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zeronini
Community Member

Real-world company with employees finding clients on Upwork?

I've been working successfully as a freelancer for the past 2 years and I intended to keep it up. However, I'd love to use my knowledge to create an actual, real-world company that hires employees for in-office work.

Of course, I'd love to continue finding clients with Upwork for this company because I love the platform and this would surely drastically increase the profits of both me and Upwork.

For the time being, I'd act as a sole manager of this agency/company on Upwork, finding clients and everything else required. 
The employees of the company would be full-time real-world employees, receiving regular salaries - not freelancers in any capacity.

With this in mind, employees would have no connection to Upwork at all and all of the work, quality, deadlines, etc. would be managed by me as the manager and founder.
This makes the most sense, as in the real world a client chooses the company - not the individual employee of it.

As agencies on Upwork are focused mainly on groups of freelancers working together (which is not the case here), I was wondering if something like this would even be possible?
In the unfortunate event that it is not, what would be the best alternative to this?

Looking forward to your reply!
Thank you very much,
Branko

ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Hi Branko,

 

As Petra explained, you can subcontract work on fixed-price contracts to your employees even if they don't have profiles on Upwork. Your client has to be aware of that.

If the contract is hourly, only the person who is hired on that contract can log in and track time on that contract. So if you start an agency on Upwork, your team members will need to create an account, join the agency and be hired on that hourly contract in order to work on it and track time. And of course you can work on hourly contracts you were hired on. 

 

Check out section 2.1 of the User Agreement for more information. 

~ Valeria
Upwork

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9 REPLIES 9
petra_r
Community Member

That is actually how agencies do work, only the employees have their own Upwork accounts.


If you don't want to do it that way, you have to restrict your activities to fixed price contracts only and use your employees with the client's knowledge and consent.

 

No hourly contracts.

zeronini
Community Member

Thank you very much for your swift reply Petra!

What you said does make sense!
Speaking of restricting my activities to fixed-price contracts, are there any additional steps I should take to make sure Upwork is familiar with what I'm doing and that there are no problems that might arise due to confusion of the nature of my agency, or is this obsolete? 

Would I still be able to take on hourly contracts that I would execute myself personally?

Also, I know I could simply look it up, but while we're at it, I'd be super grateful if you could paste a guide on creating agencies and managing them - if you have one handy. If not, no worries 🙂

Once again, thank you very much for your assistance!

Hi Branko,

Upwork is not supporting agencies as it should have been supporting. I am running an agency on upwork since it was Elance.

On upwork it will be really difficult for you to only get fixed price contracts, you will be leaving almost 80% of business on upwork which is actually hourly contracts.

You can read my thread I had created few hours ago in community and you will realize what problems you can face if you own an agency on upwork.

Hello Muhammad, thank you for your reply!

I'm sorry you've had such experience with your agency... 
I believe I would still be good to take on hourly contracts personally as I did so far as a freelancer - whilst projects would be handled mainly by the agency employees. This way I wouldn't exactly be losing all of the hourly contracts, but rather trying to expand on the per-project contracts.

If you were referring to your discussion titled "Agency member took client out-side of agency(Disappointed)", this wouldn't be possible either, as my employees would not be part of Upwork.

I hope you manage to fix the issue that you're having soon and that everything turns out well.
All the best!

You can get maximum 24 hours of work on your own profile.

Will you create upwork profiles for your agency members but will not provide the access to upwork and will be bidding yourself?

who will create profiles on upwork for your other members?

Who will be using trackers? 

Hi Branko,

 

As Petra explained, you can subcontract work on fixed-price contracts to your employees even if they don't have profiles on Upwork. Your client has to be aware of that.

If the contract is hourly, only the person who is hired on that contract can log in and track time on that contract. So if you start an agency on Upwork, your team members will need to create an account, join the agency and be hired on that hourly contract in order to work on it and track time. And of course you can work on hourly contracts you were hired on. 

 

Check out section 2.1 of the User Agreement for more information. 

~ Valeria
Upwork

Thank you Valeria.

Just one final question to be sure, though I doubt I'd take this path either way - Do I even need to start an Upwork agency to do what I intend or is it enough to make it clear to my client that the work will be outsourced to my company?

Branko,

 

You don't need to have an agency to be able to use subcontractors and delegate work on fixed-price contracts. Users with freelancer accounts can do that too. 

~ Valeria
Upwork


Muhammad Saif U wrote:

 

On upwork it will be really difficult for you to only get fixed price contracts, you will be leaving almost 80% of business on upwork which is actually hourly contracts.


Please provide the source for your claim that 80% of the business available for agencies is hourly?

 

Muhammad Saif U wrote:

You can get maximum 24 hours of work on your own profile.


What in the world do you mean by that?

 

It is strictly forbidden to log time on your own profile for work done by other people, so if you are talking about that, you are in violation of Upwork's terms of service in a big way. 

 

OF COURSE you can only log 24 hours per day on your own profile, but every single one of those hours must be worked by you and you alone and nobody else.


Maybe Upwork should take a closer look at patterns of someone logging 24 hours a day on their own profile....

 

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