by Greg Lusk, Founder of Liveforce

With the events industry being a large player in the world of freelancing it is time for event staffing agencies to start paying attention to this popular work style.

In the UK the freelancing workforce is growing at an incredible rate, If we use freelancing trade body IPSE’s definition, there are 2 million freelancers in the UK –  with 1.77 million working as freelancers full-time. The remaining 234,000 freelance as a supplement to their main source of income.

Strategising the Freelance Workforce

As the number of freelancers grow within a staffing agency there needs to be a strong focus on integration and communication.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for event freelancer management is the inability to effectively engage with the internal and external teams. Resulting in endless I ‘missed the memo’ responses or multiple meetings with varied outcomes.

The lack of communication tends to create overdue projects and additional expenses that even when you factored these in, seem to arrive unexpectedly. This means you need to think about event freelancers that you may work with for 1 day or 1 year – they need to be able to have all of the resources and capabilities to deliver work effectively and promptly.

In the real-world where technology evolves and develops at an incredible pace, the solution would be to ensure you have a single platform that delivers all of the functions of finding, onboarding, managing, communicating and paying event freelancers.

One Platform to Manage All

It’s important to accept that when it comes to a freelancing workforce, the standard HR playbook needs to be torn apart. An event freelancing workforce is a fluid ecosystem that doesn’t work well with centralised, stodgy HR processes thus the requirement for freelance management platforms that take the dispersed workforce and links it all together.

An all too common picture would be a data storage process for event freelancers consisting of post-it notes, notebooks, spreadsheets and sometimes notepad files. The lack of coercion between the information results in a massive buildup in time use when you need to find data, update it which requires finding files, finding old-data…you get the picture.

Whilst spreadsheets provide an easy to use portal for this data storage, it does become limited almost immediately when needing to directly post jobs, contact event freelancers and approve expenses and payroll.

Reading reviews, understanding previous work and experience are also vital which is where an all-in-one platform becomes handy.

With all of the above said, now is the time that event staffing agencies – large and small – start to look into the benefits of end-to-end platforms to ensure they are adapting to match the growing number of freelancers.

Through these pain area’s at Liveforce we wanted to develop a complete, end-to-end platform that does all of the above and then some. By taking industry experience and feedback we are well on the way to developing the perfect freelancer management system to ensure all areas are covered and your company grows with this exciting workforce.


Greg Lusk, Founder of Liveforce, is a creator and facilitator of change with over 18 years events industry experience.

Graduating in 2003 from Leeds Metropolitan University with BA Honours Degree in Event Management, Greg launched his events career with vigour. Whilst at uni he had also honed his skills as a freelancer, having worked across multiple projects on everything from product launches to national roadshows. Leaving freelancing behind Greg served 4 years at Catalyst Global – one of the biggest global franchises of teambuilding products.

In 2007 an offer to move to Norway lead to Greg’s instrumental role in building Scandinavia’s biggest communications agency. One of the ways he achieved this was to focus on experiential marketing and to help brands build better relationships with their consumers.

Two significant changes steered Greg toward the development of Liveforce. Greg identified in his work life, a lack of back office tools that would help the event’s industry work more professionally and efficiently. In his personal life, his growing family expedited a need to adjust his work schedule to fit with family life.

The combination of these two influential aspects led to the birth of Liveforce – and its first product- the first mobile crew management system. Future plans include the development of a suite of tools that seamlessly work together to further professionalise the Events Industry, focusing on the current gaps in back-office and behind the scenes technology.

Fascinated by detail in events, Greg believes that it’s the small things that have the ability to make a true impact.

Adam Parry
Author: Adam Parry

Adam is the co-founder and editor of www.eventindustrynews.com Adam, a technology evangelist also organises Event Tech Live, Europe’s only show dedicated to event technology and the Event Technology Awards. Both events take place in November, London.