PPH gets a fresh look

As part of our ongoing endeavor to make our site as simple and as easy to use as possible, we have now re-designed our homepage. We are constantly trying to improve how PeoplePerHour works internally and we want this to be reflected externally as well. “Packaging” does matter!

By including an outline of the four steps of our project-posting process, we believe that our users will now grasp the concept of PeoplePerHour.com from their first glance at our webpage.

We value your feedback greatly. If you have any ideas on how to improve PeoplePerHour.com and if there is anything that you feel is not clear or easy enough to use, please let us know. Our goal is to satisfy all our users, so please help us understand you.

Small Business Survey

Please take our anonymous Small Business survey by visiting the following link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=quu2poy202Iomc6e5JRFbQ_3d_3d

You will receive a FREE listing in return for no more than 3 minutes of your time.

Upon completion of the survey, you will have the chance to put in your e-mail address and your account will then be credited with an additional free listing. If you are a provider, you can still receive a free listing by converting to a dual account. You will not need to re-register. All you have to do is activate your dual account when you next log in.

Whether you are a buyer or a provider, we can certainly benefit from your answers. Our goal is to understand more about our users so that we can work towards suiting their needs. This is part of our process of constantly improving PeoplePerHour.com.

If you have any additional comments to our survey, or if you would simply like to express your views, please feel free to do so.

Take a glance at the year 2020 through ‘Freelancing: The Future of Work’

Would you be interested in looking ahead to the year 2020 and finding out what the business world would look like? If you are, then visit the webcast ‘Freelancing: The Future of Work’ on Monday the 23rd of November. It is hosted by the PCG (the representative body for freelancers, contractors and consultants in the UK) to mark National Freelancers Day, and is free of charge.

Guest speakers include a select group of experts who will put together their views and explain why they believe that we are about to witness one of the biggest societal and working shifts since the industrial revolution. Just visit www.nationalfreelancersday.org.uk and register for the event. Moreover, if you decide to watch the webcast, you will also see a video of the CEO of PeoplePerHour.com, Xenios Thrasyvoulou, who is also participating.

So forget about desperately trying to foresee and analyze the future trends in business because they are now fact. So just start implementing them. The future is already here, staring at you in the face through your laptop and through the comfort of your living room armchair.

With an estimated 4.5 million freelancers currently in the UK, the concept of freelancing shouldn’t really be one needing any explaining. And as to why freelancing has evolved so rapidly, well I would say it doesn’t really take a genius to figure it out. At a time and place where everyone is sacrificing their life for their job, it came as a sudden burst of light at the end of that endless tunnel we refer to as ‘career’, that lo and behold, there is another route. Why work long continuous hours in a cold office, just sheepishly watching the minute hand tick by for no obvious reason when you can just be managing your time and work from the comfort of your own home?

And as for the business side, it only took yet another painful and quite embarrassing fall for businesses to realize that ‘yes, things can go wrong’. But we burn and we learn. We learn that we can never be too efficient in our business. We learn that cutting back on unnecessary costs is not just good practice. It’s also necessary. Why hire unnecessary full-time staff instead of only paying for what your business needs? Why not move to a smaller office and save so much energy and cost? Or better yet, why not work entirely from home and just buy the freelance services you need when you need and from your own living room?

And who ever said we couldn’t change the world? Thanks to the technology we now have access to, everything is possible. We can now move towards a greener, more efficient and more sociable world. It’s not just about business. It’s about society.

So if you are keen on being part of this change, visit ‘Freelancing: The Future of Work’, and learn all about it from the experts. Futurologists, technology leaders and analysts will all be there to share their thought about the freelance work model and what its results will be. So don’t miss it.

Reminder: Have you used your free listing yet?

We’ve noticed that a lot of our providers haven’t used their free listing yet, so we thought we would remind you, just in case you’ve forgotten about it.

If you are only registered as a provider, then all you have to do is convert to a dual account. You don’t have to re-register and you certainly don’t have to re-write all those tedious details about yourself either! In fact, we couldn’t have made it easier for you.

All you have to do is click on ‘Activate’ when you log in. Alternatively the ‘Activate’ [your dual account function] can also be found under the ‘My Account’ tab.

It’s just a click away. You have nothing to lose and you may just have a lot to gain. At a time like this no one should be wasting any chances, especially when they come at zero cost. Just try it. It’s free!

Let us know what you think of the dual account and of your free trials. We’d love to hear your comments.

Bringing you more value: new listing packages

For those who have just joined Peopleperhour, or for those who haven’t been very active lately and are in need of a bit of a ‘shove’ back to work, here’s some information on our new enticing listing packages.

If you’re new to Peopleperhour then you’re only a click away from posting your project.

Just click on ‘post project’ and get your free trial.

If you are a returning user then you have the choice of using either one of the following three schemes, depending on how often you plan to post projects up on the site.

1) One-off – £20 per listing, 100% refundable

For those who would only like to post one project after their free trial, we provide you with the option of purchasing just that and nothing more.

2) Occasional users - £5 per listing, 100% refundable

For all our occasional users whose posting needs vary across different periods, i.e. who want more than one posting but do not know when or exactly how many projects they will be posting, there is no need to worry. We provide a great value offer in which you pay only £30 for 6 listings which you can use whenever you want!

3) Monthly Membership – £2 per listing, 100% refundable

For all our regular users we now offer a monthly membership scheme bringing you incredible value. For just £10 a month you get 5 inclusive listings! Which means you only pay £2 per listing. And if you run out you can top-up your listings at the same price of £2 each – a whopping 90% discount to the one-off rate.

And it get’s better. We also have a special offer of 12 months for a price of 10. For £100 you get a full years membership of up to 5 project listings per month, dropping your per-listing price to just £1.66!

Catch? No catch. All you need to do is subscribe for a minimum of two months. At any time after that all you need to do is drop us an e-mail and we will disconnect your membership instantly.

And remember – we offer a 100% money-back guarantee to each of the above. If for whatever reason you are unhappy with your bids, just drop us an email to with the project reference number and we will refund every penny back to you.

Extra features

Have you noticed the new features available? Don’t miss out on the opportunity to make your project stand out and get the best results possible.

- £5 per listing

Add the above attention grabbing icon to your listing, for just £5 extra, and you won’t be missed!

- £15 per listing

Target more providers by staying on top of listings up to 30 days! The cost of this varies from an additional £15 for 3 days, up to £60 for staying on top for a whole month!

We value the feedback of our users immensely, so feel free to tell us what you think. If you have any better ideas on our listing options then we’d love to hear them. Constantly improving our listing options and keeping our users satisfied is what we aim to do.

Follow us on Twitter

We often have press enquires for user case studies that we need to respond to fast. As those of you who have been featured will know (see BBC news piece featuring two of our users) getting press coverage can be an immense boost to your profile or your business so we want to bring more of these opportunities to more of you.

To help you keep up to date with enquiries we get from the press and to enable you to respond fast we’ve set up a twitter page www.twitter.com/peopleperhour Follow us on twitter so that you don’t miss out!

PeoplePerHour.com on BBC News at Six

For those of you who haven’t seen it already, there was a feature on PeoplePerHour.com on the BBC News at Six yesterday, talking about how our site is helping people and businesses in the recession. The feature was centered on two of our providers  – Edward Moss and Zoe Smith – with a short commentary from our founder in-between.

A longer interview with our founder was also posted by the BBC online in a feature titled “working from home to beat the recession”

The publicity has created an unprecedented amount of traffic to our site that brought it down momentarily. We were fortunately able to revive it fast. We apologise to any of you who were trying to access the site at that moment.

We have a lot of follow –on press enquiries from regional and national press who want to hear similar stories from people like you and how you’re using the site to help your business both save cost and enhance your income.

So if you feel you have a story that is compelling and timely then please email us on pr(at)peopleperhour(dot)com.  Please be sure to state clearly the following and any other relevant information:

For Freelancers:

• your location
• employment status (full-time/ part-time employee/ freelancer / work for a company)
• why you are using the site (to supplement your income  / you’ve been made redundant / you’re transitioning to        freelance / other )
• family status
• experience you’ve had with using the site and how its helped you: projects won / awarded / bids placed / how         much you’re business has saved by using the site

For Employers

• your location
• your company name
• what kind of company you manage / own
• how many staff do you employee
• why you are using the site (to save cost / to avoid hiring people / to get things done fast)
• What your experience with the site has been: how many projects posted / awarded

We look forward to hearing from you.

The Future of Work

There was an interesting article about ‘The Future of Work’ in Time Magazine this week. Seth Godin, author of Small is the New Big, contributed some particularly insightful points. Godin describes a future in 5 or 10 years, where businesses will employ only a few essential employees and outsource the rest of their work.

A growing number of businesses are already adopting this way of working. We speak to dozens of you every day who tell us how you have cut costs by outsourcing work via PeoplePerHour.com. Many are cutting costs by more than 50% a year.

For example, earlier this week we spoke to Michael Parker, founder of A Quarter Of Ltd, which is a traditional sweetshop, selling retro sweets online. Michael has outsourced PR, affiliate marketing, article writing and web site development, saving an estimated £7k every month in salaries.

Similarly, Kerchoonz, the social networking site that allows free legal music that pays the artists, saved costs by finding freelancers for their PR, Marketing, IT and sales functions, for which they’d otherwise have to hire fulltime or agency staff.  Founder, Indiana Gregg, says “we have made an estimated saving of 32% in the last year by using freelancers through PeoplePerHour.com”.

Ask-Kent, a B2B telemarketing company, founded by Richard Romaine took his entire business virtual in January 2006. It previously had 10 fulltime people in an office. As a virtual company it has five telemarketers working from home at any one time. By doing this, Richard has cut overheads by £80k a year. This kind of business model is also greener as it eliminates the commute.

Thanks to all of you who are using the site and recommending it to others, PeoplePerHour.com has grown from 4,700 to more than 30,000 in the past year.  This suggests that ‘The Future of Work’ as Seth describes it is already well on its way to becoming a reality.

Employers can now limit bids to UK providers

After numerous requests from Employers on our site we have now introduced a feature whereby they can optionally limit their bids to UK Providers only.

Our site is now over 70% UK freelancer, and despite a constant worry by many of you that you’ll be ‘undercut’ by lower bids from abroad, over 85% of bids are awarded to UK freelancers, despite many projects having cheaper bids from abroad.

The data seems to suggest that Employers on PPH rate locality, quality and ease of communication over price. The feature we’ve just added now takes this a step further by allowing our Employers to limit the bids they get only to UK providers if they fear of being  ‘flooded’ by large volumes of bids from abroad (as they’ve often declared) many of which are excessively cheap and ‘meaningless’ in their view.

Surveys we’ve done with our users show a split: some Employers adamantly do not want to get bids from non-UK providers and in fact often find them a nuisance for the reasons highlighted above hence the feature to optionally block them. Others see it as a nice-to-have comparison even if in the end they chose a UK freelancer 85% of the time.

This is not to say that our site is entirely UK: we have multiple cases of Employers awarding their projects to providers abroad with excellent results.  Those that have taken the time and care to submit well-thought out and structured bids have been successful.
The same goes for UK providers, and we urge all our providers to do the same – as we’ve done many a time in the past – in order to win more work.

This is yet another case of quality faring higher than price in our marketplace. The geographic distinction is simply an (unfortunate) interpretation that’s been deuced from the average case. Which is why we are not taking any measures to ban or restrict usage, but rather – as we always strive to do  - give our users more choice.

Working 5 to 9 takes off in the UK

More than five million people are working from home after finishing their day job, according to new research published this week.

The survey, commissioned by the world’s biggest office products company Staples, and carried out by Enterprise Nation, the UK’s largest website for home based business, confirms that the ‘5 to 9’ trend is spreading across the country.

Of those 5-9ers questioned, 50% said their business was growing and over 60% expected to be going full time within the next 12 months.

Enterprise Nation Founder Emma Jones said: “We were amazed by what we found. Although we knew there had been a tremendous growth in home business, we had no idea that much of this was coming from the 5 – 9 trend.

“What’s particularly significant is that the current economic climate is the impetus behind this trend. For some people it’s about increasing their income to cope with a partner’s redundancy while others felt uncertain about their future career prospects and wanted to make sure they were better placed if they lost their job.”

There’s also the added attraction that building a business at night and weekends from a spare room is low risk and low cost, allowing people to increase sales, confidence and cashflow, whilst holding onto a salary.

“In a recession people often set up their own business as a way of taking control of their own life again. But the current downturn is so severe that people are being more cautious, hanging onto their full time jobs and testing the water first before making a decision. This clearly makes good business sense.”

The survey also highlighted that 72% have considered giving up their day jobs to spend more time on their home business.  When asked what would make them leave their job, 42% said it was the only way they could grow their business while 32% said it would be when they could afford to.

Staples commissioned the research after noticing a shift in shopping patterns with more people visiting their stores after 5pm.

Yetunde Ige, Staples Head of Marketing said: “Clearly this trend is something that we’re interested in as our stores are open late. As a result we are looking to launch a 5-9ers club, which will reward people shopping after 5pm and hopefully be a real benefit to those trying to start a business in their free time.”

Trendwatching.com – one of the world’s leading trend firms – has picked up on this phenomenon. Its monthly report confirms: “A recession induced need for cash and an ever-growing infrastructure enabling individuals to act as part-time entrepreneurs, are fuelling concepts that help ordinary consumers make money as well as just spending it.”

A free copy of ‘Working 5 to 9 – how to start a business in your spare time’ is available at www.enterprisenation.com