Hi David,

Thanks for your reply. There has been interesting progress in our business. When looking at the competition in my niche, almost all have stalled for growth at 2-3 subcontractors whilst we now have hundreds. My guess is that the admin of trying to be the "middle-man" was too much of a load and they didn't have the systems in place or a competitive enough revenue structure to sustain additional growth.

We do have a small amount of work that is lost due to subcontractors working directly with clients but the flip-side is that the rest of our workers feel trusted and stay with us for years.

Another factor we need to constantly consider is the amount of value we provide vs the percentage that we charge. People do have an innate sense of fairness and if they see you doing X amount of work and getting paid XX, then they feel more pressure to bypass the system. We tell our subcontractors and clients that our main role is to provide as much value as possible in the areas that we're good at in the transaction, providing the best systems we can (so the transactions are as smooth as possible) and then stay out of the way so they can build a relationship.

I hope this helps give an update. I've put together a course on marketplaces on Udemy that addresses more marketplace factors as it's been so interesting finding what works and doesn't work for us.