Let's imagine that some medium-sized business needs to solve an issue directly unrelated to its expertise, which may require not one specialist but, for example, 4 or 5. Of course, they can put in an effort to find and hire in-house professionals, a manager for them and integrate everything into the existing company structure.

Doing all these takes time and not only! And the more specialists are needed to solve a problem, the more time it takes and quite a lot of effort and expenses. Let's assume that even a medium-sized company understands that searching for and training personnel, doing people management, and setting up processes is expensive. Often, the specialists needed in a particular country who can be found quickly are more expensive. Therefore, such a company goes to Upwork to reduce costs, save effort and skip the stage of building an in-house team. A company is WILLING to pay a little more than an individual freelancer if you, as an agency, do people management for them and deliver the results they need.

The company is looking for a subcontractor partner with the required expertise and at a lower cost to do everything in-house. Such a partner will ideally work with them as long as there is a need for such services. And again, the company dreams that when new needs and tasks arise, the subcontractor-partner will be able to satisfy them (even if it will mean finding and training a new person).

As a result, such an agreement to pay more for management and work as long as possible leads to "more money". Of course, the projects will also be bigger than just one person can do 🙂

Please note that all this time, I am not talking about the quality and speed of work, which are really not critically important (remember that the client may not understand this niche, so they cannot always estimate which numbers are average on the market). What I'm talking about are those business problems that they solve by cooperating with the agency. Of course, this is obvious to some, but for freelancers without a conscious business background, some of this can be very interesting.