The Freelancing Market Is About To Explode (Here's Proof)

Hey guys, Michael Elliott here. I understand it feels crowded right now. Competition is up, margins are tight, everyone feels replaceable. But here's the thing that most people don't tell you. The outsourcing market is heading towards half a trillion dollars by 2030. Most founders are literally drowning. They don't know what direction to go in with AI or with advertisement in general. They don't want to learn Make.com or NAN. They're hiring people on high salaries who don't know anything about automations. And they want someone who speaks business and systems. And guess what? That is you. That is me. Today I'm going to map out exactly where you fit, why the numbers tell you that now is the time to shoot. If you're sitting on the fence, if you need a confidence booster, or if you just want to know what the market's going to look like moving forward, this is the video for you. And by the end of it, you're going to be able to understand exactly where you can position yourself in this market. Because if you took a very, very small slice of this pie, you would make significant amounts of money. So let's have a look. Michael Elliott, who am I? I own a 7-figure PPC agency annually, $4.2 million in the last 4 years. I'm an expert vetted Upwork freelancer. I'm in the top 1% globally, uh, with just under half a million earnings on the platform. I own a holiday park here in the UK, uh, which is a cash-flowing business and a high-value asset. Um, and also I own a caravan trade company in the UK, which is called We Are Static Buyers. Last year we had 2,600 leads. A lot of businesses have leads, but what they don't do is they don't have two-way SMS and email sequences that contact them and keep them hot. So we turned to just under 2,600 leads into 2,040 conversations. Out of that, we ended up with 1,143, I think the real number is, uh, of photos uploaded. Now don't shoot me on the numbers here, but I think that's somewhere around like 58%. That's a very high rate from a conversation to an actual booked SQL. And if you to go back a step further and look at the amount that we actually generate from an inquiry, that is a significant volume all on autopilot. So what I'm going to show you next is an Excalibord graph, and it's a very, very basic graph, but it's one that's designed to give you very clear clarity before I dive each into each one. I have done some research in perplexity that you need to see. I have been in your position where you might be thinking, is this for me? Is this getting too saturated? Is this going to become too populated with people who do exactly what I do? But what they don't look at is the fact that the market is growing. There's more people, but there's more pie. And that's exactly how you need to look at this, because that's exactly what's happening. It's the same in the PPC field for me. Marketing is the first function businesses give away when they're overwhelmed. They outsource media buying, creative production, funnel builds, tracking analytics. That's what they do. Marketing is also the, the start of a domino. These could effectively be dominoes. If you don't have marketing that's generating leads, then you don't have any, anybody to make any sales because you can't sell to somebody who's not an inquiry. Then you— well, that's not technically true, but if you're not generating sales, it might— any inquiries, you can't make sales. Then you can't onboard anybody if you don't make a sale. You can't fulfill a service for somebody if you don't make a sale or you don't onboard anyone. And you can't deliver the actual project to the fulfillment that you've delivered because you have no one to fulfill to. And then you can't retain any clients because you don't have any. These are almost in exact order, but they start here. This is the key one really. And from there, these ones are all messy. You can get away with running a business as long as you've got this, but it's very, very messy. So I'm not going to hang around on this too much, but this is the standard service-based business. And why did I pick a standard service-based business? Because service-based businesses are the businesses that you should be going after. If you're trying to sell PPC services and NAN flows, if you're trying to sell automation, this is the way that you should be going because service-based businesses have higher margins, they have MRR generally speaking, and they're willing to pay and are used to paying for this. So while saying that, let me show you what I mean. When we come inside of here, marketing— this is for the marketing section. I've broken it down by each individual section. So we have the marketing section here. The US Small Business Administration benchmark is 7 to 8% of revenue is spent on marketing for companies under $5 million. Much of that in the service businesses is executed by agencies or freelancers. PPC, SEO, content creative— this should say AI as well, any sort of outsourced number. Let's just run the number. I've already done it here, but let's say it's 8%. If we think of $400,000 a year from a $5 million business, so if you do $5 million in revenue, you spend $400K on people like us. Like, does that not just blow your mind straight away? $5 million sounds like a lot. It's not a lot in businesses, especially in America. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of businesses doing $5 million in revenue in, in the US. I could ask that question. I don't think it's in here, but the point isn't that. The point is that if they spend £400K, if you have a £2.5 million business, then it becomes millions and millions, but they spend £200K on it. And if you have a business doing £1.25K a year, like me, for example, like having multiple ones, the, the caravan business does a lot more, but it's smaller margins. When it comes down to that, then you would have £100K if you were doing £1.25 million a year. Those 3 numbers. So this is for £5 million. This is for £2.5 million a year. And this is $1.25 million a year in revenue, and these are the spends. This opens up— I don't know how many businesses in the US, tens of millions of businesses are available that are spending hundreds of thousands a year on you. It's proven in the data. I've checked the sources. I won't be recording a video on it if it didn't. Uh, so some are obviously more reputable than others. The Small Business Administration benchmark is that. That should give you a massive sense of opportunity. If you do not look at that and think, oh my gosh, businesses doing just over a million a year spend $100,000 a year minimum. This is, this is average. Some might spend a little bit less, but some spend a lot more because they're trying to power growth. Then you want a very small slice of that cake. Let's say you want $1,000 a month retainer. Yeah, that's $12,000 out of $100,000. The opportunity is ridiculous. And if your salary now is $50,000 or $40,000 or whatever it is, even higher, $100,000, all you need to do is generate 10 of those businesses, give them a good service, and you've got a lifestyle business for life. It's, it's insane. Start thinking of it as a glass half full, because this is what this number's showing us. And this is where things get juicy, because typical small mid businesses working with marketing agencies— so this has chosen marketing agencies, AI will fall underneath this effectively— paying $2,500 to $7,500 USD per month in retainers. And mid-market firms often invest $7,500 to $20,000 a month for freelancers, equivalent to $50 to $150 an hour. What this means is that our fees are significantly cheaper than what they're actually paying, even on the lower end. If they do it for $2,500 with a revolving door of staff members and a very low quality level of individual people— and I don't mean that to offend anybody, but I've been in the agency model and I've seen it. Like it's inexperienced people coming through the door, being given work, being hidden behind experienced individuals. This $2,500 is not what you would deliver for $1,000, even like, you know, $2,000. They get direct access to the best talent. My Upwork profile, that's exactly the pitch on Upwork really. It's like, you know, you get access to the top talent in the space by working with me. Instead of paying an agency where the member of staff is going to leave every 6 months. I'm going nowhere. Like, this is my— it's my career, it's what I do. The only thing I disagree with is this: don't ever get caught in an hourly rate scenario. The way that we quote projects and the way that you quote projects from this day forward is— let's go back to this— doesn't matter which one of these that you are fixing, okay? Doesn't matter which one of these that we fit, and they're all going to be covered. You, you quote based off of value proposition. And what that means is their onboarding— onboarding is a great one because it's usually a massive pile of shit for businesses. Like, it's usually a complete mess. It's a good place to start because normally it's a real mess. Now, when it comes down to onboarding businesses, let's say you save a business, I don't know, 50 hours a week, so 200 hours a month. You— and the very cute thing here, and I need to do a video on this, on how to sell— what I do is during the conversation, I extract all the dollar amounts from the business. So like onboarding, I asked them who's involved in onboarding. Well, it's obviously the guy who sold because he has to submit this form. And then it's this person here in the customer service team who has to submit this sheet and they have to go through this step. And I work it all out. And let's say this number comes out at like $150 an hour or whatever that number is. If we do 150, I should probably know how to do this without it, but that's $30,000 USD a month that you're saving that business. For $30,000 USD a month, you should be able to command a $5K retainer because that's what you've saved them. If not, and you go higher on the setup fee to make sure— it depends, it's all about your pricing. I'm not going to get into pricing today, it's not what I'm trying to teach you. But what I'm trying to show you is it's all— you should quote based off a value proposition, not off the fact that you can fix it in good time. I'll cover why later, because it's really important that you then productize each individual thing so you can slot it in for businesses to save you time. Increases your margin on the build. If you're brand new and you're starting out, you're going to have to be in a position where you maybe kiss a few frogs, right? You're going to have to look at some smaller projects, take them on. Heck, do things for free for video testimonials to get your name out there. But once you do that, you have the ability to be able to, you know, you have the ability to be able to showcase that you can deliver this, and then you can tap into what we've just discussed. So when it comes down to that, those sorts of things, that is really, really, really, you know, it's critical. It's heading towards $50 billion a year by 2030, and it's heading there at a 7 to 10% rate per year. We're in a situation where, let's say this is the current in-house scheme and this is the current outsourced scheme that we're running. We're in a position where this is going to become the in-house team and this is going to become the outsourced team. You see the size and the difference of these boxes? More, more outsourcing is going to happen. And why? Because businesses claim that they are in— look, you can see this, the US sales and marketing BPO is estimated at about $9.1 billion in 2024, covering outsourced lead gen, inside sales, SDR teams, and CRM operations, because there's a bit of a crossover between these two. This is what this data is telling us. This is— it's shrinking. Businesses are finding it more expensive and less ROI-based if they actually hire in-house teams. If they hire in-house teams, they end up in a worse position than if they build the teams themselves. People are often more skilled. Let's say you go all in on onboarding. You can onboard better than any sales representative, like sales development rep, or any AI enthusiast that they hire because things have popped out. I mean, who's an AI— they don't know what's going on. This is our chance, boys, girls. This is our chance. Like, it's crazy. This is where a lot of agency and freelancer money flows, right? Appointment setting, outbound, and conversion rate optimisation on the sales side. This is what I've just shown you inside of We Are Static Buyers. If I did not have automated SMS sequences set up here, I would not have got a response from these leads. The amount of leads that come back to us out of hours late at night, honestly, you wouldn't believe it. And that's why we get photos uploaded. We wake up every day and we've got like 5, 6, 7 leads sometimes that have uploaded photos, effectively booked calls overnight, and we haven't been doing anything. Sales used to be desks in an office. Now it's workflows and outsourced teams, outsourced components like outbound list building, appointment setting, SDR agency pipeline dashboards, CRM automations. All of these things, they fall into that. Who does this come into. Who's this for? It's for, you know, Make, NAN specialists, Zapier specialists, cold email automation implementers, lead routing automators, AI assistant for SDRs to make their job easier, right? Sales is a key segment inside that growing sales and marketing outsourcing bucket. Okay. It, because it is a bucket, they are heavily grouped together and it's a really good opportunity from an AI perspective. I've got another visual here, um, which I want to go through with you. When it comes down to the AI stuff, I want to stick with the numbers that we're looking at right now. Onboarding and fulfillment, right? So sales, onboarding, and fulfillment. Customer service is the single most outsourced function globally. If you're looking for somewhere to start that's already proven, here's your, here's your man. Onboarding, 38% of, of businesses outsourcing customer service, email, chat, and phone. That is an incredible figure. 80% of businesses around the globe leverage outsourcing. Outsourcing can boost efficiency by up to 25%. It can lead to a 25% reduction in time to market. IT services and BPO account for 72% of global outsourcing, and 25% of real estate agents outsourced property management tasks. These sources are reputable and they're showing us exactly what we want to hear. Like, this is exactly what we want to see. Virtual assistants and offshore teams handling order processing, admin, and basic operations can cut overheads by up to 78% versus a full-time employee. Just show your customers, literally show your next inquiry this video, right, and say, look at this, this is why you hire me. This— many services businesses bolt them onto fulfilment and delivery, and you can just continue to expand. If we go to the Xkali draw and just have a little look at this graph for a moment, So this is customer journey automation, and this is the customer mindset at every point. So marketing, I have a problem, I need, I need new business through the door. What are my options? Marketing and sales, retargeting, uh, you know, lead nurturing sequences, uh, cold outreach, PPC, everything that comes under the marketing. But in this crossover column, uh, you know, nurturing sequences, this is where you come in as an AI professional. Then sales, CRM workflows, automatic proposal generation, Appointment booking. There's so many things that you can do inside of the sales, even just like set up automated reminders and priority lists and things like that. You can do all of these things because the customer's mindset is they're ready to buy. So they, you know, once they buy, they come on board and these workflows run. Now onboarding is a really big thing for the customer where they think, did I make the right choice? This is where operations comes in, and we've just found out that's the most outsourced service globally. Welcome sequences, intake forms, kickoff automations. Do you know why this is so important? Because this is your first impression. Think of this as if you're a boy, then you're approaching a girl that you like the look of in a coffee shop. And if you're a girl, you're approaching a boy that you like inside of a coffee shop. Let's just say you are aware of it. So they're running good paid advertisements because they're in shape, whatever, they look good. You— the nurturing funnel in your brain is kind of telling you like, maybe I should speak to this person, I quite like them. Then a bunch of automations fire off in your brain like, how do I approach them? How do I make it not look like this and that? How do I make it look like it's not too forward or whatever? And right at that point, your welcome sequence starts. And your welcome sequence is your first impression to that individual. It's how you come across. And if your welcome system is completely broken and you don't know how to let someone into your life, let someone into you, you have no chance. You're gonna immediately put a wall up between you and the person. I use that analogy— there's probably better analogies out there than to say that, but dating is not, is not an automated sequence. But what I'm saying is, just if you think about it from that perspective of how important that first impression is. That's why your onboarding process is the same. You could say the same in business, in anything, networking, whatever. You could have picked any example, but so what? I picked dating, like, live with it. Uh, when it comes down to fulfillment and delivery, am I getting value? This is where they start to question it. So they've been onboarded, right? Your service delivery has to be bang on the money. Project management, reporting, dashboard, SOPs that ensure that service delivery is done exactly the same way for every single client. Not that one bigger client gets a better service than this one. This is different tiers. Everybody gets the same service and the same sort of principles from your company as what they would do from anywhere else. And then customer success, which is key retention and loyalty, lifecycle emails, churn prevention, upsell sequences. These are all critical to maintaining a high MRR. The numbers again back this up when it comes down to like the retention that we just looked at. Outsource customer support, lifecycle email, CRM management, and loyalty programs sit it here. These are cited as your core use case in sales and marketing BPO, especially for SaaS and recurring revenue businesses. What did I tell you at the start? Recurring revenue businesses prioritise this so much because this is their growth. They could not bring on another client this year, but if they— you had a correct upsell strategy and a correct retention strategy, they could grow, which is nuts. But that's how it works when you have MRR. That's why they're the best business models. As expectations rise, 90% of customers say immediate responses from support are important, which pushes businesses towards 24/7 outsourced support desks and chat teams rather than purely in-house. We all know how dangerous and how bad that can be for a business if not done properly. But if you build it a two-way AI agent that can ensure that they feel like they're in a— I say AI agent, a two-way AI chatbot, you know, a two-way AI system that actually answers queries that pulls from a knowledge base., that can answer direct questions. I've built this for SaaS reporting about Canada, built a system which used their actual knowledge base to answer very, very specific queries about their SaaS platform, and the results that they saw were incredible. That's why, uh, businesses with monthly recurring revenue prioritize that so much. When it comes down to a typical US-based business, they're currently dropping $200K a year on spending on, on us. Why do you feel like you cannot take a slice of that cake. I do not care if the— you're watching this video for the first time and you're in a position where you have never sold an automation, you've never built an automation, you've never run a PPC campaign, you don't know anything about a business, because there's people like me giving out the game for free, and you don't need to spend that long learning it. It's not a huge steep learning curve. You just have to understand the importance of each individual business. And do you know why anyone can do it? Because you've all been a customer, so you understand all of the pain points. You understand everything that could go wrong when it comes down to customer service. You know it because you've experienced it. Some things you've liked, some things you haven't liked, some things you have made— has made you cancel a service, some you haven't. You couple that together with a bit of ambition and a little bit of get up and go because you're in a massively growing market that's growing from $28 billion to $50 billion in the space of 4 years, then somebody tell me why we aren't out here gunning and shooting for the stars. Well, I am, but like, why everybody shouldn't be? This is a really, really, really important message. And at the back end, over a third of businesses outsource customer service. As you look at that, in the US alone, $9 billion is spent on outsourced sales and marketing processes from SDRs, but you know, to done-for-you lead gen. So like, and obviously cold email is a big one, but even my arena, the PPC space, let me know in the comments if you want to know more about that. I could teach you everything about that along with AI because I've done it for so long. Listen, I had to put this video together for you because I'm— I've heard a few people say to me, but now it's oversaturated now. Like it's changing too much. Agentic workflows are here. People are gonna be using them. Trust me, businesses do not have a clue how to implement AI into their business. They just hire this guy who then hires people like us, and that's the fact. I've seen it, I've lived it, I've made millions doing it. My name's Michael Elliott. I hope this has inspired you on your journey. Drop me a like, drop me a comment, hype the video, subscribe. I give away a lot of value for free. I'm committed to my journey. This isn't easy to do and to continue to push. And all of your support for every single like, comment, subscription, whatever, it all means the world to me. Thank you, and I'll catch you in the next one.