EPISODE 02:
The Future of Freelancing in the Events Industry
The gig economy has been on a steady rise for the last couple of years. According to the stats, the number of gig workers in the US has climbed from between 14 and 20 per cent in 2014 to 35 per cent in 2020.
However, while this steep growth is impressive, the majority of it took place out of necessity.
The COVID-19 pandemic launched the popularity of freelancing into the stratosphere. As people began losing their jobs, many gravitated towards freelancing. This shift was further aided by the sudden technological sophistication and process tweaking that happened as a direct result of the pandemic restrictions, making remote work and, by extension, being a freelancer a lot easier.
After the pandemic, as people were expected to return to their offices, many of them decided that they preferred being freelancers and the flexibility it afforded them.
As a result, instead of being a passing trend, freelancing became a way of life for many people.
In fact, according to a study, more than half of the American workforce will be a part of its gig economy in 2027.
On this week’s episode of Fifteen Minutes With…, Sophie Ahmed, GM at Hubilo, is joined by Tracy Judge, CEO & Founder of Soundings — a remarkable events-oriented freelance platform. During the podcast, Tracy and Sophie talked about the state of the gig market in the events industry, how the industry as a whole is still learning things in the post-COVID era, and what the future of freelancing looks like in the events industry.
TRANSCRIPT
Sophie:
Hello, and welcome to our new fielddrive podcast series called Fifteen Minutes With... On my second session, I'm delighted to be joined by the amazing Tracy Judge, the CEO and founder of Soundings Connect, whom I'm sure most of you know. If you don't know Tracy, you should get to know her for many reasons. She's also now become a very good friend of mine over the pandemic in this industry of ours. So I'm delighted to have Tracy here today with us.
Tracy, you are the CEO and founder of Soundings Connect. Can you give us some background about what you do? What is Soundings Connect?
Tracy:
Sure, Soundings is a freelance platform. We connect organisations with freelance talent for events and marketing. So any role that you need, from the beginning to the end of the event, we have freelancers worldwide that can help support that.
Sophie:
That's really interesting. I think since the pandemic, it seems like there's been a rise of this gig economy. We hear about that a lot, don't we? This freelancer economy, where event companies, rather than just taking everyone on full-time, are outsourcing quite a lot of the roles. What are you seeing there? What sort of trends are you seeing with all of that?
Tracy:
It's been really interesting because, obviously, when the pandemic first happened, the first people to lose work were freelancers. At that time, we said, well, what can we provide them? The answer was - community and education. Many people were getting laid off during that time, and our community grew and grew. We have about over 2200 people in our community now. But what happened is that people got used to the flexibility of being able to work as freelancers, being able to work at home or wherever they were. So we saw a lot of people stay as freelancers, even when full-time jobs started to come back. Then, it was really interesting when live events came back as well. Because at first, we thought we would get really busy again because we had virtual and we had live events. But we saw a lull in our business, which was very surprising to me at the time. But I said to our team, just wait because come September of this year, there's going to be a lot of burnout in the meeting planning industry. And we're going to see the people that hung on all through COVID that worked, really getting burnt out.
That's what we saw; we saw a lot of third-party planners and a lot of corporate planners that decided to leave their full-time jobs to start freelancing.
Sophie:
Yes, there's quite a lot of burnout in the industry right now, isn't there? I also think also that everything happened at such a pace as well. For instance, I work for Hubilo, and they just acquired fielddrive, an on-site tech company, and a lot of the event planners had never really used event tech before, either. So there's all of that trying to happen. Also, trying to deliver a backlog of events because nothing has happened for 18 months, all done on leaner teams and normal. So I guess having freelancers there is important.
How do the companies make sure that the freelancers are trained for either the tech or for the company, you know, the particulars, etc.?
Tracy:
There's a screening process we do before any of our talent goes in front of a customer. Obviously, we're looking for experience in the event business, in the role they're looking for, on the event tech platform that we're going to use. Also, during the pandemic, we partnered with event tech platforms to upskill the talent to learn platforms. That's helping planners a lot right now because a lot of the planners want to go back to the live side, and they don't want to necessarily always be doing the event tech piece of it. So we're seeing a lot of work for freelancers in the event tech space.
Then, once we narrow it down to the right talent for the right role, we're looking at, is it a cultural fit? Looking at strengths, do the strengths align with the role? Do the personalities match? After that, our customers can meet with the talent and interview them themselves. But it's very rare by that point that the customer doesn't move forward with who we put up for them because of how much we screen them.
Sophie:
Yes, that's really useful to have that screening. I wish I'd had that, actually, when I look back at my old roles. I think that's really useful. So just two points from what you just said. Firstly, around the event tech piece, how do you think event planners are now embracing event tech, whether it's digital or on-site event tech? Do you feel like we've moved along? Or do you think there's still a big educational piece around that?
Tracy:
You know, it's really interesting. We were at Event Tech Live in Vegas together and watching how, two years ago, planners were looking at event tech to now. I think there's a little bit of PTSD with planners because they got forced so quickly and do event tech and into the virtual world, and now that events are going back live, they're like, Oh, no! They're a little bit scared by it. So I think it's just taking a little bit of time. After that, planners will start adjusting and feeling more comfortable, again, with event tech but also the on-site component of it. We have such a huge opportunity with on-site tech solutions to increase engagement on events and get better data and, I think, also to make a meeting planner's job a lot easier. So we're seeing a slower adoption than I would have assumed. But I think that's going to start coming.
Sophie:
I think so. For example, in the case of fielddrive's on-site tech, you get there, you can use facial sentiment recognition or not, and so on. But even then, I still think there's more we can do. It's something that I think will evolve in time, but we want to evolve the product with the market; we want to get people's feedback. I know we've talked about working with some of your community to get feedback as well about the product, which is so important. So that's a really interesting piece.
Just as you said, when you work on someone's cultural fit, how do you work that out? Is there a process? Have you got any top tips? How do you work out someone's cultural fit?
Tracy:
Yes. A lot of it is just human-to-human. So it's one, understanding the organisation, looking at their core values, understanding the people that work for them, the teams that they've built. Secondly, it also gets into individual personality sometimes. We're helping our customers build agile teams. Everyone's different. On top of that, you have different customers that they're going to be working directly with. So, an example of what we look at for fit and cultural fit is we use Gallup Strengths. We look at what are the top five strengths of a freelancer, and then we work with our customers. So if we have a meeting planner that is high in command, well, we're not going to put a freelancer that's high in command with them. Too high in command, and that's just not going to work well. So there's a lot of personality that we look at because we have the community, they're constantly engaging with us, with updating profiles, we can look if they upskill right. We're seeing how they interact; we're learning the human side of things. We've also allowed them to be able to use a lot of the data that we have for jobs they've worked, roles they've done, and survey results from other customers to make those match better and better.
Sophie:
That's really interesting. The cultural piece is so important. We've heard about it more and more, for some reason, over the last couple of years.
When you're working with these companies, are you seeing any particular event trends? Like more attendance, less attendance, people staying longer, staying less? Like, what are you seeing?
Tracy:
No, it's interesting because of the seat that I sit in, that we're providing the people that provide the service. So we're not seeing as much from an attendee experience standpoint as much as agencies and meeting planners will see. I see the requests that come in for the type of talent. So I think we haven't settled in yet. We're still trying different things. We're figuring out what the future of events actually looks like. It requires a lot of different skill sets that you might not have on your team, or you've never had to do it before. So we're watching events evolve and change, and skill sets and talent are going to have to change with it.
Sophie:
Definitely, it's like we said at the beginning - so much happened so quickly that it's been overwhelming. I look at five years ago when I was running large-scale events, it was so different to now. I remember when pre-registration didn't even exist, and everything was printed out. But things are evolving so quickly, and I think it's exciting.
But I also think it's like knowing how to use it to get the most out of it for your event. So we're going to be doing some education around that as well. I think it's so important for people to know that. I just love looking at LinkedIn. I'm always learning stuff on LinkedIn; I know you are too, which is great. But when you go back to the gig economy and the freelance economy, which has obviously exploded now, how do you see that in, say, for the events industry, how do you see that in two to three years from now?
Tracy:
I think that the freelance economy is going to continue to grow in the events business. Globally, really, in all industries, we're seeing it more and more. A lot of that, like we talked about earlier, comes from people having more freedom during the pandemic and now wanting to continue that as well. From an economy standpoint, it's becoming more of a skills-based economy in general, across the board. As events change and evolve, more skills are going to be needed, which is a good thing. Because meeting planners, especially anybody in the events world, we're kind of a Swiss army knife and Jack of all trades and have to learn so many different skills and functions. But today, there's just way too much to know. Also, we're not happy doing all of the pieces; we want to do what we want to do, and then we're producing better work. So that's one of the things we're seeing with our talent is it's not just the freedom, it's that they get to do the work they actually love. They don't have to do 50% of what they love and 50% of what the company makes them do.
Sophie:
That's a good point! So basically, people are specialising in what they enjoy. I guess they get to have a variety of projects and work with different people. So it's always quite fresh and exciting.
Tracy:
Yes. Also, it's very helpful for the organisations as well because when you have just the same team you're working with all of the time, you want that longevity, you want that stakeholder engagement, but it's hard to innovate when everybody's doing it the same. So, by bringing new light in, different ideas, leveraging freelancers to help during the busy seasons, or whatever it may be, you're also helping your team learn and innovate at the same time.
Sophie:
Talking of innovation, I know that you and I are both off to IMEX Frankfurt next week, where last year I was blown away. There's just so much to take in, so many great stands and booths and activations and features, all across the events industry, including event tech, and it was really interesting. So I'm really looking forward to that. What are you most looking forward to? What are the top three things you're most looking forward to at IMEX next week?
Tracy:
Oh, that's so tough. Well, always seeing my friends and a lot of my international friends from the industry and really getting to collaborate and seeing what's going on globally. I'm based in the US, and I see what's happening here. But having that global perspective is so amazing, and it also helps me innovate my company faster as well. I think that what we're seeing in the US, compared to Europe and other places in the world, the events business is quite different.
Also, from a sustainability standpoint, it's going to be interesting to see how event tech and sustainability are coming together more than ever. Then, I love to see the new emerging destinations as well. I'm currently in Dubai and was just in Abu Dhabi, and it's really cool to see when cities are building up and really becoming tourist destinations. So I love seeing the new cities coming online.
Sophie :
I love the destination ones as well! They're always so much fun, aren't they? The stands and the activations.
Talking of sustainability - I know that's a huge topic right now, isn't it? And event tech can really play a part in that. At fielddrive, we're big on sustainability and the ink we use, shipping sustainably and stuff like that. I was at an Informa event yesterday, and in most of the halls, they didn't have a carpet, and it was a big push. There were signs everywhere about how everyone could be more sustainable, as well. So it's great to see, and we're going to be doing a lot more around this topic at fielddrive over the next few months. So excited about that.
But, we're coming towards the end of this now, Tracy, so, in one word, how are you feeling about the next year in events?
Tracy:
Nervous. I think it's a transitional year for us, and especially with the recession and what the markets are doing. It does make me a little nervous short term for the changes we're going to continue to go through. But after we get through the next year and a half, I think I'm super optimistic about what the future holds for us.
Sophie:
Me too! It's going to be cool. Well, I look forward to seeing you IMEX and thanks for your time today, Tracy.
Tracy:
Okay, thanks, Sophie. Bye