Nobody Manages Freelancers Well

Production runs on freelancers and always has. Every shoot I've been part of across three continents has relied on people who show up for the job, do exceptional work, and disappear until the next one. That's the model. It works creatively. It falls apart administratively in ways that cost real money and damage real relationships.

I had a situation in Johannesburg a few years back where a sound recordist invoiced us for a rate we hadn't agreed. Not maliciously, he genuinely believed the number was right. The problem was the rate had been negotiated verbally, over the phone, while the production manager was simultaneously dealing with a location permit issue. She remembers saying one number. He remembers hearing another. There was no written confirmation because we were moving fast and the shoot was in two days.

We split the difference and moved on, because that's what you do. But multiply that by dozens of freelancers across a year's worth of productions and you start to see the leak.

The scale of freelancer dependency

Some companies work with thousands of contractors annually. FloSports reportedly coordinates over two thousand. ITN Productions, which has been around for decades, was at one point onboarding freelancers via emailed Word documents. Rate cards scattered across email threads, contracts unsigned or signed and filed in someone's inbox, availability tracked by phoning people and asking. The entire freelancer lifecycle, from finding someone to paying them, runs on informal systems that would be considered unacceptable in any other industry.

Agencies have a different version of the same problem. Ten to fifty concurrent projects, each pulling from overlapping pools of freelance editors, designers, animators, directors. A colourist who's brilliant but only available Tuesdays and Thursdays. A motion graphics artist who charges a day rate but works in four-hour blocks. The scheduling alone is a full-time job, and most agencies handle it through a combination of spreadsheets, memory, and the production manager's personal phone contacts.

The pricing trap

Most SaaS tools charge per user per month. That model makes perfect sense for a team of twelve people who log in every day. It makes no sense whatsoever for production. You might need to add a gaffer to the system for three days, a drone operator for one day, a dialect coach for an afternoon. Nobody is paying twenty-five dollars a month per seat for someone who needs access for seventy-two hours.

So what actually happens is that freelancers don't get added to the system at all. They exist outside it. Their work gets tracked informally, their feedback gets relayed through someone with a login, their invoices arrive by email and get reconciled against a spreadsheet that may or may not match the project management tool. The system that's supposed to provide visibility into the project has a blind spot shaped exactly like the people doing half the work.

The counterweight

It's worth saying that many freelancers genuinely prefer this arrangement. Not the administrative chaos, but the independence. They don't want to be absorbed into a company's project management system. They don't want another login, another dashboard, another set of notifications. They want a clear brief, a confirmed rate, and the creative freedom to do what they're good at. The best freelancers I've worked with are brilliant precisely because they operate with minimal overhead.

The problem isn't the freelancer model. The problem is that the tools we use to run productions weren't designed for a workforce that's half permanent and half transient. We've been thinking about this a lot while building Telova, particularly around how you give freelancers access without giving them another tool to learn.