True Business- real life for small businesses

My friend and social networking dude Leon Benjamin has just posted an interesting piece about what he calls “fractional work”.

He’s specifically referring to splitting a job into lots of small pieces, which can then be produced by different people. This is nothing new – Henry Ford’s genius in inventing the production line was that different people used their specialist skills (fairly repetitively) to get the most output for the least effort.

However, what is new is the internet; which allows the splitting process to be worldwide. It means anyone can work for you. It means prices can fluctuate across a global marketplace and you can transparently find talent, whether it’s in Kazakhstan or Kettering. Sites like e-lance have been making a good living out of hooking up people who need talent on tap with people who’ve got it.

This is definitely the best way for an entrepreneur to work. There’s no shortage of talented people out there (particularly as layoffs start to bite), and tools like teleconferencing are making it a bit easier to brief people remotely.

I think this is going to be the future for what used to be called ”employees”, too. We’ll all be “freelance” soon. (If you think “freelance” sounds too lowly, there’s a management version, too. It’s called having a “portfolio career”). Why shouldn’t employment and time be as flexible as a taxi ride or a meal in a restaurant? Sure, it makes life a little more unpredictable, but that can only serve to bring up the quality of the employment pool in general.

Which brings me to an admission: I have a very small number of employees. They are key to my business, and they are incentivised with shares because they’re that important to me. But not only is everyone else freelance (I have over 170 freelancers in my little black book), I can honestly say I will do anything – anything – to avoid employing anyone formally. And if I think like that, I bet many other small businesses do, too.

I am convinced that the current downturn will be a catalyst for many new businesses to appear. Many of them will be small businesses with intricate and gossamer-thin networks of trade. I predict that it will also be a catalyst for further fragmentation in employment. A job for one company, full time, will be as archaic in 10 years time as the idea of a “job for life” is now.