What is Skills On-Demand?

The biggest impediment to growth that most companies grapple with is not doing the things they have to do in order to succeed. It’s not that they don’t know what to do—and that’s all becoming obsolete now that we have AI and centralized access to the same information in real time. It’s simply that they don’t do the things they’re supposed to do. Conversely, we’re not going to name names because I don’t want to disparage anybody, but there are a lot of folks with very basic strategies who’ve achieved unparalleled levels of success simply by doing the things they had to.

This all sounds overly simplified, and that’s not my intention. Rather, my intention is to make sure that everyone has the capacity to do what they have to do whenever they need to.

We started as a performance marketing agency. Back in 2017, it was just before everyone and their mother decided they were a performance marketer. Over the subsequent two years, especially into the pandemic, tens of thousands of “agencies” appeared. Some did a great job, but the majority were people who basically figured out how to resell Google ads or Facebook ads. It’s almost like an inverse multilevel marketing program for massive advertising platforms.

This accomplished two things. One, it helped a lot of people pour billions and billions of dollars into advertising, and two, it thoroughly discouraged savvy, growing companies from working with service providers. We got into an environment where there were so many agencies available, promising more and more for less and less, that it became a churn model to survive.

We took a different approach. With the startup pedigree, we understood that every month was critical, and month-over-month growth was the most important thing to show momentum. Without time to wait until quarterly reviews or end-of-year reports, we had to make every single week count. The irony here is the more successful we were, the faster we parted ways with our teams that raised more money and were able to replace our work internally. That’s when we realized our purpose wasn’t to be the service provider; it was to be the bridge.

Skills On-Demand was born because we realized the flaw in the agency model. When you’re selling services on a retainer, eventually you become a line item that’s expendable, no matter how successful you are. For a time, that serves the client’s purpose. But eventually, there will have to be a parting of ways, and that could be accelerated by better performance. This told me that the model didn’t fit the problem. We had to create something different, and that’s what we got started on.

What I saw is the real problem was that small, growing companies or teams had a lot to do and very limited resources to do it with. This brings us back to our original problem, where success is directly tied to your willingness to do the things you have to do to achieve it. Therefore, the primary reason agencies are hired is because teams don’t have the skill sets they need to achieve their goals. But if all we’re really offering is the skill sets teams need to achieve their goals, why do we spend so much time selling long-term retainers? In the same vein, why would a business ever engage an agency on a long-term retainer if they know there are only specific skill sets they need?

I understand that for strategic functions like branding, strategy, media planning, or public relations, you absolutely need an agency because you couldn’t build the functionality they have internally. But these days, for most of the digital marketing sphere, it’s not that hard to bring someone in-house and train them how to do it. So, to recap, our mission became: how do we give people direct access to the skills they need without all the overhead of engaging an agency, which is what we were at the time?

We started by breaking down our model into something super modular. Eventually, we realized that we were indirectly solving an even bigger problem. We saw that companies were looking for skills they did intend to bring in-house eventually—they just didn’t know it yet. So, the churn model popularized by the digital agencies we were a part of was indirectly part of an actual larger journey in growing one’s team.

But that’s really messy when you think about it. If you have to first identify a skill set you need, second, engage an agency for a long-term project and a lot of money, then third, figure out how to decouple yourself from the agency, fourth, hire someone, and fifth, train the person—that’s a whole lot of work just to get an outcome that’s pretty achievable.

Enter the second phase of the problem.

As an agency, we hired a lot of freelancers. Some of the most amazing people in the world that I’ve ever met definitely came from this pool. And we learned something absolutely fantastic: the most talented people don’t freelance because freelancing requires you to be a salesperson and account manager in addition to being good at what you do. What this means is, if you really want experts who can execute immediately, don’t need any training or ramp time or hand-holding, you’re not going to find them on a freelance platform. You’re going to find them sitting in their office space, plowing away for their current employer, dreaming about a day when they could do their work from the beach.

Enter our Skills On-Demand platform.

What we built was a layer that lives between businesses and freelancers. What it does is eliminate businesses from having to participate in the hiring and training cycle so they can skip to the outcomes they want. And for the freelancers, because we’re the bridge and we have systems that manage customer relationships super effectively, that talent pool—previously inaccessible from a freelancing perspective—can now plug in on demand.

What this means is businesses can skip directly to the results they want from day one, which is a massive performance lift. And because of that speed, once businesses start working with us, they start asking for lots and lots of things, which creates a huge opportunity for the freelancers we’re exposing to this workspace to dig in and earn a living on their own ingenuity.

And that’s what I’m so excited to make available for you today. At the time of posting this, we’re not charging any access fee to get plugged into our platform and start building the things you really want to. Please treat it like a genie coming out of a lantern.

Wish for what you want, lean on us to spec out the details and make sure they align with your expectations and costs, and the rest will happen for you. We’ve been managing these types of projects for over seven years for some major companies and some really small startups. We promise speed, fantastic communication, and a load of management overhead removed from your schedule. What this means is now your hiring process looks like: identifying a skill you need, activating that skill for the unit metric you want to hit inside of our platform, and once it’s validated, then using SOPs—which we can even help you create—to hire internal team members to execute that work for you.

Looking into the Future

In the future, I expect AI to replace a lot of what current digital agencies are doing. The major advertising platforms are already using their machine systems to make it easier to plug-and-play advertising. So, outside of sophisticated tracking and high-level oversight, I expect that workload to diminish dramatically.

The most successful agencies will lead on the strategic fronts like branding, content creation, positioning, media strategy, and public relations. These are functions that cannot be replaced by AI and require some kind of human touch and intuition to succeed.

What that means is you’ll have a choice. Do you trust machines to execute work for you lightning fast? Do you trust the team you have around you to stay on top of that volume of production and be responsible for making sure it’s all absolutely aligned with your true intentions? Or do you think it’s worth taking a look at a human alternative that’s equally fast and has its own baked-in intuition?

That’s what we’re putting together for you. Because if we’re being honest, most nonstrategic work functions in the future will happen through a platform like ours. There won’t be hiring cycles for anything that’s nonstrategic. People will be able to get into the workforce as young as they like, as long as it meets the labor requirements of their countries. And people with no sales skill sets will be able to build a career purely on the merits of their work. If you want to be a part of building that story, please join today. We’d love to work with you.