the number of freelancer relationships
reduction in contractor management costs
increase in profitability per job
Background
Mighty and True is an independent marketing agency based in Austin, Texas, with a mission to make it as stress-free as possible for technology marketers to design and launch high performance marketing programs. Through a streamlined process, predefined Playbooks are used to train teams and get campaigns out the door faster and at a more competitive price than they could achieve alone or elsewhere.
While Mighty and True has been in business for close to a decade, for eight years it was run without the necessary systems and processes in place to help them to scale. “Everything was ad-hoc,” said Kevin Kerner, CEO. “It wasn’t a super scalable business. So at the end of 2022, I relaunched the business with a focus on scale, and completely rebuilt all the systems from the ground up.”
Challenge
Before Fiverr Enterprise, Mighty and True was using a spreadsheet to manage freelance talent, with contractor names and contract details listed on a Google Doc, and static information saved on each contractor’s terms and rates. Every freelancer would receive a separate Statement of Work (SOW) on Google Drive, all manually signed and without any centralized tracking. Budgeting was inconsistent, with invoices sent manually using QuickBooks. At the end of each month, Mighty and True needed to remember to pay freelancers on time, and manually handle forms and documentation such as 1099s.
“It was a hugely manual process,” continued Kevin. “There was no way to track spend, and it was a complete headache for both us and the contractors themselves not knowing when they were being paid, not knowing the terms… it was all just so manual.”
Based in the U.S. but with contractors globally in disparate locations such as India, Greece, Pakistan and Ukraine, Mighty and True was losing confidence in its ability to source and manage contractors and to pay them accurately and on time. “Sometimes I wouldn’t want to use someone, just because I didn’t know how to get them paid!” said Kevin. “That meant we had to lean into hiring full-time staff, even though we didn’t really need certain skills full-time, and those fixed costs were eating away at our ability to grow the business.”
Another challenge for working with freelancers was finding talent and onboarding people in the first place. “The interviewing process took a lot of time,” said Regina Ricano, studio and resourcing manager. “We had to write every job description from scratch, and when we found someone to work with, we had to send an email, wait for a reply, wait for scheduling to align… It just all took a lot of time and slowed us down.”
Why Mighty and True Chose Fiverr Enterprise
The first challenge that Mighty and True wanted to solve was job automation. The company wanted to be able to post a job, find the right freelancer for the task, onboard them quickly, and communicate with and pay that person through a single platform. This would replace Google Docs, Google Sheets, QuickBooks, and any other disparate systems they were using, running and automating the whole process from end-to-end.
“I found solutions that solved part of the problem, but Fiverr Enterprise was the only platform that could take on the whole workflow,” said Kevin.
“Onboarding was completely straightforward,” added Regina. “We created a system for resourcing inside Fiverr Enterprise, and now we don’t need to start from scratch each time, and can instead make tiny tweaks on the fly, making it super fast to find the right people. We are way more efficient, using templates so that anyone can post a job. This has cut our resource efforts dramatically, and allowed us to take on more clients.”
Immediately, the business saw a 50% reduction in overheads in managing existing contractors, and today, Mighty and True use Fiverr Enterprise on a daily basis to:
- Find fresh talent: Posting jobs, reaching out to the Fiverr Enterprise team for ideas, and discovering talent from diverse and skilled backgrounds.
- Categorize talent: Using custom tags inside profiles to get a holistic view of what each person is skilled at, and their areas of expertise.
- Resource and assign jobs: Provide contractors with all the information they need to meet a brief, editing milestones and tracking timelines.
From a management perspective, Fiverr Enterprise has changed the way that Mighty and True manage spend. “I can see the budget for each individual job, or track it by our pods – which we use to support multiple campaigns, as well as overall across the business,” said Kevin. “It also helps with forecasting. I can see what I’m going to spend over the next month or quarter based on the jobs that are open. We use that every week, both the budgeting feature and the Reporting feature, both of which help us to keep track of spend.”
Results
Today, Mighty and True is working with more freelancers than ever before, sourcing, managing and paying talent from the Fiverr Enterprise platform. While previously, specific roles would have been prohibitively difficult to find, now the team is confident to advertise for any skills gap, knowing they can use Fiverr Enterprise to find anything from video editors to animators and project managers.
“We know that Fiverr Enterprise has a high standard for quality of talent,” said Regina. “That means unlike when we network on LinkedIn for example, with Fiverr Enterprise we don’t need to weed out who is going to be great and vet freelancers so closely. We’re being given a fresh selection of quality talent who we know can do the job, which makes it so much quicker to get started on any new task.”
As well as finding new talent, the business has also moved its own contractors over to the Fiverr Enterprise platform to manage and pay them with greater ease. “The technology and the team are so valuable to use that we’re willing to move our own contractors into the platform and have them be a part of it,” said Kevin. “As a marketing leader, you’re always worried about talent – and Fiverr Enterprise removes that problem entirely. I tell everyone – it fills the talent gap, I’m a fan!”
Mighty and True has been able to use Fiverr Enterprise to triple the number of freelancers they work with in under a year, with key hires in the area of Design and Animation. The company has moved from a model where they mostly relied on internal employees with a few freelancers augmenting the team, to one where they have a few core employees, and a thriving contractor network. This allows them to scale as necessary to meet demand, with freelancers from all around the world.
“Freelancer expenses are really under control now,” said Kevin. “We are more profitable in the way we use talent, because we can be really tight on scaling up and down to use skills exactly where they are needed.”
“Contractor spend used to be a negative for us, but because of the Fiverr network – it’s become a positive, helping us move to a variable cost model. I’d say we’re seeing a 20% increase in profitability on each job by being more focused on what we need and when we need it.”
3X the number of freelancer relationships
50% reduction in contractor management costs
20% increase in profitability per job
Kevin Kerner, CEO, Mighty & True