Yesterday, going independent was hard. Today it isn't. I do not think most people have noticed yet how completely that changed — or why it was ever hard in the first place.
He didn't lack ambition. He lacked access.
Think about your dad, or whoever raised you. If he had access to all of the opportunities that existed, do you really believe he would have driven to the same factory every day for thirty years?
He was not short on ambition. He was short on access. From where he was standing, that factory was the only option he could see, and nobody ever showed him the rest of them.
That is not a story about one man. That is the labor market, and it has always been a fragmented mess.
How the old market actually worked
A company handed its opportunities to one staffing agency, sometimes two. Those agencies shared the work only with the people whose resumes they had already pulled off a job board.
That was the whole funnel. That was who got to see the work.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy and wrong to make a villain out of somebody. The agencies worked the market that existed, the only way it could be worked. The companies were not hiding anything. The problem was structural: opportunity was rationed through private lists, because nobody had built the place where both sides could meet.
Both sides were starved at the same time
Companies had access to small, limited pools of talent — whoever their one or two agencies happened to have on a list that week. Not the best person for the job. The best person on that list.
Professionals had access only to the customers they had already worked for. Everyone beyond that had to build a website, learn marketing and chase sales every single minute they were not billable.
Think about what that actually costs. The thing you are selling is a skill that took ten thousand hours to build, and the market forces you to spend your evenings on the one activity that does not sharpen it. The best technician in three states could be quietly running out of work while a plant forty minutes away could not find anybody.
Neither side chose that. It is simply what happens when there is no marketplace.
So we built one, with no barriers to entry
Automate America gives companies access to all of the professionals, and gives all of the professionals free and fair access to all of the work.
No fee. No gatekeeper. No invitation. Nobody deciding on your behalf which opportunities you are allowed to see. Free to post, free to apply, free to hire.
Measured on our own platform on 12 August 2026: 8,699 skilled professionals, 2,714 businesses that have posted work, and 2,221 contracts posted in total. We were founded in 2001, and the marketplace itself opened on 17 November 2018.
Thousands are already in — and it is still early
That is the honest position. We have united a fragmented marketplace and thousands of users are already taking advantage of it, and it is still early enough that joining today makes you an early adopter of the future of work.
- If you are the professional, every term is published before you apply, and you apply directly. Browse every open contract.
- If you run a plant, posting work costs nothing and you reach all of the professionals instead of one list. Post your work here, free.
- If you run a service company, the same account works in reverse: apply your available people to other companies' open contracts and turn a non-billable bench into billable work.
Take control of your career.
Now tell me where I am wrong, and I want the hostile version too: was the old market ever really short of talent, or was it only ever short of access? I have planted my flag. I would rather hear the case against it than not.
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Tony Wallace
Co-Founder, Automate America
PO BOX 1638, Greer, SC 29652
automateamerica.com
