Creative Agency Secrets

I have been “lurking” on Skillfair for a year or so now. It’s a website that matches small businesses and freelance consultants to projects.

[Backstory: I first found Skillfair.com about a year ago because they advertised a job creating a micro-site for the River and Rowing Museum. And my sport is rowing, so I picked it up on an alert service for key words. I watched the site from a visitor registration for a while and found jobs that suited some of my clients listed there. My interest built and so I emailed Gill asking if she’d be available for an interview which I could publish. Here it is.]
So how did you start the website?
The Skillfair story began was I went freelance 7-8 years ago when children were young. My background is in IT and I got a contract from former employer, and then another from a mate…. I do specialist work and was on an internet directory and got a third contract from an enquiry off the directory. This led me to the thought that we needed one of those directories for everyone.
Sounds logical.

So how do you get consultants and work opportunities onto Skillfair?
It is hard work doing marketing and sales, when you are a freelancer or independent consultant. And it isn’t most people’s core specialism and so it gets put aside and you end up with the ‘feast or famine’ problem of work. So I created a marketplace for independent consultants in a range of disciplines. To give them a feed into the marketing system that keeps going in the background while they are working with clients.
Skillfair went live early 2002 which was an interesting time then. I had had no work for 6-8 months and got a job shortly after the site went live. The business ticked along for a couple of years. I discovered when you build a website if you don’t spend a lot of money on it you get what you pay for. We needed more behind the scenes in admin – and decided to systemise everything.
This was a key finding. You have to be systematic for all stuff, if you find yourself doing something manually more than 3 times…. like sending customer service emails and enquiry replies ask yourself how can I make it happen without me doing it?
Building a scalable business requires a system to do this for you. This is key to Skillfair’s success to date.
And so what’s happened since then?
We have experienced gradual and organic growth since then. We have not had massive financial investment. The UK economy is at the point where lots of people are going freelance and seeing this as a career option and a positive step. Some of the reasons are work:life balance and not wanting to commute.
And also companies and government want highly skilled people but don’t want to commit to employing them permanently because of financial and legal aspects of permanent employment. The coming together of these two movements is making a wave that didn’t exist before.
How do consultants and freelancers find Skillfair?
Consultants find us though search engines. We use Google ads and have found that placement is important. We do telemarketing as well. We call up people who we think are consultants and ask if they want to be registered for new work. We do the initial work to register them and then leave it up to them to decide to participate further by sending them weekly information.
We also buy lists for the telemarketing. And referrals from other consultants are another very key source of new registrants. Of course, that is how you passed Skillfair’s details onto your clients.
We have worked hard to make it easier to get people to refer their contacts through the website, as they trust what Skillfair is doing. We get about 100 – 200 referrals per week. And 30-40% of paying new joiners come from referrals.
So where do you find the work opportunities?
We use a public sector tender alert service for a lot of client work and we search 6-700 websites per week and OJEU to find the lower value tenders. We have a system for this (of course) to make it less time consuming. (Gill wrote some of the code herself and sourced some of it elsewhere). Skillfair also pays for some services to support this.
The private sector projects come from Google adverts in the main. Search engines are very accurate ‘help with marketing’ means that’s what clients are looking for and / or are a marketing consultant. We find that we get clients precisely when they are looking for advise and support and not at other times.
We now have a database of past clients and we send them newsletters and details of new consultants joining the system and we can send them a regular feed of consultant names for specific skills if they want that.
It is more of a challenge getting clients to say what they want… it is the interim management agencies who are interested in this and more able to say what they want. And we serve them too.

So what are your future plans for Skillfair?
We have worked hard to make a successful business and as I said before, we want it to be scalable. We’ve been working on offering Skillfair as a white label service for professional bodies and trade associations whose membership includes independent consultants. Our service will allow them to provide opportunities to these members without getting involved in admin or commission arrangements and will boost their revenue at relatively low risk. Our goal is to have at least one of these organisations operational by the end of 2008.
Thank you very much for your time, Gill.

And anyone wanting to know more should take a look at Skillfair.com (and please mention that you found it from a link at Creative Agency Secrets!