How SLT Consulting Saves 20+ Hours a Month and Went From 5 Tools to 1 to Manage Freelancers

Background

SLT Consulting (SLTC) is a digital marketing agency. A cross-disciplinary collective of 60+ freelancers working alongside a small core staff of 3 full-time employees, SLT consulting is unique in its ability to match skills and expertise to the right clients and keep pace with their evolving needs. The company has been in the digital marketing space since 2018, and prides itself in offering a boutique approach, building strong relationships with clients and offering strategic partnerships for anything from Social Media marketing, to SEO, Brand Marketing and Growth.

Challenge/Pain Points

SLTC’s model is to leverage a wide talent pool of 60+ freelancers, but the company is keenly aware that they are just one company on the list of each freelancer’s priorities. “Streamlining the process is critical,” said Sharon Thony, Founder and CEO. “We only have a fraction of their time and commitment, and we are managing so many moving pieces.”

As SLTC scaled, Sharon naturally lost her granular view of freelancers, projects, and individual clients and their budgets. The company was using 5+ tools for handling their talent pool, from Harvest for capacity planning, Airtable for assigning work, Google Sheets for managing and tracking information about each freelancer, and a combination of Bill.com, and PayPal, Venmo, Zelle and more for getting talent paid accurately and according to their preferences. “We had 60 invoices coming in every month, and we often had to chase freelancers to get them in on time! It was ridiculous to be handling a repeatable monthly process without any automation and juggling all of these tools, but we didn’t have a better way.” 

Why did SLTC choose Fiverr Enterprise?

SLTC realized that they may have 60 freelancers and between 20 to 30 clients on the go, but the real-world workload was far greater than that. Each freelancer could be working for five clients at a time, and that alone was five relationships to handle. In reality, the effort was 60 x 30, with a complex mix-and-match process to understand deliverables, communication, feedback, and payments for each one. 

“When you look at each individual client or freelancer it doesn’t seem like such a big deal,” said Sharon. “The process is simple – you hire, assign work, receive an invoice, pay. The complexity is the mix and match of the 60 freelancers and the 20 clients, and all the potential combinations you have to solve for every day.”

Fiverr Enterprise was immediately recognized as a single platform that could replace the multiple disparate systems that SLTC had been relying on up until now. It checked all the boxes, offering hiring, onboarding, management, compliance, and payments, and was able to integrate with SLT’s current systems as a turnkey solution. Fiverr Enterprise also offered the ability for multiple users to access the platform with various levels of permissions so that Finance teams could see it all, while managers were given a more narrow view of their own projects alone. 

“I remember that moment when we found Fiverr Enterprise, and I thought, why has no-one invented this before?” said Sharon. “It was like Harvest, Airtable, and G-suite had got married and become the ultimate platform! And it’s constantly being updated and coming out with new features that make the process even more efficient for us.”
“We’ve been able to streamline all that complexity of 60 freelancers and 20 clients and their combinations” Sharon continued. “With just a couple of clicks, we have full visibility into who is working on which client, how much they are budgeted to get paid, and how much they have actually invoiced.”

Results

“I’m all about efficiency in operations – things being simple, easily accessible, automatic,” said Corrine Wright, Operations Specialist. “That’s exactly what Fiverr Enterprise is for us, that visibility to see everything and make quick decisions. Immediately after onboarding the platform, we had a full view of everything we needed to know in one place. That was really the most attractive thing. We can see who has what skills, what the job assignments are and for whom, track the budgets, manage invoices, everything.”

Fiverr Enterprise has become the single tool that enables SLTC to scale and manage everything from performance and satisfaction to invoicing and payments. “Compliance was another big value-add,” commented Sharon. “Before, we were just looking through Google Drive saying, ‘is this person compliant?’ Now we can see the status at a glance, and even block work orders or payments until the right documentation such as MSAs or 1099s has been filled in.”

As with any service provider, keeping tight attention on resources and profitability is critical.  Fiverr Enterprise has given SLTC extensive oversight at a high level so that the company can make intelligent business decisions that directly impact ROI, looking at the cost per freelancer, per account, or over the entire workforce. At the same time, they have an immediate view into what’s happening more granularly. “You can’t scale if you don’t have a system in place that supports both the big picture and the day-to-day operations,” said Sharon. “That’s exactly what Fiverr Enterprise does for us, giving us that oversight overspend, but also asking and answering specific questions such as, do we need more SEO specialists, or, can we offer graphic designers more work to fill availability?” 

SLTC has also found that Fiverr Enterprise has made a real difference to its freelancer relationships, adding visibility, insight, and smart matchmaking capabilities – especially as the company scales. “No other system that we’ve used until now has allowed me to see the numbers side, but also the people side” said Sharon. This is critical because freelancers are like another client for the agency; an audience that they also need to serve and of which they must understand specific and granular needs. Enhancing profitability means understanding the right talent is matched to the right client and that both the client and the freelancer is happy. 
“Before Fiverr Enterprise, we had miscommunications with freelancers about their scope of work, expectations, and even payments,” said Sharon. “Now, freelancers have control over how and what they are billing, there’s transparency over all deliverables, and we have an automated process that we can just click and approve. I’ve even noticed that we have had more referrals from our freelancers to other talent in their networks since we implemented Fiverr Enterprise. I put that down to our newfound environment of transparency and visibility.”

From 5+ tools down to 1 management system

Saved 20 hours a month managing invoices

Executed one-click payment instead of multiple actions