How A New Freelancer Model Unites Thinking & Doing

More than 2 million freelancers operate in the UK - around 5% of the entire national workforce and rising, according to self-employment body IPSE. About 300,000 of this freelance legion are marketers who’ve either chosen or been forced to leave payroll positions.

With this vast army of support at their disposal B2B organisations have an opportunity - and a problem.

On the plus side, tapping into the freelance pool can help businesses avoid rising employment costs and link spend to the defined length of a project. But there are downsides, too. It’s easy to fall into the trap of treating freelance support as tactical and operational - someone needed to ‘fill the gap’ - instead of the strategic resource that can transform an organisation, thanks to decades of experience and expertise.

The issue isn’t freelancers. It’s the lack of a model that recognises their strategic value, connects it to execution that delivers exceptional results, and manages the process.

Why old ways no longer work

Many organisations already realise the way they use freelancers isn’t working but are stuck in a cycle of recruiting and replacing them, wasting time and budget, without knowing how to change.

Several forces combine to create this downward spiral:

• In-house inexperience - Internal teams are stretched across too many duties and also lack depth to contend with complex problems

• Agency aggravation - The contract between some agencies and their clients is fraying due to poor service and inflexible fee models

• Freelancer frustration - Without the time or experience to manage external resource, some freelancers’ performance can be inconsistent

Due to these factors and more, organisations face an outcomes challenge. They need fast results but demand high quality. They need freelancers to be as invested as in-house teams yet treat them as a stop gap. And they want a strategic approach that streamlines workflows and approaches, when today’s use of freelancers is too often task-based and tactical.

Close the thinking and doing gap

All of which speaks to a bigger problem: adding more resource to execution distances the work further from strategy than is already the case. The gap between thinking and doing is getting wider. The preferred freelance model is partly responsible.

Marketing strategy and execution have traditionally been kept separate. Strategy sits with leadership or agencies. Execution exists with internal teams of freelancers. But no one owns the transition layer between the two. Budget and speed of delivery fall through the cracks, while optimal strategy rarely sees the light of day.

The answer is to treat thinking and doing as part of the same ecosystem - and to embed freelance expertise within one system rather than viewing it as satellite resource.

While companies continue to ponder these problems, the freelance economy is constantly maturing. More top-tier marketers are becoming independent, skilled and experienced consultants. The trick is to combine their strategic and executional excellence so that they produce high-performance outcomes.

Find the true value of freelancers

Integrating strategic intelligence with freelancer-led execution is the new marketing operation model: a system which finally closes the gap between thinking and doing.

Most organisations use freelancers as ‘an extra pair of hands’. Really, they are key components in a coordinated growth engine. Formation’s model recognises this and deploys freelancers to add maximum value:

• Strategy-led work is guaranteed from day one

• A single team embedded in a structured system

• Delivered through a core senior team + specialist ecosystem

• Team designed for growth - not constrained by org charts

• Aligned with commercial outcomes, not output

This isn’t a freelance model. It’s a new operating system for growth-driven marketing. It affords you access to top 1% specialist talent - but keeps your commitment scalable and flexible without long-term overhead. Full accountability and focus on a defined outcome, not a ‘part-time commitment’.

When we implement the new model for our clients their strategy is activated quickly, execution is aligned to outcomes, teams are coordinated, and marketing becomes a predictable - and precisely measurable - growth driver.

If what you’ve read chimes with your own experiences of trying to get the best out of freelancers, only for the engagement to go wrong without a real explanation, it’s time to stop investing in disconnected marketing.

Make thinking and doing two sides of the same coin by building a finely tuned system which turns strategy into growth. This begins by taking the Formation Growth Diagnostic, a quick, DIY tool, that helps identify the gaps in your operation and constructing a new model that actually delivers.

Formation’s approach to closing the gap between strategy and execution flows through three core layers: Strategic Discovery and Commercial Scorecard, Positioning