How will Smaller Agencies, Consultancies, and Freelancers Survive this Crisis?
Today, every consultancy, development studio, production house, and agency I know has some reliance on other teams and freelancers. That means that most brands are also relying on project ecosystems, either directly or indirectly. We all have an interest in helping each other not just survive this crisis, but to thrive after it. To do so, we need a dramatically different strategy.
Mark Ronan and I lead Quadric, a brand consulting firm in Copenhagen. Last year, we spun out Feats to create transparency around our projects and to help others do the same. We now know more about the people we collaborate with, making it easier for us to bring them into projects, and we can find new partners faster than ever. Based on our experience, we see Feats as the ‘new business’ machine that every team and freelancer needs.
How will we survive and thrive? By knowing more about each other’s past work and cooperating more to sell and deliver future projects. The result will be a stronger, more resilient ecosystem that benefits everyone.
Here’s how you can get started.
Add your past projects to Feats
Quickly create a profile and take a look around. You’ll find a huge range of projects (over 700 at time of writing) and get a sense for how it works.
Then, add your past projects, your roles, and project team members who can verify your roles. Roles are verified to ensure that everyone can trust what they see.
Here is an example of a project for Georg Jensen showing the work and the people behind it:
Unlike most ‘portfolio’ sites, projects are not owned by one member. All projects are co-owned by the people who worked on them. Anyone can add a project, and anyone with a verified role in a project can improve the project page. Then, each individual or team decides which projects they want to show on their profile.
This also means that once a project has been added by one team member, all other team members can verify their roles in minutes. Everyone can collect their projects quickly and easily.
Then, your profile and projects start to work for you, showing up on brand pages and in relevant searches. Your profile page is also optimized for Google, making you easier than ever to be found.
Here is an example of a profile page for the design agency LOOP Associates:
And, Feats is not just for creative roles — it is full of a wide range of people from project managers, planners, and brand managers to consultants and developers. For example, here is a profile of Jesper Müller-Krogstrup, an innovation consultant:
Share project pages so everyone gets recognition
Every project you do is an achievement, or a ‘feat’, that every contributor should be recognized for. That’s one inspiration for the name ‘Feats’. The other inspiration is ‘featuring’ as it is used in music.
Feats’ project pages ‘feature’ the people behind the projects. When Kelly Price and Travis Scott agree to do a project together, they know it means publicly endorsing each other and reaching each other’s audiences. Feats’ project pages work in the same way.
By posting Feats’ project pages to their social networks, rather than linking to client cases on their separate websites, team members help each other and their companies get recognized. For example, below is a project that Quadric and LOOP did together — the Positioning Strategy & Brand Identity of WS Audiology after the merger of Widex and Sivantos. We’re no Travis Scott or Eminem, so our combined social reach is definitely far greater than any of us alone:
Get to know each other’s work and cooperate
When projects are added to Feats, they are always linked to brands. That’s why the brand pages are quickly becoming the best collection of work by multiple teams and freelancers for the same client. And, the employees of that client as well — who are potential clients for everyone in the ecosystem.
There are over 400 brands on the platform today. Here are some examples:
Brand pages create the best context for your work to be seen. They also make it easy for everyone who worked on the same clients to get to know each other. Maybe a development studio that already has experience with a client’s tech stack would be a great complement to your team. Or, a film producer who worked for your client with another agency would make your project more efficient.
This is an entirely new way of finding and hiring the individuals and teams behind brands.
Get started in minutes
Feats is free, and the current features always will be. So, why not give it a try?
Your clients may already be on Feats. If not, you can create their brand pages in seconds when you add their first projects. As more people add projects for the same clients, the ecosystem will open up.
If you’re thinking, “It’s a pandemic! I don’t have time for that.” Don’t worry, Feats Concierge team is ready to help you create great looking project pages. It’s a free service for now — just apply here and they’ll be in touch.
Opportunities to cooperate are everywhere, we just need more transparency to make it happen!
Nu må vi støtte hinanden.
Michael Sherain, Co-founder & CEO of Feats, Partner in Quadric
