February 1998 Marketer Articles

The Jobless Marketer

By Alan Lambert

Marketers as Contractors
People on both sides of the design and construction continuum tend to think of "contractors" as the part of the project team that does the constructing. But a contractor is simply any party with whom a client contracts to provide something of value in exchange for payment.

Typically, the arrangement centers around a temporary need on the client's part. Contractors, thus, are distinct from payrolled employees: They exist for specific projects while employees exist to fulfill a functional role within an organization.

Most A/E/C firms have one or more "functional roles" in marketing-research, client services, proposal-writing, sales presentations, graphics, etc. Marketers filling these roles often get locked into a kind of day-to-day functional drift-until much of what they do lacks impact or focus. Some of us stay put and explore the many interesting phases of "burnout." (Sort of like Dante's descending circles of the Inferno.) Many of us change jobs to break out of this career trap. A few of us become contractors.

Companies, too, observe the functional drift of marketing, and sometimes want or need more. A growing or changing company may exceed the capacity of what its marketer(s) can effectively do. Some companies add staff; others turn to outside specialists.

Small to mid-sized companies, in some cases, never hire marketers. Instead, they break the marketing function into specific core services and periodically contract with different specialists to address those service needs. Some of these contractual arrangements are short-term, single-project affairs; others are longer-term, month-to-month retainers. Either way, the nature of the relationship is temporary.

So, as companies become more sophisticated about the particulars they want from marketers, they will tend to outsource those particulars to specialists. And as marketers become more sophisticated about our own career interests and skills, many of us will become those specialists. We will trade in our relatively secure functional positions to become itinerant workers who trade on our skills and the inherent value that we can bring to organizations. We will become one of two types of marketing contractors: Consultants or contract workers.

Consultants vs. Contract Workers
What's the difference? Consultants tend to evaluate problems as objective outsiders and offer recommendations. Companies who receive (and pay for) the advice are free to act or not act on it as they see fit. Consultants typically take no role in implementing their suggestions-in fact, they're not supposed to, because such involvement contaminates their objectivity. (See Flawless Consulting, by Peter Block.)

On the other hand, contract workers are more hands-on: They focus on results, not recommendations. They collaborate with company owners and their management teams to define problems and action plans-then take a very active role in the follow-through. They are largely accountable for the end-product of those action plans.

Some shameless practitioners in this field (yours truly comes to mind) may take turns at these separate roles, but most contractors tend to lean in one direction or another. And my hunch is that contract workers will become the preferred resource as companies enlist more outside support. This hunch is shaped by several biases that I freely offer up:

• Consultants came into their own during an era that emphasized command-and-control hierarchical management structures. Their services were purchased to provide "new ideas" to the management team which were then pushed down the food chain for implementation.
• Contract workers who have emerged during the last several years are linked more closely to an era of downsized organizations, flatter hierarchies, more fluid and technologically driven workforces, and fewer workers. The concept of the "knowledge worker" is more important-the ability to understand what needs to be done and then get it done.
• Consultants tend to travel in huge packs (Price Waterhouse, for example) and offer much in the way of expert resources, research, and academic pedigree. Therefore, the cost of their services tends to reflect this level of pricey overhead.
• Contract workers tend to be independent freelancers and therefore less costly than most consultants, as well as more flexible and adaptable to specific company needs. Many are relentless networkers and, in effect, create "virtual organizations" with one another to provide support and teaming arrangements for projects that require the time or skill of more than one person.

Moving Toward a Jobless Culture
William Bridges, author of Jobshift, sees the emergence of more and more contract workers, particularly in the service industries, as part of a larger trend toward a jobless culture. He argues that the concept of payrolled jobs is relatively new in human history-a unique byproduct of the industrial age.

As the world economy moves away from heavy industry toward services and information, Bridges says we will revert to an age-old tradition for accomplishing work: Bartering and trading on the basis of our own abilities. He predicts that the concept of "jobs" will disappear and be replaced by networks of independent knowledge workers clustered in various industries who accomplish the work to be done on a project-by-project basis.

The very notion of a "jobless culture" is not likely to resonate any time soon with those cultural power bases whose perspectives and allegiances are tied to another era-e.g., labor unions and political parties. Even some of my much-beleaguered marketer friends show signs of heartburn when I introduce the topic into polite conversation. After all, who wants to grapple with a vision of hundreds of millions of payrolled workers (including ourselves) all becoming independent contract workers with no steady paychecks?

You and Co.
Actually, whether such a sweeping social re-organization comes to pass is beside the point. What is more important about Bridges' perspective is the larger point he makes about "You and Co."-thinking and behaving like a contractor even if you choose and are able to stay payrolled. What real value do you contribute to the organization? Not how many hours do you put in cranking out proposals, but what do you do that pushes the company's strategic growth? Adds to its opportunities for building new client relationships? Builds its credibility as a high-performance organization? Helps it attract and recruit star performers from the industry? How do you provide leadership to the organization, irrespective of your job title?

Bridges is talking about the mental toughness to go it alone if you must or wish. Take to heart that the notion of a permanent job, and loyalty for or from any one company, is no longer a defensible career plan. (It probably never was.)

Consider your tenure with any company as a temporary arrangement that exists only so long as there is value delivered and received on both sides-value to the company for its organizational development and growth, value to you so long as you can expand your knowledge and skills in line with what Bridges calls your "D.A.T.A."-desires, abilities, temperament, and assets:

• what you really want to do (desires)
• what you are really good at (abilities)
• what kind of person you are (temperament)
• what advantages you have (assets)

Contractors have already become "You and Co." They get educated in the skills and tools that they need to be effective at what they do or wish to do-they don't wait on "company training programs." They steep themselves in what drives success in their market-design/production/construction operations, finance, quality control, technologies, organizational dynamics, team-based processes, client relationships, strategic focus, and management structure. Oh yes, and marketing. The breadth of what they know and can communicate and accomplish represents the value they offer.

The point here is both simple and difficult: The mindset of a contractor is what is crucial to a marketer's success. It remains true whether one actually becomes a contractor or stays payrolled. And it remains true whether we as a society enter into a cultural transformation that revolves around a huge class of jobless workers-or whether contractors remain a small (but growing) percentage of the workforce.

Either way, we thrive by what we choose for ourselves, not by what others choose for us.