1545 – Freelancers Safety Space with Solar Staff’s Pavel Shynkarenko

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0:58with us right now is pavel shinkarenko pavel you are the founder and ceo at solar staff you're found on the web at solar staff.com pavel thank you so much for joining us oh thank you it is pleasure for me to meet you and uh so solar staff um can you uh explain what Solar Staff is in a nutshell. And so, again, if you're a business leader and you're working with freelancers, pay attention. Yeah, we help companies, the huge companies and the medium-sized companies to manage their freelance forces in different countries. We help them to conclude the deals with freelancers, to pay them to resolve the disputes with the freelancers.

1:46And we help companies to increase their freelance force using and do that on a digital way. We automate a lot of procedures to give the solution for the companies who use the freelancers a lot to scale that way of doing business for them. So, yeah, so again, this would be in terms of the support, you know, if you're hiring developers, marketers, etc. Now, when you go to solar staff, you're bringing existing contractor relationships. So solar staff isn't necessarily attracting contractors. Yeah, attracting, onboarding, KYC procedures, compliance procedures, concluding deals, providing the payments, and so on.

2:57It's just kind of tool for freelance management. And then what we're talking about, so let's say that this would be someone, maybe you're making a hire, maybe not using necessarily a platform like Upwork or Fiverr. That would be more of kind of a gig type thing. Or, again, you're kind of an Upworks ecosystem there and, of course, paying Upworks fees. but but you know certainly as so as you make your own independent contacts again they're contractors and so what would be you know I see like on your website solar staff you know kind of the services come into kind of four different categories there's talent onboarding task management payments and legal let me just kind of go through those and and talk about how solar staff might improve that for an employer?

3:55So number one, talent onboarding. What does Solarstaff do in that regard? Yeah. When you use Solarstaff as a business and you find the new freelancer, you have to conclude the deal with that freelancer. To do that, you have to collect a lot of data about him. Some kind of details about his personality to provide the KYC and complaint procedure to collect his payment details to provide the payment after that. With Solarstaff, you need only to send the invitation link to the Solarstaff. And Solarstaff will proceed with all the data and provide all the onboarding procedure and collect and store all the data about the freelancers and send you a message.

4:51This freelancer is ready to use. You can give the new task for that freelancer and he's ready to start work on your task. Yeah. And then, of course, we kind of the task management. What does Solar Staff do in regards to task management? Yeah, we have a system and solution. you can use the solar staff to set up the task to give that task and some kind of description what your freelancer have to do. And solar staff will give that task to the freelancer and receive the greed from that freelancer to work strictly in that way. And after then, we collect the results of work from the freelancers and give to the business.

5:51And after then, we provide automation of the procedure of receiving the results and accepting the results. And we proceed with all the documents about invoices, reports, and tax reporting for freelancer, and so on. Yeah. And then payments, it looks like you can handle, is it escrow? Is that kind of how you set things up? It looks like an escrow because we receive the payment and advance payment from our customers. And we give money to freelancer only when the customer accepts the results of work. And we use a lot of payment systems and payment service providers to pay freelancers in different countries in multiple ways.

6:41For example, you have a freelancer in India, and we can send money to that freelancer through PayPal, through wire transfer, or directly to his bank card issued by Indian Bank. And to do that, we use a lot of payment service providers to reduce the cost of international payments for the companies. Why is it better to do it this way than just using something like WISE to transfer funds? What's the benefit to a business owner? Yeah, yeah. WISE proceed with only payment solution. We proceed with legal compliance, KYC. It's a lot of extra services and extra values for the businesses. you have possibility to organize all that routine job inside your business but you will use your own forces your own legal department clerks, financial department to proceed with all that procedures or just press one button in solar staff are you ready to accept?

8:05are you ready to pay? and that's it And then legally, so as a business owner, Solarstaff provides some protections there. Can you kind of talk about that? Yeah, yeah. It looks like we buy and sell freelance services for our customers. For example, you find the new influencer in, I don't know, Australia. And you will invite this influencer in SolarStuff. and after then ask solar staff, we need to buy advertisement from that influencer. We go, conclude the deal, buy that advertisement services and resell to your company. That means you receive the contract between your company and our company and we will proceed with the contract with our company and the freelancer.

9:07If you have 100 freelancers, using solar staff means that you have only one contract instead of 100. And that really simplifies your document flow and process of payments and process of concluding a lot of deals. Yeah. So I hope you don't mind me asking, Paul, just because I'm curious. You have offices in multiple locations around the world. One of them was in Russia. Do you mind maybe just share? I'm just because I have no idea. You're just a businessman running an international company. Did you, how has that impacted you? Like, did you have to shut down that office? or like i just i have no idea because i know that there's some really you know kind of strict rules internationally currently yeah yeah and in nowadays uh we focus on working with the russian freelancers but not with the russian businesses uh so so much because a lot of sanctions and because a lot of restrictions but uh the freelancers are only the people.

10:29And these sanctions do not restrict, for example, US companies from working with the Russian freelancers, and they still try to use them, Russians, Ukrainian ones, and other ones. We work with the freelancers in Ukraine. We work with the freelancers in Russia. We work with the freelancers in India and so on and so on. And we help companies to proceed with all that freelancers and be totally compliant. Because a lot of restrictions are coming and we focus on that restrictions and we do not allow to conclude some kind of deals that could be under restrictions. And that's why in our services, in our platform, some kind of services are prohibited for Russians.

11:32Some are not. We help companies to do in a safe way and do not do something that can provide some kind of unsafe for that companies or for the freelancers. That's why we put all that restriction in our service and we decrease some kind of our processes with the Russian office. And yeah, it becomes smaller and smaller. And a lot of our team moved to Dubai or to Cyprus last year. Yeah, that's true. and help them to move and start to live in Dubai and in Europe. Yeah, yeah. So, Pavel, I could see where, you know, if you're a freelancer and there are protections for the freelancer. So for the business owner, you know, when you communicate that you have this structure in place, I think that this makes you a more attractive company to work with, right?

13:00If you are letting the freelancer know that, hey, here are the things that we've put in place. You know, we partner with solar staff so that you can ensure that you're getting paid, you know, that we're following all the guidelines, you know, that just, you know, everything, everything is fair for everybody. And so I think that there's, you know, that ends up being really good for the company. it's good for companies for the freelancers also because we provide them the safety space some kind of space that that shows you if you are inside the correct rules everything will be done we are the guarantee for the both sides the deal will be close according to that rules.

13:57And when we are involved in that kind of communication, we proceed also with some kind of services about the mediation of the possible conflicts. And for example, we have our support department and that support department divides to the two groups. One group work only with customers, another one with freelancers. And when some kind of dispute comes, for example, freelancers start to write some kind of claim. And the support team for freelancers collect all the data and go to our customer support team. And they collect a lot of data from the customer and try to solve that conflict inside to our customer support teams and proceed with the solution how to manage that conflict.

14:59And in more than 80 % of cases, we find out some kind of solution that's acceptable for both sides because we decrease the emotional level and we are friendly to both sides. And each side have some kind of, not some kind, own customer support, own team, own manager, his manager totally on his side, on one side and on another. And the dispute will solve between two our separate department. It really helps. Yeah, that's the worst part when there's a disagreement. And, you know, it's nice to know that there's, you know, again, you've got at least someone that can help arbitrate that and, you know, get that resolved.

15:55So, okay. So the website is solarstaff.com. You work with a lot of tech companies. But, you know, on the website there, you can kind of see, you know, again, over 1 ,700 companies you've worked with from over 130 countries. countries you've set four million tasks uh for for a friend that's listening right now uh when they go to solar staff like what would you recommend their next step be particularly for again um employers of companies that are looking to contract uh so could you repeat your question uh yeah yeah so um next step so for someone that's listening to our interview uh they're like yes you know we have contractors love to have a conversation see how you can help us improve these processes?

16:45What should they do? Okay, the solar staff, it's open platform, you can registrate and start to use it. Zero cost to own, zero cost to start. We do not charge any kind of subscription fees or something like that. You can try, you can try and see how it helps you to increase the power of freelance forces in your company and how it decrease your cost of starting the new contractors and how it decrease the level of some kind of routine procedures inside your company and simplify your business processes. Yeah. The website is solarstaff.com. and again, the platform's free to join and then obviously on transactions, that's where Solar Staff earns its money from, yeah?

17:44Yeah. Okay, great. Well, Pavel Shinkarenko, again, founder, CEO, you've been around since 2014 and helping lots of good freelancers, lots of good companies. Pavel, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. It was nice to meet you.

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