What the heck is Lebensunterhaltsdiversifizierung?

You've likely heard that diversifying your investment portfolio is a good idea if you want to lower the risk of any individual holding. Diversification is also important because it gives investors exposure across different asset classes, thereby allowing for potentially higher returns than an investor would receive from just investing in one particular type of asset. Great…but what does this have to do with Shingle?

Just as diversifying is a good risk management strategy for investing, we have a term we use at shingle called livelihood diversification (or concisely written as Lebensunterhaltsdiversifizierung in German). This term really means to diversify your income with your acquired skills so that you don't utilize them all in one place. We believe this is a less risky income strategy for the same reason as diversification in investing: some companies are thriving, some are not. It is better to be working for a thriving firm than for one that is struggling financially. As a traditional employee, you are bound to your employer through the inevitable ups and downs of the industry. Layoffs will happen in every engineer's career. Having professional relationships with several engineering firms that like working with you is better than just one. No one can argue with that.

Shingle is a Platform for Livelihood Diversification

This is what shingle allows you to do. You can form relationships with several firms on the platform and do engineering work at different times for all of them. They become your affiliated firms in your profile on the platform. This way, when things aren't so hot at one firm, you simply adjust and do more work for another firm. Since you are no longer bound geographically when you use shingle, there will be no more searching for new jobs, selling houses, uprooting your family, and moving to a new city when work dries up at one firm. We desperately want those days to be over. We want people to live in the city (or small town, or isolated cabin) of their choice. Since we believe in "project-centric" execution, it does not matter "where" you work as much as "what" you're working on. The goal is always to be utilized in any engineering firm. How do you always achieve full utilization?

You work for several firms at once doing billable work with the help of Shingle. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. It really is that simple.