How many freelancers do you know? Scroll through your phone’s contact list and there’s no question that you’re connected in some way to the people who hustle to thrive in the world of the self-employed. Freelancing isn’t a trend by any means—it’s a phenomenon. It’s the reality of work today, and it’s how work will play out tomorrow. Currently, over 34% of the U.S. workforce does freelance work. Fast forward to 2020 and it’s predicted that 50% of our workforce will freelance.

Enter creative entrepreneurs. Creatives are solopreneurs with completely different needs than gig workers and nine-to-fivers. Passion and creativity are what drive them to take risks every day. Doing what you love shouldn’t be some utopian ideal. But rather, a beautiful pursuit that’s both attainable and sustainable.

The truth is that once someone takes the leap to become a creative business owner or to work independently in any capacity, they immediately become responsible for managing their entire business, alone.

Even though creatives have unique needs compared to other workers, like getting clients, managing their business and growing their network, such needs are totally universal to this domain. The bottom line is that they need meaningful and intentional support to get them through these bureaucratic tasks, so that they can focus on their passion—their superpower.

At HoneyBook, we provide the infrastructure to support the future of work:

Regular workers have to find a new job every few years. Creatives might have a new client every week, and with each client comes contract signing, payment, communication and more. These fearless creatives end up spending 80% of their time on uninspiring tasks, and only 20% on the reason they started a business in the first place—their superpower. HoneyBook flips the 80/20 of life as a business owner, making it easy to manage and book their ideal client faster, more frequently, and with less legwork (for a discount on HoneyBook, click here).

Beyond the challenges of back office work, creatives also lack the benefits having an office full of coworkers provides: learning and getting feedback on their work, venting their frustrations at the water cooler, or even befriending the person that will connect them to their next job.

We created an online platform to connect creatives with a community of other business owners with complementary skills. Creatives can find new business opportunities and shared knowledge from our network of design professionals, photographers, web developers, and many more. We fuel over four hundred monthly meet-ups across the world that discuss key business topics from digital media to pricing.

So business management and knowledge are taken care of, now what?

Creative entrepreneurs still face unique challenges

Health insurance is especially intimidating for creatives. Tax credits to lower health insurance premiums, fines if they don’t enroll, location-specific disclaimers—these are a few of the mixed messages that make enrolling in the right health plan a challenge for creatives.

That’s why we’re partnering with Stride Health. HoneyBook members can go to honeybook.stridehealth.com from any device and instantly compare all options, (they have every plan on the government sites, and more!), see whether they qualify for subsidies to lower the cost, easily get enrolled, and have access to an award-winning support team year-round for health insurance guidance.

In the days following our partnership launch, we received a flood of messages from our members telling us how alone and confused they’ve felt about health insurance and how relieved they were that we had formed an alliance with Stride to help simplify the complicated, stressful process of finding the right plan.

We found out that one of our members was let go from her full time job with secure health insurance. She had no idea where to start her search for a new plan—where should she go, how much should it be, how does she know she’s getting the right plan and not overpaying? She described the process as “pretty damn terrifying”.

Thanks to our partnership with Stride, we were not only able to guide her in the right direction, but she was able to find the right plan for her needs at an affordable price.

Oz, CEO

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Oz Alon

Oz is the Co-Founder & CEO of Honeybook.