We're all freelancers

My friend, fellow blogger and dog-surfing instructor Rich Siegel – who runs Round Seventeen – put up a post today called Too Many Freelancers.

The gist of it is far too many of our staff brethren are packing it in for the seemingly greener, albeit much more competitive, grass of the freelance life, although not all of them are suited for it. Of course, he’s right.

But I’d like to offer another point of view. We’re all freelancers, whether we’re on staff or not.

It’s a quaint notion, a carryover from the Mad Men era, or a time you could work at IBM for forty-four years and have a nice pension at the end of it to see you through the rest of your days, that having a full-time gig at an ad agency somehow equals job security.

Ask the teams that work at Mitsubishi’s new agency every two years how secure their jobs are. The creative teams on Dell Computers can probably whip up a spreadsheet showing why that theory is wrong. Take a drive with the former creative director at Doner, Mazda’s old agency for thirteen years that created the Zoom Zoom campaign, and ask him how he feels about job security. The battlefield is littered with examples.

My point is we’re all just one agency review, one client loss, one new marketing director, one client’s wife’s opinion, one budget shift to digital, one creative director in a bad mood away from being shown the door.

Don’t get me wrong: I very much like the idea of job security. I also like the idea that I’m six-foot-two, a hundred eighty five pounds, totally ripped and get mistaken for Chris Hemsworth on a daily basis. But just because I like it don’t make it so.

The Round Seventeen post talks about Smiling and Dialing, Dry Spells and Making Nice, all daily chores freelancers are far too familiar with.

But they occur on the staff side as well.

Staffers get paranoid when it slows down, and try to look busy in case management is doing bed check. Not so much politically motivated as a survival strategy, staffers can be found making nice to people most in a position to turn the idea of job security into a reality. And day in and day out,the phone lines are always open to other agencies. Especially if an account's rumored to be shaky (SPOILER ALERT: They all are. Always).

So if you're on staff at an agency, thinking about making the leap to the freelance life, congratulations. You already did.