respect that they deserve.

What makes Rachel most excited about the future of work, and how Wethos is both creating and adapting to it

Jennifer: I love it because I think this is something that is really standing out to me. I think companies and people that will thrive in the future of work is just this holistic approach. And that is something that Wethos has done really well. You're really considering every element how to make it work, how to make it respect every stakeholder. It's such a fuller, well-rounded solution to all of the pain points of the current freelancing model.

Rachel: Honestly, it came down to trust and empowerment. People thrive when you do that. When you give them trust, and you empower them and you say, "You know, we're here to support you and give you whatever you need to get there." And I think that's a really, really important reversal that more companies need to make.

Jennifer: So I would love to get your thoughts about what motivates you most about the potential in the future of work economy?

Rachel: I don't think that the crisis at hand [COVID-19] has necessarily dramatically changed anything, but I think it has accelerated things. I really do feel like the power shift needs to happen and go back into the hands of not just independents, but workers at large. I just think that there's going to be this power shift and I think what, what that does ultimately is it empowers everybody who is potentially an independent, or going to become one, whether or not that's their choice over the next six months to really deeply think about what it is that they want out of their lives and out of their careers, especially after they come out of a period of time potentially where we all just found out most of our jobs can be done remotely. And I, I hope that we come out the other side of this really rethinking our lives and what centers us and rebalancing those things. And I do think that being able to work from home and work remotely as you so choose is a huge, huge, huge part of that because life is unpredictable, but work could be very, very predictable, honestly.

Jennifer: I love that view of the future. I think that you're right, this crisis that we're in I think is stirring a lot of that and it's uncertain, a lot of it in people and individuals. The reminder that we all have a choice for how we spend our time and energy reminds us we can be intentional with those and really make conscious decisions about what we want our work to look like and what we want to fight for. Rachel, thank you so much for sharing all of your insights and sharing everything about yourself.

And thank you for joining the podcast today!

Rachel’s Bio:

Rachel Renock, Co-founder and CEO (@racheren1) is a former advertising creative, she quit her agency job at 25 and launched Wethos to help people find and form teams they love. Since the launch in 2016, Renock has raised over $4.6M in funding, landed on the cover of the New York Times, and built a remote work platform where 4,500+ marketing and creative freelancers from all 50 states team up to tackle big issues together.

About Wethos:

Wethos empowers the next generation of independent thinkers, makers and doers to team up and earn more together. Learn more at http://wethos.co or follow them on Twitter or Instagram at @wethosco

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode, and what topics would be most beneficial to you during this season. Send me your thoughts, opinions and questions by going to jenniferspoelma.com/contact and sending me a message!