Mandy Johnson runs Production Services at Jack Morton, the global brand experience agency that builds live work for McDonald's, Meta, Cadillac, and Adidas. Her team manages the freelance network behind those activations- more than 2,000 people every year who need to be onboarded, contracted, and insured, before they show up to a venue.

When Mandy joined in 2022, that work was held up by spreadsheets. "We would use Google Sheets, and then in one we would use monday.com," she says. "Having to do all of those things in addition to tracking down the Word documents of the deal memos, making sure that we're getting the PDFs saved in one spot, then managing the insurance documents separately- it was a very manual and piecemeal process."

The insurance piece in particular fell to her by default. "I have a degree in opera performance," Mandy says. "I was put into this role... I am not an insurance or tax expert, and yet I have become the insurance and tax point person for Jack Morton. I know enough to be dangerous." That's the position most freelancer-heavy agencies put someone in: every certificate of insurance routed to whoever has “time” to learn it, on top of the full-time job of producing the work.

One workflow, including insurance

Jack Morton consolidated onto Worksuite as the system of record for the freelance relationship: onboarding, contracts, payroll, and insurance running as one fluid job instead of four. 1099Policy is the layer that prompts, scopes, and binds insurance inside that flow. A freelancer picks up workers' compensation and general liability for the specific project, in their own name, in the same intake that captures their tax forms and deal memo. The certificate attaches to the assignment, not to a calendar year.

For Mandy, the practical payoff is that whole categories of certificate review disappear from her queue. "If people get their policies through 1099Policy, we don't review it. We don't even have to look at it," she says. "The dates are right. The additional insured is correct. They've crafted the integration to just do all of that work for us."

Per her own numbers, the consolidation has returned 80+ hours a week to the production team.

Why this matters for on-the-ground work

Jack Morton's work happens at venues, on load-in clocks, with people on a floor for long shifts. "The on-the-ground stuff is so much more intense, because you are there for 10, 12 hour days," Mandy says. "You are working significant overtime and doing everything within our power to make sure that this event comes off without a hitch for our clients." That's exactly the labor profile workers' compensation and general liability are built for.

Time pressure used to bend the compliance posture the wrong way. "There have been time crunches especially when we've been given assignments very close to the requested event date," Mandy says. "We've had to not cut corners, but accept what would be less than a minimum requirement instead of insisting that the vendor provide something up to snuff." Per-assignment coverage embedded in the onboarding flow takes that decision off the table. The insurance question is answered before the call time, not negotiated under it.

The freelance pool as an operating asset

Once the consolidation was in place, Mandy came to see the freelance network differently:

"I thought that our freelancer work was a one-and-done sort of situation, and that is not the case at all. With freelancers we are building relationships. If we like your work, we're going to work with you again, because it's easy to do so. Having that history to remember exactly the work that we did, the rates that we paid before, all of the information is right there on file, easy to reference. It is truly our little black book."

Pre-qualified, pre-credentialed, pre-insured freelancers are easier to re-engage on short notice- there’s a massive difference between rebuilding a team from cold leads and assembling it from people the agency already knows and trusts.

Cruise ship to speedboat

Mandy puts it this way:

"A cruise ship is not going to be able to turn on a dime, because that's not how a cruise ship is built. So if you have to take your cruise ship apart and rebuild it as a nice little speedboat, do that. You've got to be able to think on your feet. You've got to be able to make last-minute changes, because they are going to come your way."

The cruise ship is what Mandy inherited in 2022: 2,000 freelancers, spreadsheets across every office, an opera-trained Production Services Director as the final sign-off on every certificate of insurance. The speedboat is the same operation today — onboarding, contracts, and per-assignment coverage moving as one workflow, every freelancer accounted for before they show up to a venue.

If you run contractor ops or business affairs at a freelance-heavy agency, you already know how much of your team's time goes to paperwork. Jack Morton recovered 80+ hours a week by consolidating onboarding, contracts, and per-assignment insurance into one workflow. 

Get in touch to see what the same stack would do for your operation.