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Many entrepreneurs choose to hire independent professionals rather than full-time employees because the former provides several unique benefits to the business. This article from Keep The Fire Lit outlines some of these benefits and shares tips on hiring freelance sales and marketing professionals.

Why Hire Freelance Sales and Marketing Professionals?

Freelancers operate independently. They offer specific expertise, such as designing, writing, sales, and marketing. Freelancers take projects from different clients and set their own schedules. If you’re looking for sales and marketing professionals in Toronto, hiring them on a freelance basis offers several pros and cons.

According to Fora Financial, the pros of hiring freelance sales and marketing professionals include:

• Minimal commitment. Hiring freelancers lets you access sales and marketing expertise without having to commit to the professionals long-term, as you would with full-time staff.
• Flexible rates. You can agree on rates based on the specific projects or tasks the freelancers take on.
• Large talent pool. The freelance market provides you with a large pool of highly talented and motivated sales and marketing professionals that you can deploy almost immediately.

The downsides of hiring freelance professionals include:

• Limited control. Your oversight is limited because freelance professionals operate with significantly more autonomy than full-time employees.
• Limited scope. Buscom notes that a freelance workforce is relatively difficult to scale because expanding the scope of a freelancer’s work involves renegotiating your contract with them.
• Training and onboarding costs. Hiring freelance professionals often involves some up-front training and onboarding costs, which can add up if you frequently hire new freelancers.

Investing in certain off-the-shelf services can also help save your business time and money. For example, the right accounting software may offer all the benefits of an in-house accountant while saving you the cost of hiring one. Likewise, you can save money on the fees lawyers charge to incorporate a business by hiring a business formation service at a reduced rate.

Incorporating your business can help you save on taxes, limit your personal liability for business debts, and give you access to better ways of receiving payments from customers.

How to Hire Freelance Sales and Marketing Professionals

Freelancers vary widely in their expertise and rates. You want to hire freelance sales and marketing professionals who match your business’s needs and budget. Of course, you’ll need to be able to pay for your outsourcing needs, so seek out sources of funding. If you need to take out a loan, keep in mind that lenders will examine your finances closely, and if you have a young company, personal finances will be especially scrutinized. Among other criteria, lenders will consider your debt-to-income ratio to determine whether to issue a loan, so it’s good to know what yours is before approaching an institution.

There are different places to find talented freelancers.

• Search on Google for the websites of smart, organized freelancers.
• Hire sales and marketing professionals through LinkedIn after reviewing their profiles.
• Look for sales and marketing professionals on freelance marketplaces such as UpWork.com and Freelancer.com.

When looking for sales and marketing professionals, check for the following:

• Ability to maintain meaningful relationships with key customers
• Strong corporate communication skills
• Experience selling products similar to yours
• Proficiency in using digital tools for sales or marketing
• A good culture fit for your company

Additionally, check their stats and client referrals to make sure they have a strong history of excellent performance.

Hire the Best Talent

Freelance sales and marketing professionals can be a great addition to your workforce. With the right hiring strategy, you can find freelancers who meet or even exceed your expectations.

Disclaimer

This article does not provide legal, financial or hiring advice. If you need advice, please consult a relevant professional in your jurisdiction.

Bramble Patch Purpose

Is time management important to you? You may not have even thought about it until someone asked you to add one more to a long list of tasks or you got sent on a time management training course. Maybe you have just found that it’s impossible to do everything you might WANT to do? And you also realised that typical time management doesn’t mean anything to you. Have you ever thought of looking about you into nature for inspiration?

You CAN get everything done that you NEED to do if you take some tips from the bramble patch.

You may have brambles in your garden. Perhaps you planted them for their fruit or they may have just grown there and you would love to get rid of them! If you don’t have any brambles in your yard, there may be some in a rural location you visit to collect berries in the autumn.

Whether you have a bramble you love or not, almost everyone knows about the briar patch, the prickles and the juicy fruit but did you know you can also learn about time management from the bramble? Brambles are prickly shrubs with long looping thorny shoots – only the blackberry in the UK – but also including the raspberry in the US. There are thought to be 1,000 different varieties of bramble worldwide! So it is a widespread and successful plant. But how does it demonstrate time management?

Time Management starts with a Purpose.

(If you want to find out about your own purpose, scroll straight down to the bottom of this article now.)
The bramble has one purpose, to spread as far and wide as it can and to hold onto any territory it has gained. Any gardener knows that unwanted brambles are VERY difficult to remove and the longer you put it off, the harder it gets and the bigger the patch grows. In order to achieve its purpose, the bramble needs to hold onto the ground it has, spread into new areas and protect its core, in case of damage. These are its main goals.

Needs To Keep Ground Already Won

Protection

The bramble doesn’t want to get eaten by animals as a source of food, so its shoots have strong thorns that provide good protection from grazing animals. These thorns are also backward facing and can help shoots move rapidly through the undergrowth as they grow. The shoots grow in a tangle because their ends root into the ground, forming loops that rapidly create an impenetrable tangle.

Needs to Spread

Long arching shoots

In order to gain new ground, the bramble has to spread. It does that by getting resources (water, sunshine) and using these to send long shoots arching quickly into the air (to gain distance) and which then bend down to the ground. If the tip touches the ground, it sends out roots and a new plant becomes established.

Flowers and fruit

It also spreads by means of its fruit which is sweet and juicy and very attractive to many animals, including humans. The fruit includes seeds that are highly resistant to digestive system acids. They can also survive for 100 years! Animals eat the fruit and the seeds get scattered in their dung, so they have their own source of fertiliser ready made. The seeds create new bramble patches at a distance from the parent plant if they reach somewhere suitable.

Need To Protect Its Core

Brambles have a perennial underground rootstock. It is hidden below the earth, making it resistant to damage and possibly keeping it safe from fire.

So what is Your Purpose?

The bramble’s purpose is to spread as far and wide as it can. (OK, I know that a bramble doesn’t have a brain, nor does it appear to make conscious choices, however, its ACTIONS appear to be as good a way as any of determining what its purpose might be if it were a sentient being.)

What is your purpose? Why are you here, what is it you want to achieve?

Do you want just to survive and keep your head down, making as few waves as possible, just to get by?

Is your purpose to bring up your children as best you can?

Maybe it’s to be a success in your chosen employment or to win a race or achieve a difficult goal?

What Do You Need To Do To Achieve That Purpose?

The bramble needs to spread, to gain ground, (using looping shoots and seeds), it needs protection (thorns) and it needs to keep its core safe (perennial underground roots).

Brambles are highly successful plants, spreading aggressively, protecting themselves and keeping their core safe. They demonstrate time management through their actions in achieving their PURPOSE and in using their GOALS (spread, protect, hidden core) to achieve their purpose.

How can YOU copy the bramble and achieve YOUR purpose?

If you want to find your life purpose, watch this video:

https://youtu.be/js_Q27lMs_8

You can get the book at