Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: Ignacio Galarraga, CEO of NetMen Corp (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I have a specific question about the bidding process on Elance. Do you have somebody monitoring requests for proposals as projects come online 24 hours a day?

Ignacio Garraga: Not 24 hours. I work 10 hours a day. There are two types of processes when somebody posts a proposal. You can go into the marketplace, browse all the job descriptions based on the category, and then go bid. Or the customer, when he starts posting his job, can browse the suggested providers and invite them to bid. As my company is rated in a lot of categories, I receive a lot of invites. I don’t have to go and search. I do two things: I search for projects, and I post bids. I also receive invites to bid.

SM: So, you do all the Elance bidding yourself, or do you have somebody doing it for you?

IG: Actually, I do it. I like it. That’s the only thing I didn’t stop doing in my company. I bid for everything.

SM: So, you negotiate all the projects, talk to customers and all of that?

IG: Yes, everything. Maybe a couple I don’t, but 95% I do myself.

SM: Would you talk about the project management side? You’ve obviously gone from yourself to 55 people. Talk about how you have scaled your organization, how you have structured your organization. Let’s also talk to me about the features and functions that Elance offers to work on a larger team now.

IG: When I started, Elance didn’t give us so many tools to build a large company under a profile. Everything was done under one name. Right now, Elance has a team option, so all my team members have their own profiles. They handle their own projects. Everything is much simpler now than it was a couple of years ago. The tools help us because each team member is visible to the customer. The customer can come back and ask for a specific team member. That wasn’t available a couple of years ago. This is a new tool from Elance. It helps us a lot.

SM: Basically, you bid on the project, you close the project and then you assign one or more team members to that particular project. And you’re saying if a customer comes back, wants to work with you again and wants to request the same team member, he can do that because Elance provides functions for it.

IG: Yes, that’s correct. When the customers come back, they don’t ask for me anymore.

SM: So, this is happening on a large scale in terms of all the customers you’re working with right now. And you’re following the same methodology afterward?

IG: Yes, exactly the same. We have approximately 7,000 customers through Elance. That’s a lot.

SM: Yes, that’s a lot. And you said you have 55 people. What is the structure of the organization? How many people are managing projects? How many people are actually working on projects?

IG: I have 10 people managing projects and 45 designers in different areas: Web designers, graphic designers, print designers. I have two areas, accounting, the people who handle the relationships with the customers, and then all the designers.

SM: But the customer’s relationship is with the account manager, right?

IG: Yes, an account manager, not the graphic designers.

SM: Got it. What else? Are there any other management or scaling points that you have learned or anything that you find particularly useful in the functionality that Elance offers you to do this kind of scaling?

IG: No. Elance started with all these types of development tools like last year. So, this team option is extremely new. That’s the best tool for me. They have other tools like hour view, for hourly work, but my company does not work from that type of project. So, I never use it.

SM: You only work on fixed-price projects?

IG: Yes. I only work on fixed-price projects. The tools that they have for tracking hours, I don’t use. I can’t tell you about that.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: Ignacio Galarraga, CEO of NetMen Corp
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