Is there a time and case for hiring other freelancers to meet deadlines, keep clients coming back and tackle bigger projects? In this article, Damian Kearns talks about the benefits and pitfalls of hiring help when you’re hired help.
It Was All Going Really Well Until…
After nearly two decades of reliable, predictable full-time staff jobs, I went freelance about 9 years ago and like many of you readers, I find myself in a constant state of concern; concern for the current gigs and concern about what future gigs may or may not come my way. It took about 3 years for me to acclimatize to this new state of perpetual employment ‘flux’ but sometime around that point, projects seemed to start coming in steadily enough that I scaled back from panicking to the current level of apprehensive concern I have, when looking at my schedule. This seems to be about as good as it gets, for freelancers.
I had a solid freelance career until Covid, when for the first quarter of 2020, I watched my schedule dry up like those pictures you see of water being sucked right out of a beach, just before a tsunami dumps it all back, with enmity. What had been scheduled prior to lockdown didn’t evaporate, it simply moved beyond the horizon, and once these gigs swept back into my calendar, they came back bigger; massed together with other projects waiting to hit the beach hard. By September 2020, I was being deluged with requests no single individual could hope to deliver upon. I started looking for help. I made a list I like to call “My Subcontractor Checklist”.
Here’s that list of things I wanted from my subcontractors:
Experience: Experience is five or more years actively, daily, engaged in post production audio work. Nothing else is relevant nor can be substituted in to pad out ‘experience’. Any other audio work is not relevant to post production ‘experience’ except in niche instances like post music composition and in my mind, does not constitute the ‘post’ experience I need on my jobs. When I require a minimum 5 years experience, it’s only in this branch of audio. If you read on, you shall see that though the subcontractors I employ must meet this minimum requirement, I make other opportunities available to junior engineers who aren’t at the five year stage of their careers.
Gear: Subcontractors have to work on the same platform as me and if mixing is being subcontracted, plugins also have to be mutually agreed selections we both own. Editorial and recording can be done without plugin compatibility but not mixing. Mix sessions have to slide back and forth easily between operators.
Reasonable Rates: If I’m paying, I will pay the most that I can, inside a production’s budget, minus a small management fee since I’m the one dealing with the clients and any potential issues with a subcontractor’s output. This might seem an arbitrary cash grab but it’s not. It’s not even proper compensation, in my opinion. it’s just acknowledgment that I am running the show and assuming the majority of the risk.
Attention to Detail: Believe it or not, this is not a universal trait amongst all audio engineers. From time to time, I have had my own issues with this too when faced with a convergence of stressors. Multiple deadlines can conspire and conflate and in those moments, sometimes decisions taken in haste don’t hold up under scrutiny. Shit happens but with focussed operators, shit happens a lot less often. At least, this is the hope. So far, I haven’t exactly been proven wrong on this point.
Availability: I like it when I have someone employed outright for a specified term but quite often with freelancers, they juggle other things along with any assignments I might be offering. I’m okay with this: No one should leave their existing clients in the lurch for a brief secondment. For day jobs, juggling isn’t an issue but on series work, the stints are long enough I’ve the expectation that whatever else is happening in a freelancer’s schedule, it had better not impact my timelines since there’s a fair bit of money on the table.
Trustworthiness/Personality: The freelancer’s fear is that subcontractors might be willing to ‘poach’ clients they are exposed to or even worse, ‘trash talk’ the freelancer who is hiring them. I think ‘trash talking’ someone to a client is the greater offence of the two, because stealing a job is naughty but undermining someone’s reputation is diabolical, if it’s not called for (which is often but not always the case). This can and does backfire on people so it’s rarely a good political strategy and to me it’s a sign of a certain chronic negativity which often feeds paranoia. It’s been my experience that people who are nasty have narrow careers. That’s karma, maybe, but it’s also a fact that people don’t consciously seek out unkind people to give them money to join their teams. Trust comes from building comfort and there’s no comfort at all in nastiness. Trust comes from delivering on time, delivering well, and not creating friction inside the team. The people I trust most in this business are nice people who put their heart into their craft. I can relate to this.
Punctuality: Deadlines are deadlines and meeting them means getting work done ahead of time. This is a time-based medium and if one has not mastered the art of delivering on time, it’s likely reflective of other temporally-based issues like…musical…timing…and…dialogue…and…sound…effect…editing…and…Foley…and…ADR…etc.
Creative Vision: Sharing a creative vision doesn’t necessarily mean doing exactly the same work someone else does but it does mean that a subcontractor’s pieces should slot into the mix well, with reasonable or no extra effort. This vision often requires a lot of the next trait to come into proper alignment.
Communication Skills: If one does not answer messages or respond to email in a reasonable, timely fashion, that person becomes an anchor around the necks of the other team members. Poor communicators might not realize it but poor communication skills are directly proportional to the amount of and type of communications they receive. No one likes communicating with a horrible communicator so this can hinder the entire team. Again, this business runs on collaboration and team work and any one member of a team who can’t be bothered, shouldn’t last.
Time To Mount Up
I knew all this list stuff, I really did. “Not my first rodeo,” as we sometimes say here in Toronto. We don’t have rodeos in Toronto but for some reason in the post production business, we seem to think we have rodeos.
I hired my first freelancer for the gathering late 2020 ‘storm’ in August but that was mostly because I wanted to help out a friend, whose ‘work tsunami’ struck later than mine. He was ruminating about selling off gear to pay bills and I had a lot going on so I brought him in to share the money around and buy myself the odd day off. I think this is good business practice: take care of your friends. Something that must be said about freelancers is that if and when we really like each other, it can be very emotionally and financially rewarding. The only problem was, his ‘tsunami’ hit three weeks after I hired him and I still needed him beyond that. I would have to look…elsewhere.
The one guy I wanted on my team for Fall and Winter 2020 was actually a staff member at a downtown studio. I had worked with him on a 13 part series and had trained him during that time. We really click as a team so I decided to go through the proper channel to engage him. After a respectful, upfront conversation with his boss, I found I couldn’t actually hire him due to his employment obligations. I’ve always keep business things honest and direct so I quickly moved on after that talk. Someone else’s employees are a very tricky bunch to try to use for subcontract work, since they are for all intents and purposes, someone else’s and aren’t out here hunting down work and living job to job like us freelancers. Nowadays, I will not subcontract to someone with a full-time job because of the potential for thorny office politics and also because I feel I should be looking for other people in need of freelance employment. You know, freelancers.
So, I was stuck. I had a TV series finishing, a podcast series going, two new TV series starting and another TV series starting 2 months down the road, in the middle of my now completely log-jammed schedule. The problem with these three looming TV series– and this lay at the heart of my conundrum- was that they were all coming out of the same production company who happen to be a massive slice of my annual income. I put myself in the middle of their post audio staffing attempts, by not saying ‘no’ to anything and by being willing to help with the post audio talent search. This bind I was in would require a lot of lateral thinking to sort out.
Then, I remembered a freelancer I had worked with a year before on another job. I quickly brought him in as a second mixer and sound editor. This was the best decision I could have made. I hired two other editors to handle sound effects on two of the series and put this one guy on anything and everything on all three to help me tackle the workload tidal wave.
Everything came together and it worked well. From October to March, I was able to pay the people well, teach them a bit about how I work, get them credits on these shows and even continued to develop my Pro Tools template to the point that I could share it with Production Expert in March of 2021.
We had the work, the cashflow, the software, the hardware and with the right amount of effort, we became a team. In the month of January 2021, I worked a playback session every 4 days for a different one hour TV episode, proving my planning and leadership could stand up to the deluge. My clients were extremely happy. It must be noted the only person working more than a 5 day week on my team was me. I had people with other gigs, a baby, and other family issues and I felt these priorities could and should be balanced in favour of the individual.
But that was soooooo 2021!
2022: And Now For Something Completely Different
I tried something similar to this multi-series balancing act between June and October 2021 and it didn’t work very well. We got through the shows with panache and the clients were all happy but the ‘creative’ never quite came together easily and now that Covid was becoming less of an encumbrance to production, other gigs were flowing to my subcontractors. It felt like there was a bit of a ‘revolving door’ happening with the personnel on my jobs and it got tougher to maintain a consistent product. I found myself working longer and harder to keep things at the same quality level. This coming and going of personnel is probably more typical of freelance teams than was my prior experience through the previous winter. Without permanent employment, people have to keep looking for the next deal and will also take on projects concurrently. Sometimes, people agree to something and a better deal comes along and well, off they go.
This all lead me to change my operating model. Recently, I’ve turned down two TV series and a feature documentary. That doc has all the elements to make it an award winning, relevant film. I just don’t have the bodies to throw at it. All my regular subcontractors are fully booked and even looking to me to subcontract from them but I’m fully booked too. Now I’m wondering, was that ‘work tsunami’ in 2020-21 worth it if the team has been carried off in different directions? I think about this a lot. There aren’t any easy answers I’ve managed to conjure.
I’ve been mulling the pros and cons:
Pros
I helped keep people earning through a dark patch in modern history and forged friendships with some really decent, skilled operators.
When they’re not too busy, I have a small handful of peers I know I can hire who have all the traits I outlined above. That’s a great feeling. I hired one of them a few weeks back to help out on a documentary. It felt so easy to collaborate with someone with whom I have a well established workflow.
The group proved that freelancers can come together to create a virtual company of talented, trusted individuals, to tackle large or multiple projects.
We all got better at our jobs.
Cons
I learned that I can subcontract most elements of post audio out but dialogue editing wasn’t something I really ever wanted to part with. That element caused more grief than it was worth to me and that speaks to a personal unwillingness to completely hand things off to other people. After these experiences, I now retain the dialogue portion of any gig I’m on.
The stress of managing people isn’t something I feel I can deal with for months at a time. I’ve always said I’m neither king nor kingmaker. I’m no leader. It’s not that I can’t, it’s that my heart isn’t in it. Again, personal issue, no one else’s.
I set a dubious precedent with these clients that I can ‘scale up’ my business when needed which with freelancers, isn’t always true because we are all independent people with our own businesses, trying to please our own clients. Other people’s clients must take a backseat to our loyal customers so just this fact alone makes scaling up unwieldy and can yield different results every time it’s attempted.
Putting The ‘Free’ Back In ‘Freelance’
One of the last gigs the group of us did together lead to me hiring Ben, my part-time assistant whom I’ve been training and working with since September 2021. Ben’s work has afforded me the time to write articles for Production Expert and to take on enough, but not too much, extra work. He’s not the first junior engineer I’ve hired but at this point in time, he’s enjoyed a long period of work with me. My typical approach is to help junior engineers build up their skills and later on, help them into other full-time gigs. I’ve had a few success stories come out of this approach. To me, It’s a good way to spread experience and skills and ensure great people have bright futures. There’s really nothing that replaces one-on-one instruction.
Freelance is the constant struggle to make a living whilst trying to simply live a life. What the recent past has taught me is that while hiring and working with other freelancers is great, it is critical for me to understand that no matter how many ‘bodies’ I have at my disposal, too many concurrent projects equals more work for me. Each project is more work and at the point I need more than one person to help me, it is wise and probably healthy to say ‘no’ to the extra stuff.
I’m starting another series in the coming weeks and was approached to supply a sound effects editor for this job. I did not provide additional personnel. Instead, the people above me ended up hiring someone. This person won’t answer to me and his work won’t reflect badly on me if it doesn’t measure up to expectations. This is a good stress management technique, going forward. Throw the staffing issues back at the people who require staff so the responsibility sits where it ought to, with the clients. At the same time, My friend Ben can be working on my other ongoing projects to maintain my client base and since I train him and I pay and treat him properly, I don’t believe he’s going to leave me ‘high and dry’.
Do I think freelancers should hire freelancers? Yes! I believe in the modern,’ post-tape’ world this is as close as we get to apprenticeships in post audio; a sort of paid. mutual learning exercise. I am a big proponent of both mentorship and spreading opportunities around. As well, knowing more people can lead to more gigs for everyone so it’s also a wise survival tactic. Just be warned: Before you hire subcontractors, take stock of your strengths and limitations and come to terms with them, so you’re not finding yourself feeling less confident about the end product.
There is a balance we all need to find and working too much isn’t the way to find it. Work doesn’t have to be a tsunami, we just need to realize when to avoid being carried away by the pull of our own careers.