Client case study:
Apartment Therapy

Yes, so I’m the Director of Finance and I’ve been here since 2016. I deal with budgeting, cashflow, oversee accounts payable, accounts receivable, pretty much everything that could be going on in an accounting and finance department. I’m at the top of managing and organizing all of them.

Our freelancers are writing articles, submitting photography and all sorts of things. They are located all over the world, primarily in the US. We have people in South America and Europe, Australia, Asia, everywhere you could imagine. In a given year, on rotation I’d say we’ve got a few hundred freelancers, maybe 300-500. Maybe it’ll be a one off one time or maybe someone is publishing with us every week. We’re dealing with hundreds of contractors per year.

Before any platform, we were scaling up rapidly enough to make coordinating activity a pretty big challenge to keep all the tasks and projects organized. Before TalentDesk, we were working with another provider and our biggest challenge with them was the financial aspect of it which is why I got involved. Managing hundreds of freelancers around the world presents a lot of challenges from the payment and tax side of things. This lead to a lot of headaches, manual labor, and duplication of work - all sorts of issues that financial departments don’t like and want to get rid of. So, we looked for alternatives and we found TalentDesk. The piece of it where TalentDesk takes over the payments and issues the payments to the contractors was a big selling point for me personally.

I’d say overall the system worked fairly similarly, but with the product feature requests that we might have - they were less responsive or less built out. We’ve only been with TalentDesk for however long and already there’s product roadmaps. We’re having visibility into new feature ideas they are either already being worked on or are taken into consideration. 

Our old platform, they were more ad hoc and a little bit random. It never felt totally taken care of. There were a lot of features that you would expect any platform to already have included that we had to explain to them, which was pretty frustrating. So yeah, the robust feature set that you’d think would be obvious and then there’s the attitude of developing features as they go along.

I’m going to be totally biased but I love paying one invoice to pay dozens and dozens of invoices at a time. That is killer for me. To just be able to pay just one invoice per week instead of managing dozens and dozens of pieces of bank information and tax forms - it’s changed our lives.

Time-saving for sure, especially for my team. What I’ve also noticed on the editorial team and the managers, TalentDesk just seems to have allowed for them to build a process that I think is working a lot better for them in terms of how they organize assigning work and onboarding freelancers. I can see it happen from the sidelines and it just seems a lot less chaotic and more organized than our prior platform.

I’ll put it in a way that might be a little bit dramatic. Just before we rolled out TalentDesk I had another person on my team on the accounts payable side. He left right before we rolled out TalentDesk and we haven’t had to replace him. It’s saved a lot of time.

It’s been a challenging couple of years for the publishing space and the digital ad space and Apartment Therapy’s goal for the next couple years is to distinguish itself in the market. We want to become the destination for everything that we do - from home, food, to family. We have a dorm therapy website now too. So, the goal is to be the primary destination and there are a bunch of key metrics behind that. The biggest strength we have is the content, that’s why people come to us. From the words, the photos, the videos - it’s from providers and sourced by contractors all around the world. We’re aiming for unique perspectives, expertise, it’s the better way to get the best content possible. We can’t produce the content that we need that would get us to our goals without a system like TalentDesk, so I think this is a super important platform relationship for 2024/25 for sure.

I would definitely recommend TalentDesk. I would recommend it for a couple reasons. First and foremost, it does what you need it to do. It might seem obvious, but I’ve found that not just in this kind of platform, but in business software in general, it’s not always that easy. It does what it says on the tin which I think is really important. But also, I would say Claire and Connor have been really good too. The relationships that we’ve had with team support has been super crucial. You don’t get that with a lot of software. Being able to direct a lot of people right to you guys has been super helpful because they feel taken care of instead of just sending them to a chat agent or something like that. This is really key because the people who manage our content don’t necessarily have the time to mess around with figuring these things out. To have the support that we have is really important.

I’ll use two words and say - game changer!