Last week was not only what felt like the darkest one in Sweden this year, it also happened to be the week when we arranged the second meetup with our business network. This time, the meetup was arranged in collaboration with our friends at Wint and Nordnet. 

With keynote speakers such as Caroline Säisä and Ulrika Ahl from Wint,  Maja Ginsburg and Ashraf Habash from Anaspire as well as healthcare entrepreneur Victoria Boethius at Vegatus and Alexander Gustafsson from Nordnet, our guests were in for a packed evening! The event was fully booked and we’re delighted that so many also showed up, despite the weather of the day: pouring November rain (!).

Networking events tend to divide people into two groups: the ones who loves them, and the ones who dreads them.  Regardless of which group you feel most drawn to today, we presume that you might agree with us that as a freelance business owner, networking is not really optional. Rather, getting out every now and then to meet and greet ought to be an integrated part of your business. 

But how do you crack the mingle code then? Well, based on our study of all the brave entrepreneurs, speakers and curious consultants we met up with last week, there are several ways of doing this. With December and all its mingles coming up, we decided to compile a quick list with a few tips!

Here you go, ready to be applied at once – here’s 3 survival tactics for your next business mingle: 

1. Be prepared so that you can be your best you. And no, with that we don’t mean that you need to upgrade your whole wardrobe or get a haircut prior to a mingle. However, making sure you feel good is a great way to ensure that you won’t be focusing on your looks during the evening. Instead of considering if that piece of lettuce is stuck between your teeth or if your shirt is smelly, you will be able to relax and actually focusing on who’s in front of you. 

2. Getting too many questions and starting to feel uncomfortable? Need a little breathing break? We hear you. 

If it’s been a while since you were “out and about”, talking about yourself can feel exhausting and overwhelming.

“I’m sorry, I feel like we got caught up now only talking about me. Please, I’m curious to find out about you/what you said about X earlier. Tell me more, what does it mean to work with X./how did you end up doing this/ when did you decide to pursue X/who are you teaming up with…“.

See what we mean? Be honest about your need to shift focus for a while, then immediately take the lead as well. Remember, you can always use this classic phrase when you need to turn things around!

Then, of course adapt your follow up questions based on the current situation. The examples above are just to give you a few ideas on how to get started. 

3. Clear goals for your networking efforts. Set up goals based on who YOU are. Not based on what your bestie or sales team would do. 

Is it a really bad day but you can’t postpone? Well, perhaps a suitable goal for today may be to just show up and talk to a maximum of three people? If you know there will be an important connection at your mingle, then focus mainly on that person. Connect in any way that comes natural to you. Thanks to all digital solutions today, following up has never been easier.

Natural born networker? Then you don’t need our advice above, but perhaps it’s time you challenged yourself even more. What could you do to improve yourself? Maybe you could lend a social hand to someone nervous you meet and help him or her to relax a bit?

What’s your best networking tips? We’d love to hear from you! Drop us a comment below and let us now. 

Last but not least, in case you missed our mingle last week, new meetups for freelance consultants are coming up next year! Sign up for Brainville and our newsletter and we’ll let you know when the next one will be 🙂 

All the best and good luck with your December efforts 😉

/Your friends at Brainville

What do these things have in common? They’re all new or improved features in Brainville!

Match consultants
It’s now much easier to match one of your consultants to available assignments. You’ll find this feature below the shortcuts on the page “Assignments”. To match profiles to assignments in a reasonable way your consultants need to have at least 70 % profile strength.

Experts
We’ve combined the pages “Consultants” and “Job seekers” into one single page. Less is more.

Locations
It’s now possible to add several locations to an assignment. More is… more?

Dark theme/mode
Do you prefer a darker design? We’ve added a dark theme to Brainville.
What is “dark theme”?

Have you noticed that skills and roles on assignments look a bit different from before? That’s because we made them a bit more useful.

Yes, they are just simple tags, but did you know that clicking on the name of the role or skill leads to a search for the specific tag?

And did you know that if you click the graph icon, on the right side of the tag, you open a new tab with statistics related to that tag? Try it out!

We’re testing these smart tags right now, but we’ve limited the test to assignments. If we come to the conclusion, based on your feedback, that they don’t clutter the UI, we will start using them on more pages in the future. And not only just that…

The negative trends from the second half of last year continued in the first quarter of 2023. Read more about it in our latest report on the market (previously known as Konsultrapporten).

We’ve also updated Brainville Statistics, the website where you can find much more data. At the time of writing this article we’re indexing 291 roles and 1503 skills.

Check out your area of expertise! And if we’re not keeping track of your skills and roles yet, simply suggest them.

Are you curious about the market for freelancers and consultants in the Nordics? Then you’re in luck! We’ve just added a market overview to Brainville Statistics.

The first thing you might notice when you visit Brainville Statistics today, at least if you’re Swedish, is that the entire website is now available in that language.

A few things have changed on the start page too. For instance, there’s a sneak peak of the statistics for Q1 2023 and a list of the latest additions when it comes to roles and skills.

But the major difference is the new page called “Market overview”. It’s filled with useful information about the amount of assignments, remote work, available experts, company sizes, top roles, top skills and the geographical distribution of assignments. Some of these stats are also available on the country level.

We’ve also added new fun facts such as “Buzz words”, which represents words that show up much more frequently the last 6 months, compared to the six before that period.

We hope you find these additions useful. Please do keep sending us your ideas, opinions and thoughts about what we should do next. Nothing is too small or too great. We appreciate your feedback.

We’ve introduced two features to help you clear up the assignment feed in Brainville.

Hide assignments
Are there assignments that pop up in your list that you’re clearly not interested in? And have you already perfected your search alerts? Then you might want to use this new feature: Hide assignment.

In the assignment feed you will notice a new icon representing an eye with a dash. Use it to hide an assignment from the list. All hidden assignments are still available via the shortcuts in the upper right corner.

If you already have browsed to an assigment that you don’t want to see again, simply use the …-menu and click “Hide this assignment”.

Block company
Are there companies that you really don’t want to do business with? Then this is the feature you’ve been looking for. Either go to the company’s profile page or to one of their assignments. Use the …-menu and select “Block company”. Doing this will completely remove them from your assignment feed. This will also prevent you from using them as a supplier.

Brainville just became a bit easier to use. In our strife to simplify the platform we’ve made some changes that we hope you’ll like.

The headline refers to a saying that a friend of ours used quite frequently back when we worked together. And it stuck. Our interpretation is that ideas and solutions are usually initially too complex. Your idea may fit on a piece of paper now, but what would you have to remove in order to fold it? Could folding it actually improve the idea?

“Make it cleaner”
That’s our motto. For instance, this might mean removing distractions to help users to focus on what’s important on every page. Avoiding information overload. Another example is removing friction, such as redirecting users to other pages to do simple tasks.

A work in progress
Maybe there’s something we can do to improve your experience in Brainville? With your feedback we will keep working at it.

Now, login and check what we’ve done so far.

We’ve had issues with our issue-tracking system. A number of tickets have been automatically spam classed or deleted without being spam.

We have resolved the issue and really apologise for the inconvenience. We’ve also managed to restore some of the tickets. Please do contact us again if you think your ticket has been lost.

With apologies

The team at Brainville 

In Konsultrapporten we used to monitor and report on around 40 skills that were highly demanded. Since the introduction of Brainville Statistics, this number has increased manyfold – to more than 1.400. Thank you for contributing.

Brainville Statistics is a combination of a wiki and our statistics. Your expertise has helped us add and tie skills and roles together in more and more areas of the freelance and consulting industry.

Contributions are rewarded
Adding information to Brainville Statistics is easily accomplished. Simply click on the “suggest”-links that are spread over all our pages. Accepted contributions are rewarded with full access to our statistics. Continuous contributions can get even more. And of course, we keep track of our contributors and plan to show their names (if they want the recognition) next to the pages the’ve contributed to.

What’s the purpose?
Keeping track of all roles and skills help us help you and others in a number of ways. The most apparent is Brainville Statistics which has made the freelance and consulting industry a bit more transparent and intelligible for people both inside and outside of it.

Adding more roles, skills, their synonyms and their relations help us improve Brainville Statistics and matching in the marketplace, enabling customers and freelancers/consultants to find each other – which is our main goal.

If you want to be found on LinkedIn too, life just became a little bit easier. We’ve added a feature enabling you to share an assignment or a consultant/freelancer profile as a cleanly designed image.

When sharing an assignment or a profile, you can now add your own background and compose a shareable image containing relevant information. And of course, it’s linked to your assignment or profile.

Assignment
Assignments can easily be shared to LinkedIn when you publish them, and if you do share them we boost the visibility of the assignment in Brainville. An already published assignment can also be shared using the “…”-menu.
A shareable assignment image displays:

• Your company’s logotype and background
• The title of the assignment
• Location
• If remote work is allowed

Consultant/freelancer profile
Use the switch and share your, or your consultant’s profile, in Brainville. When you’ve done that you’ll see a LinkedIn icon, enabling you to share it even further. As a bonus we boost the profile’s visibility in Brainville.
A profile displays:

• The profile tagline
• Specific role, for instance “System developer .NET”
• Availability date

Do you have products or services that match our users’ needs? Then you might want to try our new platform for advertisements.

We often receive requests regarding the possibility to reach you and all other users in Brainville. That’s why we’re introducing a simple platform for this very purpose. But remember, we cherish your time and attention. We will moderate all advertisement requests and only approve of the ones that reasonably could be of value mainly for freelancers and consultancies.

How to get started

1. Go to the tab “Ads” located on your company profile.
2. Click “Start using ads”.
3. If you haven’t added a credit card, you’ll be prompted. That’s it.

How to create an ad

1. From the page “Ads”, click on the button “+ Create new ad”
2. Name the ad
3. Add the URL you want to divert traffic to
4. Select where you want the add to be placed in Brainville
   1. In our right column…
   2. …or in “feeds”, that is pages with listings, such as “Assignments”, “Consultants” and “Companies”.
5. Upload an image representing your ad
6. Select your audience
   1. Country
   2. Company size interval. Perhaps you only want to reach freelancers?
   3. Matching roles and skills – i.e. that must match the person or company seeing the ad
   4. Excluded roles and skills – i.e. that you don’t want the audience to match. For instance, perhaps you want to reach all Python developers who haven’t “TensorFlow” in their skill set.
7. Maximum daily cost – how much are you willing to spend per day on this specific ad.
8. Publishing period – for how long should the ad be published

What does it cost? How do you pay for your ads?

So far, we have gone for a really simple model. We have a fix price per view (approximately 1 SEK / view) and we’ll charge your credit card once per month.