Úna Herlihy: Building The Indie List, a Haven for Freelance Marketers

Nigel Rawlins: Una, welcome to the Wisepreneurs podcast. Could you please tell us something about yourself and where you're from?

Úna Herlihy: Hi Nigel, it's lovely to be here. Thank you so much for getting in touch with me. I'm looking forward to our chat. So, I'm Una Herlihy, I'm a marketing consultant and I'm the co founder of The Indie List, which I'll explain in a minute. I live in Ireland in a small city called Kilkenny, which is a beautiful part of Ireland.

And I've been living here for about 17 years.

So, started my career working in advertising in the early 90s. I worked in agencies for a long time in the client service function. And, I loved the whole agency world I loved working on really exciting brands. I loved the whole creative process. I loved the range of people that you would just meet on all these projects, creative projects like TV productions.

And it was just like a really exciting time to be working in the industry. And I worked for about 15 years, in agency. And back in 2005, I was working on some brilliant accounts, I was doing really exciting projects, I had two small kids at home. I was just finding it really difficult to see how life in an agency was going to be compatible with my personal circumstances at the time.

And it just it wasn't a place that was massively accommodating of women with young kids. And I found that I was sort of being overlooked for different opportunities and a lot of decisions were being made about my career without much, much conversation with me. So I decided it was 2005, I think I was explaining to you earlier on that it was a really buoyant time in Ireland. We were in an economic boom. It was called the Celtic Tiger, lots of building, lots of construction, lots of spending on advertising and a lot of jobs. And I I suppose I had I knew that I had to do something.

And I wanted to have freedom and flexibility. I figured that I will give freelancing a go and if it doesn't work out, I'll go and get a job in another agency. And that was something that was probably going to be very likely to happen. So anyway, I jumped two feet first into freelancing It was really tough it I was, I suppose, freelancing, in terms of my understanding of the term, applied more to creative roles, not necessarily to people who worked in client service.

And I didn't want to just go in and out of agencies as a gun for hire and work on maternity leave contracts. I wanted to work and do something new and do something different. And I suppose, what I began to understand was that when you're in a creative environment the, the quality of the output is massively influenced by the dynamic between the client and the agency.

Like a really good relationship results in high performance and high quality service and high quality product. And you can see that in all the big kind of client agency relationships or entanglements, contracts and so on that really last. There's always a really, really good relationship.

And I knew that that was a problem. There was a lot of toxic behaviors in the client agency relationships. There was a lot of situations where the client and the agency weren't sharing the same goals. Ways of working were inefficient and kind of bloated and it was resulting in a lot of pitching a lot of burnout in people and so what I started to do was to work as a pitch consultant and I figured that there was a real opportunity to rethink the pitching process so that it would be less onerous on the agency and result in a better outcome for everyone.

And so I worked as a pitch consultant then for about 10 years and that was amazing. I loved it all.

Nigel Rawlins: Explain what a pitch consultant is.

Úna Herlihy: So a pitch consultant. Okay. So what I did was work with the marketing client team or the brand, the brand team in, in a company, and I would run a procurement process to appoint either a creative agency, a PR agency, brand agency.

So I would curate a shortlist and manage the process from the start right through to the contracts. So it was, I guess, a project management role around procurement. But it was a great opportunity for me to build my network and to really get to work quite quite closely with different types of people within an organization.

So dealing with compliance, dealing with procurement, HR. So it was a fantastic way for me to expand my network. And so I did that for 10 years. 2020 came and a new decade and I thought do I really want to be doing this for the next 10 years of my life? And then COVID hit and suddenly my pipeline disappeared overnight and I found myself for the first time in maybe 12, 13 years where I had no work and it was strange.

And there was a part of me that was really sort of intrigued. About what was happening, what was going to emerge from this disruption from a work perspective. And I knew that, a lot of creativity would come from it because inevitably it does. And I never thought though that I would be generating anything in any sort of creative project out of it.

So I was very inspired by what was going on on the front line with health care workers and it was just such a weird time for everybody and wanting to help out but being completely restricted from doing so just meant that I applied my focus sort of elsewhere and I figured I'm one person whose income has stopped because of COVID.

There must be hundreds more like me and I, just very innocently, without really thinking about it or overthinking it, I put a post up on LinkedIn and I said I'm putting together a list of people who are available for work. If you're interested, join up, and I'll share this list with my clients.

But of course, I couldn't share the list with the, I mean, that's how not thought through the whole thing was from a GDPR perspective. I wouldn't be able to share their data with anybody, but I haven't thought about that. And I didn't want reality to get in the way of a of a, of a good idea. But I thought very little of it.

And a couple of days later realized that it was really kind of gaining traction. And I was starting to get a lot of messages from people reaching out to me, wanting to know about it, wanting to go on the list. And it sort of mushroomed. And within a couple of weeks, I had spoken to a former colleague of mine from my agency days and tried to get them to come along the journey with me and we talked about it.

We talked about what it could be, how we could take it from a pro bono initiative into a business, what it would look like, what the model would be, what the proposition would be, and we decided to go for it. So the initial post on LinkedIn went out around the 1st of May and we launched the business then on the 4th of July as The Indie List.

And yeah, so it was a fantastic time and we didn't really know what we were doing. And yeah, but that was how it all started.

Nigel Rawlins: So it was an idea and it struck, when I asked you about the pitching, because I thought, oh, you're working for the advertising agencies trying to get the job with the companies, but you're working with the companies to help them run that process. And that was in Ireland, wasn't it?

Úna Herlihy: That was in Ireland. Yeah. Yeah. And it was great. I loved it.

Nigel Rawlins: One of our guests was Tash Menon, who worked in London, working for some big companies. And she was interviewing people to do their advertising and their marketing. And she realized that she wanted to pick and choose and create her own teams. And that, and she did that really well in London.

When she came back to Australia, she set up an agency to do that so that when a company wants to do their branding in Asia, she curates a team just like you're doing the, the benefit you've got is you're on an island, which is called Ireland

Úna Herlihy: Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: With a good population of about 5 million. So you're sort of I don't know, contained in many ways. And that's the other interesting thing about LinkedIn that you mentioned, that you were able to put up an idea and you got traction out of that. LinkedIn can be quite interesting like that.

Úna Herlihy: I mean, it started on LinkedIn for sure. And we use LinkedIn a lot for our own marketing activity and for networking but there was another aspect of it that kind of helped it to gain momentum and it was we benefited from a huge amount of goodwill from the start because it was a genuine effort to help out in a, in a, in a really kind of weird time and a scary time for a lot of people. And myself and my co founder Peter, we both have worked in the industry for a long time. We both have benefited enormously from working with the people that we've worked with in our industry. And we really appreciate that. And for us, this was a way that we could kind of give back, I guess.

And that's, and as I say, we had no master plan. We didn't intend on setting up a business. We just wanted to help. We wanted to do something and then we saw the opportunity. So I think when it happened and we got the momentum on LinkedIn, we also had quite a lot of PR, and that was generating more goodwill for us. And it was just fantastic. It was just a wonderful experience. And yeah, really, really kind of treasure, treasure the memory of it, even though it's not that long ago.

Nigel Rawlins: So it was a good idea at the right time.

Úna Herlihy: Yeah, for sure.

Nigel Rawlins: It's interesting. A lot of things changed through COVID, all the lockdowns were probably not a good thing with hindsight, but we didn't know at the time, but it created a whole lot of interesting ways of working, and I think a lot of people decided they want to work for themselves.

Well, let's talk about the Indie list. Can you explain what it is and how it works?

Úna Herlihy: Yeah, so the Indie List is I suppose a marketplace for freelancers in marketing and communications. We represent quite a broad range of talents in the marketing industry. Not quite the A to Z of roles, but the A to W. So everything from AI specialists to advertising, art directors and copywriters, creative directors, photographers, producers, a lot of digital talent, and then a lot of very senior C suite marketing professionals who probably wouldn't necessarily refer to themselves as freelancers, probably more consultants, and I know you, I know we'll talk about that at some point but what we do is we, we curate lists of appropriate people. for different client projects that we're asked to respond to.

We refer to ourselves as a high tech, well, we're not high tech. We need to become more high tech, but we are high touch. That's, I guess, part of our current operating system. So clients will come to us, they will they'll tell us what they need. Sometimes they will know precisely what they're looking for, and other times they might need a little bit of help in, in trying to kind of work out the requirements and of course we're absolutely happy to input in that way because I guess from both of our experiences of working in agencies, you're able to kind of fairly quickly understand the mix of people required to create a campaign or address a particular marketing challenge. So yeah, we take a lot of time in first of all trying to understand what the client requirement is and then making sure that the people we put forward for the role are as good a match for the client as possible.

So what that means is rather than let's say a platform like maybe Fiverr or Upwork or something that's more self serve. Clients have to rely on their own assessment of the particular freelancer. We spend our time all the time reviewing people's portfolios, checking out their references, really try to understand who they are, what their skills are, how relevant they are for a particular role.

So we take all that leg work away from the client and we make a very, you know, tight recommendation. So it's almost like the, the agency selection work that I did when I was running pitches was like matchmaking on a macro level. This is kind of more micro matching. And, and sometimes it works and sometimes none of the candidates are right for the role.

But, in that situation, we, we take the feedback on board and we refine our search and, and hopefully we'll come out with a perfect match, second time around. So that's really how it works. Our platform allows us to post jobs on our on our jobs board.

And all of our members who are onboarded are either invited to a particular project to review it and, and, and consider it and accept it. Or otherwise we'll publish it on our jobs board and, and people can apply as, as required.

So that's how it works. I guess the other thing maybe to say about the Indie List is, our mantra is around helping people earn, learn and connect.

So, earn is obviously all the work that we do to get people jobs and projects and help them earn money. But, you know my own experience of working as a freelancer from 2005 until effectively 2020, so 15 years, there was no Indie List when I went out on my own and very few people in client service were freelancing.

So I learned an awful lot of lessons the hard way. And I realized what the big pain points are for people working on their own. We always say that freelancing gives you great freedom and great flexibility, but it's not without its challenges. And you you kind of have to be wired in, in a certain way to to be okay with that.

First of all, it can be uncertain. It can be very isolating, kind of can be lonely. You have to really kind of work hard at certain areas that you might have taken for granted in a salaried position like business development or networking, which is difficult for some people and often actually without wanting to generalize, but creative people sometimes find it hard to network, I think, outside of their own sort of skill set, and apologies if any creatives are offended by that.

So, we wanted to create, in the Indie List, we wanted to create a place where people could find work, but also network, learn, and be part of a like minded community. So what we've done is like every couple of weeks we'll put on a webinar, we call them our LOL sessions learn over lunch and we usually bring somebody in.

Like we had Melissa Liberman in a couple of weeks ago and she was amazing and we have another woman, faye Goldstein, who's a portfolio and proposal specialist. So we put on a webinar every couple of weeks and really they're designed to help people around the more sort of difficult aspects of freelancing, your financial management, your tax affairs, marketing yourself, pricing yourself.

And there's just so much more that we can do. Like AI, I mean, we've brought in a few people to talk about AI and things like sort of storytelling and how important storytelling is, regardless of what you do. We put on webinars every couple of weeks designed to deal with a particular pain point for freelancers. And we get some really good engagement with, with sort of a slow burn, but it's, it's brilliant having access to people like Jon Younger and Melissa and Alina, all these amazing mavens who are available and so kind to come on our, our webinars and, and impart their wisdom.

So that's a really important part of what we do. And then we're also trying to leverage our connections in the business to provide discounts on certain services. So one of the big pain points for freelancers is just kind of your accountancy affairs and your bookkeeping and how how to sort of change your thinking from somebody who was in a job to now somebody who has to manage all aspects of their own financial life.

And that's a big transition for people. So we have a relationship, a partnership with another company where they've offered discounted rates for our members. We've partnered with the Digital Marketing Institute to offer seriously discounted courses. We've partnered with car insurance companies and health insurers to offer discounts off those services.

So, and none of that is revenue generating for us. It's all part of, I suppose, the community and the culture that we want to build within the Indie List. It's where it started and it's very much a kind of a central part of what we do. When we see people who decide to leave their jobs and work for themselves and that they're realistic about what's involved and they've thought it through and they're super talented, we tip our hat to them and say we're, we're here to be a, a sort of a support structure for you. A soft place to land if you decide you want to work for yourself. And it's yeah, so that's, that's been great.

Nigel Rawlins: Making that shift is a big shift from a job to running your own business. And, and that's what I think a lot of independent professionals have got to understand it's not all work for the client. You have to work on the business and your own stuff. So in terms of that learning, how do you sort of explain to the employers who are looking for the talent how to work with the talent? Do you help them learn how all that works?

Úna Herlihy: You know what, I'd love to say yes, but we're not there yet, but it certainly is a really big, I guess, problem to be solved, we estimate that there's probably about 18 to 20,000 people working in the industry in Ireland. And so that includes, let's call them clients like brand side marketeers.

And then about another 3000– 4,000 working agencies, so your ad agencies, media, PR and so on, so they say essentially they service the clients and then about 7, 000 work for themselves. So that's about one in three people in our industry working for themselves. And there's still barriers to companies sort of leaning into that and embracing it.

Structures that don't enable agility. And so we, we preach about creating conditions for freelancers or self employed solopreneurs coming in to complement an existing team. But we are, right now, concentrated purely on getting the business running as efficiently as we can, getting new business, building and improving our infrastructure on our platform infrastructure.

And, I think the education part of the job, which is really important, is something that I'd say we need to clone ourselves three or four times to to do it, but sure, it's something that we have to do. We're not, we're not actively doing it at the moment because it's just kind of insurmountable right now to us because we're such a tiny team.

It's still just myself and Peter and Amanda, who's our community manager and she's a freelancer. Our support team are people who do our SEO and our bookkeeping and our legal. They're all freelance and we've just employed our first business development person. So we're, we're still very much a startup, I guess.

Nigel Rawlins: What I was thinking about was that, nowadays, some things are moving so fast, that a business, if they want to employ somebody to do a particular job, it can take several months, and then it can take them several months to get up to speed.

But there's lots of talented people available, who could start tomorrow in many ways, who know what they're on about, and could get a project moving together, and an organisation like yours. Like the Indie List can put a team together fairly fast and have them on the ground fairly fast, even if it's, they're working remotely.

And companies have got to start realizing that if, if they want to work in a fast moving industry, there's no sitting around.

Úna Herlihy: Yeah, yeah, it's true, somebody was connected with me on LinkedIn, had a fairly pressing requirement that I think what might have been due to somebody needing to take time for a personal bereavement, I think, within her family.

And they needed somebody for a short time. And they couldn't get around HR and that just seems really inefficient and wrong, because, therefore you have a team internally that's very, very stretched and very burnt out. And I I don't think you can do your best work under those circumstances.

Nigel Rawlins: I think I was speaking to Robert Vlach, and he was telling me that, it might've been him, or it might've been one of the other guests, talking about how a lot of companies use temp agencies already. So they're used to it, but they just don't get the idea that a freelancer or an independent professional can be part of that mix as well.

Úna Herlihy: Yeah, I think that there is a mindset over freelancers. I think there's a kind of a perception that you use freelancers in case of an emergency, almost to stop the bleeding, and that's fine. There are some freelance roles that can respond really quickly and jump in really, really quickly. But obviously the more time you can afford to find the right person for it often pays off. You have freelancers who will be able to like jump into a job straight away. So some freelancers, some self employed people will identify as freelance. They tend to be, in my experience creative. So freelance copywriters, art directors, graphic designers.

And then there will be other people who won't necessarily identify as a freelancer, but rather they'd call themselves a consultant. And I think when you say consultant to hiring manager, they think it's going to be somebody who's going to sort of not get stuck into the work, but take an outside in approach, view and sort of consult on that rather than actually rolling the sleeves up and doing the work. And so I think that there definitely is a role to, to educate or to challenge hiring managers assumptions of the type of talent that is available, how they work, what they do, and how to best find them, and, and manage their contracts. And I think that's where we come in. We can understand the need, find the people, embed them in the role. And so for us, I mean, a big part of our new biz drive is going to be going out and showing customers, the breadth and range of talent that there is and how easy it is to work with them to find them and work with them.

If you can kind of open your thinking and challenge the way you currently work, so that you can respond to the, the range of challenges that the marketing services industry is facing right now. There's a myriad of challenges, and as you said previously there's a huge amount of change.

And it seems like the rate and the pace of that change in our industry is so overwhelming. Obviously even more so now because of AI and when I was started working in this industry we used to talk about annual brand planning there is, that's such a luxury from the past, you have to be able to react on the spin of a dime now.

Nigel Rawlins: If you are talented and you've decided you want to work for yourself. And you want that person to work for your organization and they don't want to work for you anymore, then maybe you're going to have to come to the terms that it's, it's better to have that person maybe working on a project for you or on a fractional basis, maybe than hoping that they're going to work for you because they don't want to do that anymore.

Úna Herlihy: they don't.

Nigel Rawlins: What do people call themselves? I know we've talked about freelancing, independent consultants, independent professionals. What are your thoughts on what do we call ourselves?

Úna Herlihy: What do we call ourselves? Oh my gosh, I think I don't think there's an easy answer to that. I think some people call themselves freelancers. Others call themselves solopreneurs, independent consultants, independent professionals. I think it's it's changing all the time. And, and that's, I guess kind of interesting as well because it just shows you, to my mind, that how so many, so many really, really skilled people are deciding or realizing that they can have a career without the the structure of the permanent, employer and, and all that comes with that.

So yeah, I think it's all of the above.

Nigel Rawlins: What do you need to do to get listed on your platform? What sort of things are you expecting people to provide you with if they want to be on the Indie list?

Úna Herlihy: Yeah, so well, we want really experienced people who are very serious about the work that they do. So to sign up at the Indie List, right now you go to our platform, you click on the link to register as an Indie Lister, and then you're taken onto our platform where we will, we will ask you a number of questions.

And There begins the onboarding process. So the things that we'll want to know is I guess your elevator pitch. How would you describe yourself? What are your skills and expertise? What's your professional experience? Where have you worked before? What your rates are? What your availability is?

And we would expect a CV at the very least, or if you're a creative a link to your portfolio, ideally a website. And when we have captured all the information that we need to get, we make a fairly I suppose we review all the information and we make an assessment as to the suitability of the individual to the type of work that we get and the kind of client work that we have and the sorts of client relationships that we have.

Some people will get through, not everyone will get through because they haven't provided the information that we need or they haven't engaged with us. So when we have all the information, we admit them into the talent pool and then depending on their particular skill set and any particular demand in the market.

If we don't know them we'll schedule a call to get to know them a bit better. As you said earlier, Ireland is an island nation of about five million people. In our industry, it's relatively small, about 22, 000. Our network is pretty good.

We know a lot of people who have signed up. And if we don't know them first hand, they're second hand connections or third hand connections and so we can very quickly get feedback on individuals if we need to. It just kind of goes to show you the real importance of building your personal brand and your reputation as a self employed person.

Because basically when somebody rings up another person to say what's Nigel Rawlins like, you want to be pretty sure what that person is going to say about you from a professional perspective anyway, if you're, if you're really serious about I suppose being successful as a self employed person.

So yeah, and then we'll schedule a time to speak. Get to know them, encourage them to turn up at our events, get involved in as much as they can. And they then are able to apply for. a job or a particular project. And yeah, we try to, we try to keep it as easy as possible, but it's a platform and sometimes it glitches, but we're, we're kind of a work in progress.

So that's kind of, that's the sort of the, the journey. We, we handle all the admin and the billing and all of that sort of stuff because there's there's nothing worse than a freelancer having to continually chase up a client for payment and sometimes it can get a bit awkward and the freelancer doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds and all of that we've no problem going after the money and our view is that people should be paid fairly and on time. And we, we have a a two week payment term clause with our clients. Now, it's not always observed and it's not always enforced, but you know, I think we've gotten our clients to a point where they're pretty good at paying us certainly within 30 days.

And it just means then for us that we can pay the freelancers and they don't experience those sort of painful cashflow worries. Speaking from experience, I've stayed awake many nights staring at the ceiling worried about money. And when we set up the Indie List, that was the one thing that we wanted to do.

And, and the one piece of advice I would give to every person considering freelance is get an accountant because you just spend so much time trying to understand it. And for some people like myself, just hand it over to somebody who really knows what they're doing and concentrate on the stuff that you're really good at and lights you up.

Nigel Rawlins: I totally agree. So one of the things the Wisepreneurs podcast is about is encouraging older professionals who may wish to become independent professionals, with your Indie list, what sort of age groups do you have on there? Do you encourage older professionals?

Úna Herlihy: Yeah there is a mix. The average age of our Membership is about 46. We don't tend to have too many people who are three or four years into their careers. A lot of, a lot of people in our industry at that stage they're trying to learn the business.

They're maybe at a life stage that needs them to have a bit more security. So what we see in this market anyway is that most people who are freelance. are working probably about 15 years plus, but you know, so we would have people in our community ranging probably from their mid 20s, not a huge amount with the bulk of people being over 45.

We've people in their 60s, trying to think, do we have people in their 70s, but the people who are probably most active in roles are, I'd say, between the age of 30 and 50. But we're finding that freelancers, particularly creative freelancers who are in the industry, let's say 30 years or so have been freelancing for maybe about 15 years.

They're finding it tough, there's a lot of pressure on rates and there's a lot of I suppose technology has displaced a lot of creatives in, in some ways. Copywriters might have been doing much more kind of conceptual work 15 years ago Now, writers are working on projects which require long form copywriting or very sort of niche copywriting. And of course, social media and brand publishing has completely changed how brands present themselves now to their customer base. And obviously, those Types of channels tend to, I guess, favor people who are digital natives, have grown up with digital rather than, like me, having it foisted upon me.

So there's a lot of pressure for senior creatives, I would say, more so than marketing consultants, project managers and, and so on. But there's a lot of ageism in the advertising industry. If I was still working in an agency right now at 55, I would really feel a target on my back and that's very sad. So there's probably if you think of our industry, three to four thousand people work in agencies in our industry by our calculations, which are based on kind of LinkedIn data.

About nearly 4, 000 people working in agencies, about 7, 000 freelance. So arguably there's more talent outside of agencies than there is inside. But the agency model has been kind of very messed up, I think, for a long time. And, you need agility and some agencies are absolutely brilliant at keeping a kind of a small core team and then expanding as they need, but overall kind of keeping the overhead down, because my sense is that if you've got a whole bunch of people sitting on salaries and they're on the balance sheet all the time, you have to ensure that the work that they're doing is feeding the machine. It may not necessarily be the right thing for the client, but it's feeding the agency machine to keep it going. But change is hard and I've probably very few of the answers, but, I hope I don't sort of make it sound too simplistic.

Nigel Rawlins: I'm hearing that with the change and the fact that there are talented people available, that having a fixed group of people sitting there is not necessarily the best model anymore.

Úna Herlihy: Yeah, it's really important that you have consistency of people, so client service and planning is really important to have the same team because it's back to the quality of the relationship, which builds up over time. The core relationship should be very, very strong.

And then the agency to be able to pull in, assemble a team really, really quickly, but still really own and max out on the client relationship because that's what agencies actually, certainly when I started working in the business, that's what agencies were brilliant at building a relationship with the client.

But sadly it has become quite a lot about blended rates and cutting costs, and it's kind of sad and in fact, the, the agency that I spent eight years of my career in, which I absolutely loved, going in there every single day, it was an agency called Irish International, and I got so many amazing opportunities in, in that agency and it was acquired by one of the networked agencies, and it has merged in under another agency, but the brand name is gone, the building is gone, the place is gone, and a lot of the people are, are also gone, and that's kind of sad.

I was sad about that.

Nigel Rawlins: So tell me, what are the employers looking for at the moment? So what is the biggest demand there and are you seeing some themes that are coming for the future?

Úna Herlihy: Yeah. So, digital marketing, content creation, performance marketing, SEO. There's always demand for copywriters, particularly specialist writers. Always demand for social media content creators. People who can kind of work really fast. Interestingly, a lot of people looking for people, just to work on Canva, just like kind of down and dirty, generate lots of content. But there is also a very big demand for senior people who can kind of get stuck in to big kind of strategic issues with the brand, manage a particular project, always a demand for account handlers.

Particularly at that kind of account manager level, which is always a sort of a hard one for us to respond to because the individual is more likely to be in a, in a permanent role because of their age and life stage. But if they decided to go freelance, I'd say they would make so much more money than they would in, in their job.

They're very much in demand because they kind of keep the show on the road. They keep everything sort of ticking over. And strategic planners, brand planners, digital planners very much in demand. We're now starting to see a demand for AI specialists. So people who can come in and deliver training to brand and marketing teams.

And that's a sort of an exciting space for us to be in because we've got some really amazing people in that area. But it could change. I mean, it just changes so, so quickly. And because we're only three and a half years old, it's hard to definitively sort of point to our jobs board and pull out sort of trends.

It could be anything. And and so that's, that's what makes it really exciting. And that's what makes it, it makes it feel like so many people actually could get some work with us because every job is quite different, every role is quite different and it's really exciting for us if we can sort of really quickly know who the right person for the job is.

That's just the sweet spot for, for me. It's like when you're talking to a client and they are sort of, kind of offloading their problems and talking about it and saying, if only this type of person existed and it might be what they would refer to as a unicorn. But actually it might be just a Jack of all trades who is really good at lots of different things and has a really good attitude and has some great references.

And they often are the unicorn that the client is looking for, but the client has kind of gone it needs to fit this sort of job spec. And it's just lovely when you can say, you know what, I have the absolute perfect person for you. And I was talking to her yesterday and she's available and she happens to love insert your brand here. And then to be able to sort of not kind of dilly dally and mess around, just make the introduction and get on with it. Problem solved. Client wins, freelancer wins. And when when they win, then we win. So it's the triple win. The trifecta.

Nigel Rawlins: Fantastic. Let's start finishing up. How would you like people to connect with you and contact you?

Úna Herlihy: Oh, well I'd love people to contact me, so you can get me on LinkedIn. You can send me an email at una at indylist. ie I know you'll probably include it in the notes. You can send me a carrier pigeon or message in a bottle. But LinkedIn is probably the best way to to get me.

And yeah, I'd love to, love to hear from anybody who'd be interested. This is the great thing about the World Wide Web. Very much accelerated by COVID, which was this idea that if you are on the other side of the world, there is no problem about communicating. And, and that was the really wonderful thing about COVID.

There were a lot of people that I connected with in the States over the last 10 years. And I would have always sort of thought, oh, if I ever go to America, I must look them up and go for coffee or whatever. And I ended up just kind of reaching out to them over COVID and we had a coffee on Zoom and it was just fantastic.

So that's what I think is really, it's really great about being able to sit on this podcast with you in someplace in, in Victoria. What's the name of the village or the town?

Nigel Rawlins: Clifton Springs. So it's South of Melbourne, South of Geelong. It's a hundred kilometres South of Melbourne.

Úna Herlihy: Wow

Nigel Rawlins: Una, thank you very much for being my guest on the Wisepreneurs podcast.

Úna Herlihy: Thank you, Nigel. I really, really enjoyed it. And I hope I didn't rabbit on too long about anything. But no, it was really, it was really nice.