SideHusl.com reviewed new hustles for consultants, callers and cleaners this week, finding good to average opportunity for freelancers.

Hustles for consultants, callers and cleaners

The best paying opportunity of the three comes from an armchair consulting firm called Wynter.

Wynter enlists freelance “experts” to help businesses craft effective sales messages. They do that by connecting businesses with a product to sell (or develop) with the people who would be in a position to buy that product. Since business-to-business products can range from copy machines to software, the experts Wynter enlists range from office managers to CEOs — and nearly everyone in between.

You’ll need to connect to your Linkedin profile to sign up. That will help Wynter determine when you’d qualify for a consulting gig. Gigs are infrequent. But when they do come up, they’re well paid. The site says gigs take from 5 minutes to an hour and pay between $5 and $600.

You can find similar gigs with Maven, Respondent, User Interviews, Zintro and GLG. If you hope to find more than an occasional gig like this, we suggest you sign up with them all.

Hampr

Home/life stress is predicted to be one of the themes of 2024 as companies press more people into going back to work in offices. That is likely to boost the demand for “helpers” doing everything from picking up the kids to doing the laundry.

Hampr aims to capitalize on that trend by enlisting freelance “washrs” to pick up, wash and fold your clothing — much like competitor Poplin.

But Hampr has a simpler pricing and pay structure than Poplin, which essentially pivots on the “load.” Clients put one load of laundry in each bag, paying between $15 and $40 to have it picked up, cleaned and returned. Prices vary by city and whether you join Hampr’s membership program, which wins you discounts vs. Poplin, which charges and pays by the pound.

Freelance washers earn 70% of the load price, with the site taking the remaining 30% as payment for doing the marketing and collection. And, since the customer puts just one load in each bag, washers don’t even need to sort.

Pleio

Pleio enlists freelancers for remote customer service positions in its GoodStart program. These work-at-home agents call patients with chronic diseases to help them manage their health.

The site says that freelancers make $15 or more per hour making phone calls on the company’s behalf. However, freelancers are not paid by the hour. They’re paid by the completed call. So you could make considerably less — or more — depending on whether prospective patients answer the phone and talk to you. If they don’t, you could be making calls all day and have nothing to show for your work.

Moreover, there’s at least 10 to 15 hours of unpaid training that’s required before you are able to work a single paid hour. Pleio pays a $250 “bonus” for completing the training, but only after freelancers log 60 hours of paid work.

For freelancers, this site poses a bit of a dilemma. Pleio could provide better-than-minimum wage pay with work-at-home flexibility. Or it could provide a pittance for hours of work. There’s really no way to know in advance because workers say the volume of calls — and the receptiveness of the patients you’re calling — varies dramatically from day to day.

Notably, the control that Pleio has over how “GoodStarters” work, including the required training, suggests to the editors at SideHusl.com that Pleio is “misclassifying” workers as independent contractors when they should be employees.

Employee vs. freelance

What does that mean to you? If you took a GoodStart position and were not paid for all the hours you worked — including the training — we think you should complain to your local Department of Labor.

The DOL enforces U.S. labor laws, and can impose heavy fines and penalties on companies that misclassify workers. These penalties can include forcing the company to pay back wages and overtime.

The agency will need to determine whether misclassification is taking place, of course. And that’s always tricky because it’s based on a multi-part test that aims to determine who has the most control over the work relationship — the company or the worker.

If it’s the worker, you’re an independent contractor. But if it’s the company, you’re an employee. You can take our freelancer or employee quiz here to see how the determination is made.

1/27/2023

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