Every few months someone asks me the same thing. “You have been doing this for over twenty years, why aren’t you on Upwork or Fiverr?” It is a fair question, and the honest answer is a mix of how I have worked, what I value, and a quote I keep coming back to: I am not in the business of creating business.
Here is the longer version.
I have mostly worked with companies, not gigs
For most of my career I have been a full time employee of the companies I worked for. Whatever I did outside that was mostly my own personal projects, built on the weekend, plus the occasional assignment that was personal or emergency based. A friend in need, a former colleague stuck before a deadline, someone I respected who needed a hand. My coaching work fell into that same weekend category. With some employers I even had it written into my contract that I could take on non-competing work like coaching on the weekend, and I made a point of keeping that clause there.
The one real exception was my time at Amazon. During those years I did not pick up a single piece of work outside my full time role. I was so absorbed in it that I even let my own homepage go without an update.
So the platforms never really fit the shape of my working life. They are built for a steady stream of small, transactional projects. Build a website. Fix a bug. Design a logo by Friday. My work has looked different: longer engagements with companies, cloud migrations, multi-cloud strategy, and lately private, on-premise AI deployments. That kind of work moves through procurement and relationships, not a bidding queue.
The pricing fight was never for me
I actually do have accounts on some of these platforms, going back to around 1999 or 2000, from the very early days of online work. I just never became active on any of them. Part of it was timing. A bigger part was that I kept hearing about the same thing from everyone who used them: the race to the bottom on price.
On a marketplace, clients often compare people on one number, the hourly rate, and the pressure is always downward. That is a hard place to talk about the actual value of the work. When you help a company avoid a costly infrastructure mistake, or keep sensitive data safe during an AI rollout, the value is not captured by an hourly line item. I would rather have that conversation directly than compete to be the cheapest name on a list.
Some work simply cannot be advertised
A lot of what I do involves proprietary code, internal systems, and sensitive infrastructure. Modernizing a private codebase, standing up an offline AI setup inside a company’s own network, that sort of thing. It comes with NDAs and real confidentiality obligations. Public project histories, client names, and feedback threads are the currency of a marketplace profile, and most of my best work cannot be shown there at all. The good outcomes stay quiet by design.
I let the work do the finding
The other reason is simpler. On a gig platform you spend your time pitching, bidding, and competing for attention. I have leaned on the opposite of that. I write, I publish books, I run a podcast, and I keep an open footprint on GitHub. The people who need my particular mix of skills tend to find their way to me through that work, or through people we both know. I would rather put my hours into the work itself than into winning the next bid.
Which brings me back to the quote. I am not in the business of creating business. I am in the business of solving hard problems well, and letting that speak for itself.
So, if you were looking for me there
If you came looking for me on Upwork or Fiverr and did not find me, that is why. It is not a judgment on those platforms. Plenty of good people do great work on them, and for a lot of projects they are exactly the right tool. They just were never the way I worked.
So if you have a real problem in mind, let us talk about it directly. Take a look at how I work on my consulting page, and when you are ready, get in touch. I would rather start with a conversation than a bid.
