Freelancers Seem to Do Whatever They Want. What Is Their Life Really Like?

We interviewed nine freelancers, four employees at large companies, a new freelance-recruiting company, and two elders willing to give their views on the subject (they were not easy to find)

When Mo Zhao left his company to work for himself in 2012, he was tired of technical work and repetition. Becoming a "freelancer," he thought, would let him work with more clients and arrange his own time.

Mo Zhao had spent ten years at the market research firms Nielsen and TNS, gathering information to help clients find out what consumers really wanted. The clients changed; the analytical framework never did. "After enough years, you've seen every formula there is," he said. He wanted to try new ways of analysis, but he was managing more than a dozen employees, and checking and supervising their work ate up most of his time.

Switching companies or starting his own wouldn't fix that. He had to end the "collective life" altogether.

Stripped of his corporate label, Mo Zhao joined a distinct group in the talent market: "freelancers." They refuse to go by the book, they want "the ideas and the creativity to be their own from start to finish," and they serve more than one "boss" — they even seem to have the right to pick their bosses, and to change their minds now and then.

The cost is just as plain. However much experience they have, "freelancers" can't carry the five-star hotel membership cards or fly business class the way employees of big companies do, and they can even hit trouble applying for a credit card — the form demands an employer's name and an office landline.

Then add every kind of insecurity you can think of: no long-term contract, no pension, no paid vacation, no sick leave… and none of it has stopped young people. According to the US Freelancers Union, one in three Americans is a freelancer (about 42 million), and freelancers may account for half the entire workforce before 2020.

Most of them work in services or in knowledge work. Their reasons for going freelance differ — some think their company's resources can't support their growth, others simply haven't decided where to work next and go solo in the meantime — but one condition is always the same: they have a skill to sell, the more specialized the better. It looks much the same in the US, Europe and China. According to LinkedIn China's 2015 figures, photographers, designers and independent translators make up the largest share of users who list "freelancer" as their title.

In August and September this year, we interviewed nine freelancers, four employees at large companies, a new freelance-recruiting company, and two elders willing to give their views on the subject (they were not easy to find). The freelancers work in design, software engineering, photography, translation, talent representation, market research, writing and consulting, and each has slowly revised what "freedom" means to them. The people at large companies are the ones who find freelancers and hand them projects, and they offer some advice from the corporate side.

The Companies

The European organization IPSE argues that the number of professionals leaning toward freelance work is rising — even as the total working population shrinks — partly because more and more people want flexibility and control over their own work.

Anke, 27, loathes the "996" schedule (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, a rhythm internet companies have pushed hard lately). She hates sitting in an office with everyone else, and the idea of collective honor makes no sense to her. After two media jobs, she became a freelance writer last year. Just as most young people itching to quit with nothing lined up hope it will go, this past year she has spent more time at the gym, traveled more, and earned more, not less.

But the talent market as a whole is more complicated than Anke's case suggests. It is entirely possible that the shift in what companies want from labor is what drives this fashion for "freedom," rather than the other way around.

In the years of the Asian financial crisis, large firms went under in the consulting industry where Zhang Li'ou worked, and many of the people thrown out of work were forced into freelance consulting. Corporate clients also discovered they could buy much the same solutions from freelancers for less, and that freelancers working from home saved them office rent too.

Other companies — translation firms, for instance — decided to stop stockpiling translators in-house. The cheapest and most efficient role was to organize the scattered players along the industry chain: control the quality, keep the books straight, and that is enough.

Wen Shuang, the former president of Lagou.com, believes internet companies' fierce appetite for talent over the past two years has changed the old way of hiring — they urgently need people who can solve a problem for them fast. He went on to found "Zike," a freelance recruiting platform along the lines of America's iwork.com and Australia's freelancer.com. Zike launched on August 22, and Wen Shuang said that by early September more than 900 companies had signed up, along with over 6,000 freelancers and multi-career workers — exactly the people that internet companies with limited money could never afford to keep on staff.

For freelancers, a company's influence lives on in all kinds of forms. Beyond professional skill, this still-unusual career choice demands that they quickly pick up small tricks for holding on to a sense of security, because they have to be more all-around than before if corporate clients aren't going to drop them.

And even when everything runs smoothly, company people still hold their prejudices about freelancers' teamwork and follow-through — prejudices that become an obstacle if a freelancer later wants back into the collective.

The Clients

Hu Zilin ran into trouble after she left her company.

Before quitting, Hu Zilin worked at a talent agency in Los Angeles, handling Asian artists' concerts in the US. In 2010 she came back to China and became an "agent-representative." Freelancers in her line of work sit as a "middleman" between an artist's manager and the client, taking 10-30% of the artist's appearance fee as commission. Hu Zilin is also the China representative for a number of American and European models — Miranda Kerr among them — and for Hong Kong and Taiwanese artists.

An agent-representative doesn't actually have an artist under contract — that is where the freedom lies. Hu Zilin doesn't have to follow anyone around, and she can take on several artists' business at once. That was the main reason she left the agency: in four years she had worked with only a handful of stars, because the American firm wanted only big Asian names like Mayday, A-Mei and Aaron Kwok. The day she quit, she wasn't worried about work drying up. With what she had built in Los Angeles and at Taiwan's Rock Records, she pictured herself becoming as successful an independent agent as Taiwan's Qiu Likuan.

That was also where the trouble began. In her first year back in China, Hu Zilin earned nothing. She had the artists, but not enough clients — people distrust "middlemen," and when she quoted a low price they suspected she wasn't reliable. Even her old clients couldn't help her.

Mo Zhao met dozens of his old clients and closed none of them. He saw the problem: the new ideas he wanted to sell were not what the big companies he used to work with needed. He wanted to do the job better — better than the compromises he had made inside a company — but those big companies only ever wanted something safe, something that would pass. "Clients used to expect 100 points. Now I want to deliver 200, not the old 100," he said. Nobody was willing to gamble on his innovation.

In their first year on their own, almost everyone we interviewed took work unconditionally, whatever it paid, whether or not they liked it. "You have to make a living, so you take it," said Liu Xuanyu, who moved from Wuhan to Beijing to be a freelance photographer. At the start he kept thinking: "If I turn down this job and that job, in the end nobody will come to me at all."

Bo Jin felt the same anxiety early in her career as a freelance translator, afraid that "one job less means one chance less." She loves translating books from English and Japanese, but publishers pay only 40-80 yuan per thousand characters — a 100,000-character book comes to about 6,000 yuan, 5,000 after tax. The money is thin, and, just like the tangled finance departments of big companies, publishers usually "don't settle up until six months after the book comes out." "I eat off this. How am I supposed to live?" Bo Jin has to take commercial translation work to earn a steady, decent income.

Li Ran came to realize something else: facing a client's demands, his old teammates and the very idea of "the company" used to give him courage. He had been a software engineer at a company and went out on his own because its technical resources were limited. Now he carries the risk of every decision alone.

Trust Crisis

Li Ran wasn't afraid of those risks, but big corporate clients had their reservations. As a rule, they don't want to deal with "a single individual."

"Unless the designer is famous, or at the level of a university professor, so the standing is more equal. If you're a young designer, even if your work is pretty good, I don't think working with a big company is realistic," said Xu Xialong.

Xu Xialong, who trained as a designer, set up her own studio the moment she decided to go freelance. She is its only employee and its only boss; the studio exists so she can pay tax and issue invoices — all so that "signing a contract looks a bit more official." But the big companies aren't the only ones at fault: Xu Xialong herself avoids companies with few staff. "I took a lot of losses in my first year. I found small companies' processes pretty chaotic. Even the ones with plenty of capital have a very casual delivery system. I basically won't work with startups or early-stage companies now." Over a year she built up two or three steady clients, and with them trust isn't an issue.

The more money a job involves, the less a company trusts a freelancer. With an artist's appearance fee, for instance, where the advance alone runs into six figures, clients turn far more cautious at the negotiating table.

Wang Dan works at Huayi Brothers, and sometimes he chooses to work with freelance agents like Hu Zilin, because they are in touch with many artists and know more than one star or model. Even so, he thinks the safe way to handle a freelancer is this: meet the day before anything is confirmed, with the freelance agent and the artist (or the artist's own manager) both in the room.

"That's the sad part of freelancing," Hu Zilin said. "No company is covering you. If I went out and said I was from Tianyu or Huayi, do you think he'd need to do any of this? No, because he has your company as the guarantee."

To win a client's trust, people like Hu Zilin have to work harder to prove themselves. For a commercial appearance she has the star record a video promising to attend; for an endorsement deal, where the money is bigger and a video won't do, she brings the artist to sign the contract in person. She turns up on the day of the shoot herself — not to accompany the artist, but to serve the client and leave a good impression.

There is no shortage of reliable, excellent people among freelancers, but there is no denying that, next to company employees, the group carries some risk in terms of stability. A Hong Kong translation company has three full-time staff and nearly 30 freelance translators; its general manager, Huang Weijie, thinks freelance translators generally have no loyalty — they work with whoever pays most. Now and then a project forces him to find a translator immediately, and he has to ask twenty-odd translators at once. In the worst case not one of them wants the job or has the time, and then he has to turn the client down or push back the deadline.

Newcomers and Veterans

Zhang Li'ou may be freelancing at its most ideal. He has been an independent consultant for more than a decade, mostly on mergers, acquisitions and strategy. He earns more than twice what he made at a company, and invests in various projects in his spare time. "I no longer feel I need to work for a company, or want to. I make more money out here and I have my own time. Why would I go back?"

Zhang Li'ou has almost never faced a trust crisis or an unpaid bill. That very likely has to do with experience: this consultant, who spent years at a top multinational consulting firm, reckons you need at least three or four years at McKinsey, or five to seven at an ordinary company, before anyone will take you seriously.

Wen Shuang wants to give freelancers a steadier flow of clients; his platform, Zike, is starting with professionals who have more than three years of experience. In reality, though, it may be newcomers to the workforce who need the most help when they first get their freedom. LinkedIn's 2015 Report on Freelancing in China found that freelancers with less than three years of experience are the largest group, at 33%, and that 67% of freelancers are between 20 and 33 — most freelancers, in other words, are young.

Most of the freelancers we interviewed are newcomers too, and on the whole they earn at least 50% more than they did at a company. That holds for Anke, a freelance writer of one year, and for Liu Xuanyu, a photographer of two or three. Even in their worst months now, they say, they clear 10,000 yuan.

That depends on their industries being relatively stable and on the rise. Brands always need content, for example, and these days they lean less on traditional media. Liu Xuanyu is working in something close to the best era photographers have had — demand for video keeps growing too.

Plenty of other industries are less lucky. Bo Jin's translation income can vary by two-thirds from one month to the next; in the slow season she lives off a credit card she got back when she had a company job. Hu Zilin had no income for a year and a half after coming home, and just as things picked up, a 20-stop tour by a Korean artist she had recently signed fell through. The American, European and Taiwanese artists she knows well are not in demand in China — even a commercial appearance requires approval from the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television before an artist can perform here, and the process is so involved that some promoters simply give up.

Playing It Safe

One of the biggest risks freelancers face is late payment. We heard of at least eight such cases in our interviews, in every industry. "A project sprouts complications everywhere, all kinds of situations — even the final payment method comes with a lot of detail," said Li Ran, looking back on his two years as a freelance engineer. He was lucky in that, however long the delay, the money always came in the end; but he was also often asked, once a project was over, to do maintenance or work outside its scope — unpaid, of course.

"When you're freelancing, a lot of things are just hard to pin down," Li Ran said. Worse, one late project topples the rest like dominoes: none of his other planned projects could finish on time either.

Anke has worked with big companies too. "They're generous with money — knock off a couple of small things and a thousand yuan comes your way. But that thousand takes half a year to arrive," she said. Afterward she made it a term of every deal that payment must come within a month. To keep her income steady, she also signed an unusual contract with one company: two pieces a week for a fixed salary, no need to come into the office, and she can still take projects from other companies.

Mo Zhao's solution is the more common one among freelancers: have the client pay half the fee as a deposit when the contract is signed. The designer Liu Yongchang settles in proportion — every 30% of a project finished earns him 30% of the fee.

As for social insurance, which most people worry about, most freelancers said it is no problem at all. They usually attach themselves to a friend's company, or find an agency on Taobao to pay it for them.

Bo Jin bought commercial insurance. "Commercial insurance is a bit more efficient, with broader coverage and a better return," she says. Anke's father bought her a policy abroad. "Insurance here restricts which drugs you can use. Overseas insurance lets you use the best medicine and the best hospital beds. It makes no difference to her whether she's on the domestic [medical insurance] scheme or not," he said. That overseas policy is unlikely to be cheap.

One-man Army

One problem freelancers saw coming from the start but only felt in their bones later is that freedom may be something you have to learn.

You no longer have to sit through "pointless, time-wasting meetings," of course, but that doesn't mean you have more free time. It used to be work Monday to Friday, rest Saturday and Sunday. "Now, when am I supposed to work and when am I supposed to rest?" Freelancers run into this question constantly, and often only a deadline ends the argument.

The freelance writer Anke makes herself decide the night before exactly where she is going and what she is doing the next day — "the whole thing can't be a mess." At the start of each week she also plans how many pieces she will write and what has to be settled.

Bo Jin wanted to find her own working rhythm, different from the rules a company used to hand her, but not too soft either. At first she looked for it in cafés, and ran into the old, tired problem: it is awkward to carry your laptop with you to the bathroom, and working out of a café costs a lot. That drove her home, where a new problem appeared: in an office your subconscious slips into work mode, but at home you relax and don't feel like working.

After that she began renting bigger places. "I have to arrange my room so my rest area and my work area are clearly separate," she said, and she finds it works.

Mo Zhao had the same trouble. After nine years of going to an office, suddenly being a freelancer threw him. In his first three years on his own he rented three offices, all in residential buildings rather than real commercial blocks — which didn't matter, because the point of the place was that "there's something concrete here, and it gives me a psychological cue: you're paying a few thousand yuan a month for this, you'd better earn it back." He went to this "office" every day, because it gave him the feeling of proper work.

Working as an independent agent, Hu Zilin added, also makes you unusually lonely — something she hadn't expected. "We have to be very careful what we say, because we know too much about artists' private lives, and that isn't something we can talk about." At an agency, an artist has a whole team behind them, so when trouble comes there is at least someone to complain to.

She is not alone in this. About a year in, Xu Xialong's excitement faded and she began to feel "cut off from society." For six months, the moment she opened her eyes in the morning she wondered whether to go find a job at a company, and by night she felt she loved freelancing after all. "I thought it through ten thousand times. Everyone thinks it ten thousand times."

Not long ago Xu Xialong went to an event run by the National Arts Fund, with 35 illustrators there. What they talked about most among themselves was loneliness. She says she is relatively lucky, single and unmarried — whenever the pressure builds she travels, roughly once every three months — but one designer there had a child and a family. "She can't leave a three-year-old to fend for herself. Her nerves were even worse than mine, and her loneliness went deeper."

Hesitation

Bo Jin now doubts whether one person really can be a whole team. The experience has forced her to admit, a little reluctantly, what a company is good for: alone, the scale of what you can do is not the scale a company team can do. "Big clients go straight to translation companies. It isn't something I can take on by rounding up two or three people. A translation company offers not just translation but a whole packaged service."

Zhang Li'ou is a freelancer, but he spends most of his time working inside his clients' offices. Without a team to work with, he says, he can't get anything done.

Even Anke, one year in, is already reconsidering freelancing — or perhaps the real problem lies with her industry. Both she and Bo Jin are thinking of changing fields. Bo Jin's plan has more or less taken shape. She considered becoming a project manager at a large translation company, but dealing with such firms taught her their processes and their operations, and she concluded that "this sort of thing — three years, five years, ten years — doesn't really improve you as an individual. You just get more practiced, that's all."

More immediate pressure comes from family. Coincidence or not, most of the freelancers we interviewed refused to let their parents be interviewed, answering that "it might not be convenient," or "that one isn't convenient." We suspect freelancing is still a sensitive subject in Chinese families.

When Hu Zilin first quit, her family backed her and urged her to try something new. But in the year when she earned nothing, her parents began to waver. "Why work yourself to the bone for this? You could come work at the family company. How much longer are you going to grind away on your own?" There were at least three such conversations that year, each lasting a whole day. Several times her parents nearly talked her round, Hu Zilin said.

After two years as a freelance engineer, Li Ran joined a new company early this year. At a company, he feels, you can see a clear path to promotion and a clear system of ranks, whereas a freelancer is essentially "selling time" and cannot achieve "continuous growth." "Freelancing isn't a way to grow a career. It's a way to balance career and life," Li Ran said.

Steady career progress isn't the only thing that pleases him. He always used to stand on the far side of a line from his clients; now he stands on their side — "everyone at the company is working on one product." Inside a collective like that, Li Ran can raise objections and make longer-term plans for a product, whereas clients used to ask him for one thing only: a quick fix.

Back to the Company

If a freelancer wants to go back to a company, HR still has doubts about taking them.

They think freelancers rate their own ability highly, expect a lot of themselves, struggle with teamwork, and often "quit over the first disagreement." "Because he or she has been fighting alone all this time, and now they're suddenly on a company team, coordinating internally, weighing more factors — a few of them just can't take it," said Lan Yu, HR director at Renren.

Lan Yu admits that most freelancers really do produce better work than ordinary employees. She compares "wild" animals with "domesticated" ones: "wild" freelancers survive better, and have to sharpen their skills to stay alive at all. LinkedIn's research also shows that freelancers on the platform list 2.17 times as many skills as ordinary users, have 2.37 times as many contacts, and collect as many as 3.62 times the endorsements.

What gives HR a headache is that these young people are independent and strong-minded, and many things are not up for discussion — pay, for instance, or an absolute refusal to work weekends. Bo Jin explains that she lost enough money to have to harden up; on pay she has become her own legal counsel. "I've found that once they cross my line, however tempting their terms are, I'll refuse to work with them again."

If a client hands over incomplete or wrong data, Zhang Li'ou will send it back for them to redo, or end the project outright — he bills by the minute, and he doesn't have the time.

But then, you could say that young people in the workplace today are all more or less like this.

Cover image: blogspot

(At the interviewees' request, Zhang Li'ou, Li Ran and Anke are pseudonyms.)