Is this circumvention?

[confaya]

Hi Upwork Community,

I believe I have a peculiar situation on my hands and I want to find the best solution so I don't infringe the non-circumvention agreement.

About a year ago I applied for an animation project as part of our agency. It involved creating several short teasers to build an audience and eventually create a half hour show. We've initially done the work ourselves; we're 3 freelancers who share a local office and this has been the way we worked for over 2 years now.

As the project grew in size we needed more animators to help keep up with the demand. One of the solutions was to turn to upwork. Our problem was how do we avoid paying the service fee twice: once from the client to us and then from us to the animators found trough Upwork. To work around this, our client gave me recruiting and hiring privileges on his account, so we would make all the decisions and we could send the offers directly from the client to the freelancers.

Our initial efforts proved successful and our clients application for funding was approved to produce a half hour pilot that will potentially get picked up by streaming services. Our client let us know that due to the criteria based on which these funds are awarded, our agency will be the only animation company they deal with and outsourcing talent will be our responsability.

My first thought was as follows: we invite the freelancers to join our agency, our client pays us the full animation budget, and we pay the freelancers(which are now agency members) off-platform. However, scouting these forums, it seems recruiting freelancers on the platform is frowned upon. We're not technically recruiting, since we've been working along side these freelancers for the same client. Only now, we have become a client ourselves, but we want to maintain working relations exactly how they are. The only thing that changes is the cashflow. Hope you can see my dilema.

This project as a whole, has generated well more than $30,000 in transactions on Upwork alone and will continue doing so at an exponential rate, at least for the forseable future. Considering these numbers, I'd like to know what would be the solution to get the best deal on service fees. 

We're not farmers and don't want to be. We're happy to waive our comission if that means the freelancer gets more money and produces better work. The alternative would be to hire these Freelancers trough Upwork, and have them forfeit 20% on service fees, as well as lose their discounted service fees with the actual client.

I'm really curious waht your thoughts are on this matter.

Thank you.

[petra_r]

As an agency you are NOT a client, so that will work and not be disintermediation (or circumvention)

The only tricky part will be finding the freelancers and getting in touch with them and convincing them to join your agency. But there is no problem adding the freelancers you are already working with through your recruiting / team management priviledges to your agency if they want to do that.

[VladimirG · Accepted solution]

Hi Roland,

Thanks for posting your question in the Community. Note that it's in line with Upwork ToS to invite the freelancers you've hired through your client's account to join your agency, and have your client hire them through your agency in order for the payment to go to your agency's account balance. Afterwards, you can withdraw and disburse the earnings to your agency members directly as you mentioned.

If you have a Fixed-Price contract with this client through your agency and are looking to outsource part of it to the freelancers you're looking to add to your agency, without having additional contracts created for them, you can do that as well. Note that you'd need your client's permission in order to have other freelancers access and work on their project and transitioning work is not allowed on Hourly contracts. Please refer to the article 8.2 of User Agreement before proceeding further in case you opt for taking this approach and let us know if you have any questions.

[confaya]

Thank you Petra and Vladimir for your answer. That's exactly what we wanted to know.