Olga Mizrahi - The Gig Is Up: Thrive in the Gig Economy, Where Old Jobs Are Obsolete and Freelancing Is the Future

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Copyright 2018 Olga Mizrahi

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Design and composition by Jamie Ponchak, ohso! design

Cover design by Jamie Ponchak, ohso! design

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Print ISBN: 978-1-62634-493-8

eBook ISBN: 978-1-62634-494-5

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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First Edition

To the hardworking hustlers that arent normally seen.
I see you, and, yes, you are invited to the company party.

Table of Contents

Introduction and Overview

What is this gig economy I keep hearing about? Is it just Uber and Upwork, or is it all freelance jobs? What about the temp and contract workers out there? Even if hired offline, are they now giggers? The answer is Yes! to all the above. Yet there is still some understandable confusion about what the gig economy is.

project-based or on-demand services that can be provided by anyone

This is because the gig economy is very diverse: it can include temporary workers, contract workers, consultants, and freelance CEOs, as well as freelance workers, entrepreneurs, and solopreneurs. The gig economy is an amazing force that normalizes all types of project and temporary work and changes the concept of the workplace for everyone in and out of it.

Have you ever heard of the parable of the frog slowly being boiled alive? To play along, first we have to agree that having a frog is better than Chick-fil-A. The parable starts by warning us that if you boil the water first and proceed to put the frog in, the frog (a.k.a your lunch) will jump out of the hot water. The solution: put the frog in cold water, then slowly boil it, and it wont even know until... delicious frog sandwich time! In this story, we are the frog, and we havent really noticed that the gig economy has been slowly boiling up around us. Now the good news: unlike our favorite new parable, instead of us all being killed, we will be made aware of how to use this new working world order to our advantage.

It is no wonder that we all feel the perpetual white water of change all around us. There is no standing still in todays work environment. No matter how fast we paddle, the current of change will keep rushing past. Nothing is speeding up that change more than the technology in your phone. The year 2017 marked the 10th anniversary of Apples iPhone. Its led to the smartphone revolution fueling the remarkable change of the workplace as we know it. I am no exception to the opportunity (and the anxiety!) that this change brings. So I wasnt entirely surprised when I started seeing an interesting trend start to swell all around the blog I write for small business owners: the meteoric rise of the freelance economy.

Growth of the smartphone and widespread Internet access

Todays workers are digitally enabled by having a computer in their pocket. When you consider that the first iPhone was released in 2007 with zero apps, the amount of growth in on-demand products and services since then is nothing short of staggering.

The ChunkOfChange.com blog is my labor of love; my day job is running a small creative agency in Long Beach, California, called ohso! design. When my business partner and I first started our e-commerce and graphic design company in 2004, we had a huge secret! Shhhhh! We could not disclose to potential clients that we had created an in-home studio, and like many, we set up a virtual storefront. We masqueraded as an actual brick-and-mortar studio at a physical location and pretended that our scrappy team all actually went there to work every day. As freelance specialists worked on projects with us, they got ohso! design business cards and sometimes even (the drug dealer favorite) disposable cell phones with numbers that were their business line. In reality, everyone preferred to work from home or the local coffee shop, and no one was the wiser as we churned out quality projects, ranging from slammin websites to advertising campaigns to marketing strategy.

Why the deception? Because, as hard as it is to remember today, you really could not be taken seriously as a team if you didnt have people on a leash. As a leader, my ability to keep a project on track and produce stellar results was mistakenly equated with micromanaging the team from close quarters. If I had disclosed my hands-off approach to letting people do what they were awesome at, we wouldnt have won the projects that grew our budding company.

Even finding our freelance partners was an exercise in word-of-mouth and, sometimes, taking a chance on someone met through an online community.

Fast-forward, and gone are the days of the stereotypical on-demand worker.

Todays freelancers are everywherefrom Uber drivers to high-powered corporate consultants. No longer is there shame in having a temporary job; all jobs are potentially temporary, it seems. Now, you can find awesome people anytime, anywhere, and anyhow.

A fundamental societal changethe removal of the shame in working flexibly, from anywhere, part time or full time, temp or permanently on demandis what I believe is the fire stoking the engine of independent work