“Illicit trade threatens public safety, undermines intellectual property rights, and hampers economic growth, and the risks could increase as counterfeiters leverage new technologies and techniques to avoid detection,” said OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann.

More recent national data for the US confirms the trend. According to US Customs and Border Protection, the total number of goods seized at the US borders for intellectual property rights violations more than doubled from 2020 to 2024, and the total manufacturer’s suggested retail price of these goods increased by 415%.

The OECD/EUIPO report describes increasingly sophisticated assembly, logistics, and distribution methods. Counterfeiters are adopting “localization” strategies to place final assembly closer to target markets, using international waterways such as the Danube River. With their reduced oversight, free trade zones “play a pivotal role in this trend,” the authors added.

Product diversification runs hand-in-hand with greater reliance on e-commerce for distribution. Designed to combat the illicit trade in pharmaceuticals, vaccines, medical devices, and everyday consumer products that pose risks to health and safety, the World Customs Organization’s Operation Stop III, conducted last December by 111 customs administrations, found that 71% of cases involved parcels ordered over the internet, “confirming how easily unsafe goods bypass normal import checks,” said David Gammill, founder of Gammill Law Accident & Injury Lawyers, a California-based law firm.

China leads the production rankings, accounting for 45% of all reported seizures in 2021. Additional major players hail from elsewhere in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Drop your guard for an instant, and you’ll get clobbered by a barrage of sporting investments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

The sports market for the region is primed for a 16.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2023 to 2030, according to consultancy Grand View Research. Qatar’s sports market alone is projected to hit $3.7 billion this year, according to a 2024 white paper by Middle East Sports Investment Forum.

Morocco is slated to co-host the 2030 soccer World Cup (with Portugal and Spain), with Saudi Arabia following four years later, nearly on the heels of the 2022 edition in Qatar. And Egypt is preparing a bid for the 2036 Summer Olympics.

With a $2 billion annual investment, the sports industry’s contribution to Saudi GDP should equal $16.5 billion a year, or 1.5% of output, by 2030, says a report published in December by SURJ Sports Investment, a unit of the Public Investment Fund (PFI), the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund. The sector’s market value is projected at $22.4 billion by then, up from $8 billion today, which should translate into over 100,000 jobs.

“It’s new, sexy, and different compared to the stock market,” says Viktoria Tsvetanova Lightbody, a competition lawyer with Dentons, a global law firm, and a director of Badminton Europe, the regional governing body for that sport.

“The Middle East is such a hot market,” says Marquel Martin, CEO of 3Point0 Labs, a sports and entertainment management firm that spearheaded two boxing matches in Riyadh for its then-client Francis Ngannou, a mixed martial arts crossover fighter. “There is tremendous growth to be had in sponsorships and leagues.”

Heavyweights hail from the oil-rich Persian Gulf, but markets like Egypt and Morocco are punching above their weight. “It’s pretty much everywhere. It’s the new Klondike,” says Simon Chadwick, a business consultant specializing in sports and geopolitical economy, comparing it to the frantic late-19th century Canadian gold rush.

To get a sense of the velocity, consider these highlights from the first quarter of 2025.

TKO Group Holdings, parent company of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), confirmed the launch of a new boxing organization in partnership with Sela, an events company owned by PFI.

Abu Dhabi hosted the first-ever Middle Eastern leg of the World Surf League Championship, held in an artificial wave pool. The competition numbered as one of at least 19 major international events featuring at least 14 different sports this year in four countries: United Arab Emirates (UAE: notably, Abu Dhabi and Dubai), Bahrain, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

Mercedes-AMG, the high-performance subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz AG, announced plans to build an auto racing theme park in Qiddiya, Saudi Arabia, working with another PIF subsidiary. It is expected to rival Abu Dhabi’s Ferrari World, which opened in 2010.

NIP Group, an esports (video game) firm, inked a five-year, $40 million deal with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO), a publicly owned investment booster agency, to drive expansion in the region and around the world. NIP was formed in 2023 from a merger between Swedish esports outfit Ninjas in Pyjamas and the Chinese digital sports group ESV5.

SURJ Sports Investment bought a stake in the London-based DAZN sports streaming service, throwing down the MENA gauntlet to Qatar-based rival beIN Sports.

Qatar Sports Investments (QSI), a subsidiary of the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the state’s sovereign wealth fund, announced the launch of PSG Labs, a high-tech “innovation hub” as an extension of its ownership since 2011 of the Paris Saint-Germain football club.

Maverick Carter, business partner of basketball legend LeBron James, secured PIF’s backing for a $5 billion venture to organize a new global professional basketball league, The Financial Times reported. The deal is reminiscent of the 2022 launch of the PIF-backed LIV, a golf tour that forced a merger last year with the established PGA Tour.

Etihad Airways, the UAE’s national airline, announced a multi-year sponsorship agreement with the Badminton World Federation (BWF), starting with the 2025 season.

Still pending in early March, Moroccan amateur golf phenom Adam Bresnu appeared set to sign with 3Point0 Labs. The agent deal may prove symbolic beyond its size as a step toward the development of local sports heroes, helping establish a sustainable homegrown sports ecosystem in the region by giving local fans “a stable champion to get behind,” as Martin put it.

Forays into golf and badminton aside, money tends to be channeled into the three Fs: “fighting, football, and fast cars,” notes Chadwick, a fact that may reflect something deeper. “Not that women don’t participate, but the society is still incredibly masculine.”

The Middle East is hardly new to sports. “Wrestling, athletics, and fencing all originated in Egypt,” notes Victor Olivereau, a geopolitical consultant specializing in the Middle East and sports who has worked with Peace and Sport, an international organization.

The groundwork for today’s skyscraper-scale outlays was laid in 2013-2017, however. In 2016, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pushed PIF to flex “its financial might globally, including in the sports world.” Some mark the beginning of the current craze to pioneering investment in Formula 1 (Bahrain), tennis (Dubai) and English Premier League (Abu Dhabi). The next year, Saudi Arabia launched its ambitious Vision 2030 program.

For the hydrocarbon-dependent MENA economies, the official rallying call extends beyond economic growth to diversification for job creation, especially for individuals entering the workforce. More than 250 million children and young people, from newborns to age 24, lived in MENA countries in 2023, making them around 47% of the population, according to UNICEF. Youth (15-24) unemployment in the region stood at 24.9% the same year, according to the World Bank.

Saudi Arabia, for one, “will not be able to invest, without limit and in this way, over a long period,” he predicts. “When we observe the delays in the construction of NEOM and the revision of the kingdom’s ambitions in this area, we can legitimately wonder whether this policy of massive investment will continue beyond 2034.”

The region’s track record thus far suggests that “the sums invested are often greater than the benefits generated,” he adds. Take the World Cup in Qatar, which is estimated to have cost the Qatari authorities some $200 billion to stage and to have generated only $20 billion to $40 billion in indirect gains and investment.

“On the other hand, the organization of these events constitutes a vast stimulation for the local economy, at the level of built infrastructures, tourism, and others.”

Like the Klondike over a century ago, every participant is not guaranteed to come out ahead.

The report predicts further rises this year, with the aggregate central-government marketable debt-to-GDP ratio in OECD countries hitting 85%, more than 10 points higher than in 2019 and nearly double the figure for 2007. In parallel, borrowing costs are creeping upwards, reaching 3.3% by year-end 2024, up 0.3 percentage point over 2023.

“The period of ultra-low interest rates is over, and markets need to reckon with a new reality,” says Carmine Di Noia, director for Financial and Enterprise Affairs at the OECD.

Besides hampering new activity, the borrowing binge is likely to boost the cost of rolling over existing debt stocks. Nearly 45% of sovereign debt in OECD countries will mature by 2027 while roughly a third of outstanding corporate bond debt comes due in the next three years.

Old debt “will likely be refinanced at higher interest rates,” said OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann.

Earlier borrowing sprees cushioned the shocks and encouraged recovery from events such as the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. “What is remarkable is that these spikes were not one-off increases,” says Di Noia. “In both cases, rather than returning to previous trends, borrowing levels basically have remained at new highs.”

Sovereign bond issuance in OECD countries is projected to reach a record $17 trillion this year, up from $14 trillion in 2023. Nor are non-OECD actors immune. In China and most emerging markets, sovereign borrowing jumped from around $1 trillion in 2007 to over $3 trillion in 2024.

Corporate debt reached a historical high of $35 trillion at the end of last year. Most of this has been funneled into financial operations like refinancing and shareholder payouts rather than investments to boost productivity or capacity. “The risks are undermining debt sustainability,” Cormann warned.

A quarter-century after negotiations began, Mercosur, the South American trade bloc whose core members are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, has finally signed a trade agreement with the European Union (EU). The deal runs against the grain in an era of growing protectionism and rising deglobalization.

“This agreement is not just an economic opportunity, it is a political necessity,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at the Mercosur Summit in Montevideo in December, where the pact was signed. “I know that strong winds are coming in the opposite direction, towards isolation and fragmentation, but this agreement is our near response.”

The deal is the EU’s largest ever and Mercosur’s first with a major trading partner.

“European products will enter [the Mercosur] market under much better conditions than US or Japanese products,” Federico Steinberg, visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, wrote in a paper published on December 6. By eliminating tariffs on over 90% of goods, the agreement is expected to save EU exporters €4 billion annually while granting South American producers preferential access to European markets for competitive agricultural products.

The agreement has two parts. One covers goods, services, public procurement, and intellectual property, focusing on trade issues such as tariffs, with special attention to automobiles, agriculture, and critical minerals.

“Increasing uncertainties in geopolitics” have sparked interest in rare earth minerals, says Charlotte Emlinger, an economist at the Center for Prospective Studies and International Information (CEPII) in the French prime minister’s office. For sensitive items, such as beef exports to Europe, quotas put a lid on inflows.

The second part of the pact addresses broader themes, including human rights and the environment. Along with another 2024 EU trade pact with New Zealand, it breaks new ground by referencing the Paris Agreement on climate change, a detail notably accepted by Argentine President Javier Milei, a global-warming skeptic.

With a combined GDP of nearly $3 trillion, the four core members of Mercosur—Spanish for “Southern Common Market” in Spanish—would rank as the world’s fifth-largest economy. Some 300 million people live in an area of nearly 15 million square kilometers. The GDP figure doesn’t include Bolivia, which has been approved for membership but is in a four-year “implementation period” to come fully on board.

The EU was already Mercosur’s second-largest trading partner two years ago for goods, accounting for 16.9% of total trade, trailing China but beating the US, according to the European Commission. The EU exported €55.7 billion worth of goods to Mercosur that year, with €53.7 billion going the other way.

Touted as the emerging EU of the South when it was founded in 1991, Mercosur has yet to evolve beyond an imperfect customs union. The original four added Venezuela in 2012 only to suspend it in 2016 for violating political standards; Bolivia rose to full membership last year.  Suriname, Guyana, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Chile are associated states; they won’t be formally affected by the EU-Mercosur deal.

Intra-regional trade among the four founders jumped four-fold to $16.9 billion between 1990 and 1996, according to the Inter-American Development Bank, but true integration has proven elusive. Internal trade remained at just 10.3% of the global total in 2022, according to data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity, an online database.

The timing of the deal can be linked to efforts by the EU to ensure continued robust and diversified trade in the face of protectionist measures by the US under US President Donald Trump, the growing role of China, and the demise of the World Trade Organization (WTO) as an effective facilitator of international trade integration.

“In the last few years, the geopolitical situation has become more dire for the EU,” says Maximiliano Marzetti, associate professor of Law, Department of International Negotiation and Conflict Management, Lille Economics Management Lab in France, “with the war in Ukraine, Brexit, and the protectionist and aggressive policies of China and the United States. The EU needs new trade partners in a climate of hostility to free trade and also to assert its relevance on the current multipolar international stage.”

Mercosur-EU negotiations date much further back: to 1999, during the period of “peak globalization,” but they remained in low gear until late in the Obama administration, when the US began taking measures to weaken the World Trade Organization.

All members are far from speaking with one voice, however.

Argentina’s self-described “anarcho-capitalist” President Javier Milei has offered harsh words for Mercosur, even as he begins a one-year stint as the group’s president pro tempore. During a speech at the Mercosur summit, Milei described the bloc as “a prison that prevents member countries from leveraging their comparative advantages and export potential.”

A month later, in Davos during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, Milei told Bloomberg that he would abandon Mercosur and its Common External Tariff, which preempts side deals, for an accord with the US. “If the extreme condition were that, yes,” he said. “However, there are mechanisms that can be used, even being within Mercosur.”

Uruguay, too, has been exploring an independent deal with China. But “negotiations never started because of Lula’s vision of Mercosur being together,” notes Bartesaghi.

Nor do these piecemeal agreements solve all the problems. The renewed bilateral deal with the EU will not solve associate member Mexico’s problems if it is hit with higher tariffs from its northern neighbor.

“Remember that the US accounts for 80% of Mexican exports and the EU accounts for less than 5%,” says Ashkan Khayami, senior analyst, Latin America Country Risk at BMI, a British multinational research firm. “It’s not really plausible for the EU to replace the US as kind of the main destination, or even a very significant destination, for Mexican exports.”

Next comes ratification. For Mercosur, this is straightforward. Legislatures must vote, but if one balks, the accord will still apply for those that approve the deal. In Europe, however, the process is complex both bureaucratically and politically.

Prior to December, French farmers were out protesting the Mercosur deal; a resolution against the deal has been filed in the French parliament. Politicians in Poland, Italy, and the Netherlands, too, are raising questions. But observers tend to chalk this up to domestic posturing.

Thanks to the above-mentioned quotas for beef, for example, “that’s just a hamburger per inhabitant,” says Bartesaghi. Paraphrasing a French colloquial saying, “Mercosur is the tree that hides the forest,” Emlinger quips.

While the EU has sovereignty over trade, other treaty issues need member states’ approval. Proponents may therefore try to split the Mercosur text into its two component parts, trade and other. The trade section could presumably be fast-tracked though the European Parliament, where it would need votes representing 65% of constituents. Other sections, including environmental issues, would take the longer, country-by-country route.

“It is likely that the EU will opt, if it can, to split the ratification process,” says Marzetti.

The notion that “change is the only constant” dates all the way back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus, some 2,500 years ago. But the pace of change in today’s business world often seems to outdistance the capacity of executives and their teams to adapt.

Hardly a fad pushed by human resources, the phenomenon known as “change fatigue” can affect the bottom line through workforce churn, reduced ability of workers to adapt to further change, and lower productivity.

Executives should “be treating change fatigue as a business risk,” says Hilary Richards, Vice President and analyst in Finance Practice at Stamford, Connecticut-based consultant Gartner.

Whether adopting new technologies or reacting to external change, many if not most companies appear to be in a constant state of flux. Over 75% of corporations revamp their business model every two to five years, according to a study by WalkMe, a San Franciso-based software-as-a-service firm.

Nowhere does change fatigue ring truer than in corporate finance. Finance departments field a myriad of novel strategic roles when a company implements digital transformations, enterprise resource planning, and artificial intelligence (AI).

“CFOs have pretty significant mandates to support growth, manage cash, and process change,” Richards notes. Yet, only one-third of corporate-change projects are deemed successful, according to the WalkMe report. Two-thirds of workers report burnout during transformation drives and workplace stress accounts for 8% of national healthcare spending in the US.

Another recent report from Orgvue, a London-based organizational design and planning platform, found that 38% of CEOs would rather quit than lead a major transformation.

Her clients ability to adapt to change began to wane around 2017, recalls Jenny Magic, founder & CEO of Build Better Change, an Austin, Texas-based consultancy and co-author of “Change Fatigue: Flip Teams From Burnout to Buy-In.”

“Top leadership was interested, but middle managers and the people who do the work were less capable of carrying it out,” she recalls. A recently published report by her firm “validates that things are not getting better.”

Some evidence shows them getting worse.

“The average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022, up from two in 2016,” a Gartner report notes, “and there is no reason to expect the pace to slow. But the workforce has hit the wall; the share of employees willing to support enterprise change collapsed to just 38% in 2022, compared with 74% in 2016.”

In response, some organizations are getting creative; examples can be found among both corporate giants—Danone, Liberty Mutual—and relative upstarts. Companies opt for either change management consultants employed by big name consultancies or specialized emerging competitors. In addition to advising executives, these increasingly high-profile professionals hold conferences, provide training, and draft articles with titles such as “Three Ways to Minimize Change Fatigue Among Financial Teams.”

The solutions that consultants promote address two distinct kinds of change—large-scale transformation and accumulative change.

Major initiatives tend to favor faster speed and larger scope. Yet there are signs that more gradual solutions might be more effective and less traumatic.

These drives tend to be implemented in reaction to big external events, such as a severe economic downturn, the Covid pandemic and its fallout, or important trends in technology such as artificial intelligence. But this might reflect outdated thinking, argues Oliver Shaw, CEO of Orgvue.

“Change came along a lot less frequently” even a couple of decades ago, he says. Executives “developed impulses [to act]: ‘Change is needed now!’” As a banker who lived through the 2008 financial crisis, “I thought at the end of that, I would never see anything like it again.”

Now, supposedly one-of-a-kind events seem run-of-the-mill.

Full-bore transformation, often involving cutbacks, might be too blunt in an ever-changing world, Shaw argues. Risks include high severance pay and other costs related to large-scale layoffs. Companies in the Fortune 500 that underwent significant workforce restructuring in 2023 dished out $32.7 billion in severance pay that year and carried over another $10.9 billion into 2024 as charges or liabilities, according to data compiled by Orgvue.

Additional costs of dumping workers, according to a 2024 Bloomberg study of Securities and Exchange Commission listings, include reduced productivity (about six months); an uptick in voluntary departures; increased unemployment insurance tax; and higher legal fees, mostly to avert lawsuits over alleged discrimination.

Danone took a different path when it was contemplating a large-scale change; it used what an Orgvue case study calls a “continuous design approach to organizational development to remove the need for costly, reactive, high-risk transformation projects.” Instead of slashing jobs, the Paris-based multinational food and beverage company overhauled its human resources processes and shortened its planning period from annual to quarterly to better track labor demand and supply. They were able “to understand how [to make adjustments] through time,” Shaw says.

As with any malady, sometimes the best “remedy” is preventative medicine. When the Swedish payments fintech Klarna wanted to reduce overhead in 2023, it reduced trauma via layoffs by outsourcing about 500 jobs in 10 markets to two partner firms. Internally, it implemented a hiring freeze and embarked on a drive to adopt money-saving AI. “They are leveraging their margins by levering AI,” Shaw notes.

Danone and Klarna are examples of companies where leaders “understand organizations as systems.” If the average firm has a 15% attrition rate, according to Shaw, it should be able to milk that in tandem with internal reassignments to make significant reductions without undue trauma.

After a merger, San Diego-based broker C3 Risk & Insurance Services jumped into what at first seemed like a very complex and difficult integration process. Employees fretted over their future with the firm. Nobody could agree on which technology to adopt.

Eric Brown, founder and CEO at Florida-based Imperio Consulting, was brought in to help facilitate the process. A veteran of the US Special Forces, Brown draws on that background in his practice. Instead of change fatigue, the American military calls it “operator syndrome.” Constant pressure and uncertainty can wear people down.

“The corporate world mirrors that experience in many ways,” he says, “especially in finance, with its tech overload, unpredictable markets, and ever-changing regulations. It’s like trying to stay steady on shifting sand, and it can be exhausting.”

Brown recalls telling one client, “Let’s slow down now so we can speed up later.” Soldiers think of it as a “crawl, walk, run” sequence. With buy-in from C3’s top brass, Brown was able to help incorporate that approach into the integration plan in large part by using team-building exercises and tools.

“They took it to heart,” he says, investing in training and dialogue with employees. In 2023 and 2024, C3 was tabbed as a top place to work by both Business Insurance and the San Diego Business Journal. “C3 are rock stars,” Brown adds.

C3’s experience also points up the need to address the second of the two types of change fatigue that consultants identify: the accumulation of small changes. Like water that builds up behind the proverbial creaky dam, they can ultimately threaten an organization’s structural integrity.

Employees feel increasingly harried by the nearly non-stop accumulation of relatively minor changes affecting managerial strategies, team composition, and job description, Gartner found. Employees feel disempowered by top-down change that comes without debate or discussion. Old-school burnout and increased turnover result if employees cannot recover and recharge from one disruptive event before the next one comes along.

Hoping to ward off the fatigue cycle-of-death by 1,000 cuts, Liberty Mutual designed a process to identify employees’ fears and assumptions. It started with questions aiming to help workers make peace with change. Tools included change workshops as well as employee engagement and feedback. Such initiatives can help address problems that lurk below the surface.

“Most of the senior C-suite focuses on the tip of the iceberg,” Richards says. “It’s what they’re paid for. But your team will run into that iceberg.”

Growing numbers of experienced chief financial officers are abandoning the corporate grind to take freelance roles for multiple clients—whether in parallel or on a serial basis.

“The demand for [freelance] professional CFOs has approximately doubled” in recent years, says Eusebi Llensa, co-founder and CEO of Outvise, a Barcelona-based marketplace for high-end independent contractors.

Indie CFOs come in two flavors. Both enjoy growing popularity. And both differ from old school consultants because they become trusted members of company teams rather than serving as outside advisers.

Fractional CFOs work mostly with start-ups and growing midsize firms that need high-end financial services but cannot afford or don’t yet want a full-time employee. They work for extended periods with a portfolio of clients to provide the full gamut of CFO services, albeit on a part-time basis.

Two years ago, only about 2,000 LinkedIn accounts featured people promoting C-suite fractional services. This number currently stands at approximately 114,000, according to Sara Daw, CEO of The CFO Centre and The Liberti Group, and author of Strategy and Leadership as Service.

Interim CFOs take on short-term project-based assignments that cater to their expertise and interests; for example, an M&A specialist might sign on for a few months to oversee a transaction. When the deal is done, they move on.

People who define themselves as interim were more likely to be engaged in January (73%) than during the same month last year (67%) or two years ago (55%), according to the 2024 European Survey conducted by the International Network of Interim Manager Associations (INIMA).

Interim work is growing for all relevant functions, but C-suite and board services run ahead of the pack: They represent 55% of all gigs, said the INIMA report. Individuals skilled in “change management and process optimizations” are in high demand.

To facilitate the trend, a new global industry of independent management platforms and marketplaces is emerging to match C-suite and other high-end freelancers with potential clients. Some handle contracts, payments, back-office tasks, and other services. Top names include Outvise, Malt, True Bridge, Talmix, and Catalant. The CFO Centre, Fintalent.com and iFinance Director count among a subset that specializes in CFOs and top financial pros.

These companies report impressive rates of growth in revenue, such as: up 180% over the past two years; a threefold jump in monthly recurring revenue over the last 11 months; and an increase of 15% to 20% last year.

Chelsea Williams, founder and fractional CFO at US-based Money Mastery, a financial coaching company, and Core Solutions Group that works with law firms in the US, says she recently had to “Stop growing” lest things get out of hand.

The grandmother of them all, The CFO Centre, has evolved into a £60 million ($78 million) multinational organization since it was founded in 2001.

The industry has come a long way since Sara Daw co-founded that firm. Descriptive terms had yet to be coined. “Most people didn’t understand what we were talking about,” she recalls.

Despite the recent growth, the phenomenon still flies under the radar of many business screens. “I spent a lot of time having coffee with people to explain the model,” says John Frank, a fractional CFO and founder and CEO at Third Road Management, a business he has gradually grown over the past decade.

Frank echoes fellow industry leaders when he says, “The sky’s the limit” for the future of CFOs as independent contractors. As Dow travels the world, she says, “I get people asking when we are coming to their country.”

Sometimes people don’t wait. Take Rafael Estrela and his partner in São Paulo; seven years ago, they launched what has become BR Experts for the Brazilian market.

The trend is fueled by several developments including supply and demand, as well as from the evolution of the CFO profession in the corporate world.

The first has become obvious. We live in a “take this job and shove it” zeitgeist whereby many individuals embrace the lyrics of that Johnny Paycheck country song to pursue a better work-life balance, more flexibility, and new and more interesting professional challenges.

Take Phil Christmas, for example. As a British fractional CFO based in Spain, Christmas builds his portfolio of clients through platforms such as Outvise.

“I can help out with my two small kids. I can take my 6-year-old to school,” he says. “I am not fully employed as a fractional CFO, but I don’t want to be.”

But it can get complicated. For example, freelancing is often temporary. Nascent entrepreneurs take gigs to stay afloat as they bootstrap their companies.

“They need to fund their lives,” says Matthew Horrocks, head of Private Equity British Isles & North America at Malt, a platform for interims. “It allows them to spend time on what they want to do.”

That’s the sell side. On the buy side, there are two groups: SMEs and startups combine for one; then there are the corporates. For the latter, the use of freelancers is related to the evolving role of CFOs.

When SMEs and startups begin to grow, they increasingly need sophisticated financial services. But they can’t afford to hire a top-notch CFO. What is an entrepreneur to do? Hire a fractional.

For startups, the demand often emerges during early funding rounds. “When they are required to provide financials and data rooms, startups tend to hire fractional CFOs,” says Ömer F. Güven, founder and CEO of Fintalent.com, a platform for M&A and post-acquisition integration experts.

And it’s flexible. “Maybe it’s two days a week, but during the peak fundraising period, it could be 60 hours a week,” says Güven.

For small companies, whether seeking investors or not, a fractional CFO “really serves as a trusted adviser” for the entrepreneur, Frank notes. Says Christmas: “I am 62. My clients are often in their 20s. They are CEOs. They are highly intelligent, but they have no clue” about the financial side of the business world.

If smaller companies fuel the fractional world, corporates dominate the interim one. Sometimes it is something as simple as hiring a temporary replacement for a vacated slot or someone on parental leave.

But corporate leaders are also beginning to understand that they can boost productivity by hiring experts for specific tasks and projects, such as M&A, carve outs and post-acquisition integration. This is related to the growing sophistication of the CFO role, moving from computational to strategic and operational roles; thereby opening up sundry specialist tasks that might be better filled by temporary or part-time workers. Top financial people now need to be “strategic” says Llensa. “They need to ensure that there is a proper ROI.”

As individuals, fractional and interim CFOs might be one and the same, depending on the circumstances. They generally create portfolios of clients, sometimes tapping old contacts, sometimes platforms, and sometimes other networking tools.

Almost everyone agrees on one thing: To be a successful freelance CFO, one needs to be good at self-marketing. In other words, introverts need not apply.

“You have to find clients every day through marketing and networking,” says Christmas. “The type of person who is usually an accountant doesn’t have that kind of expertise.”

To make the roster of The CFO Centre, candidates must pass the barbeque test. Everyone is invited to a cookout. Those who help put sausages on the grill and talk to everyone make the team. Those who “stand in the corner” get cut.

Revenues from the Olympics are generated primarily by two main protagonists: the local organizing committee, this time 2024 Paris, and the IOC. Each also has clearly defined responsibilities.

For the most recent Summer Games in Tokyo, the IOC received a total of $7.6 billion between 2017-2020/2021 (slated for 2020, those games were postponed a year by the Covid pandemic). Media broadcasting rights accounted for 61% of revenues and the The Olympic Partner (TOP) corporate sponsorship program for 30%.

Broadcast fees have jumped by over four-fold since the 1990s, reaching $4.5 billion for Tokyo. TOP revenues increased from less than $300 million to $2.3 billion over the same period.

The TOP program was launched in the 1980s with five partners, and gradually expanded to the current 15. The stable of sponsors reflects changes in recent economic history. The original group included Kodak and Xerox. Current members include Atos, Airbnb, Alibaba and Intel. It also reflects the growing interest in the games. “We sweated bricks” to secure sponsors at the beginning, said Chris Renner, Global Head of Consulting at rEvolution, a Chicago-based sports marketing agency and a founder of TOP. Now, four-year contacts have been replaced with eight-year ones.

The main sources of income for local committees such as the 2024 Paris Games are domestic sponsorships, ticketing, licensing within the host country, hospitality and merchandising. As IOC revenues increase, local organizers also get more of that pot. Paris gets $1.7 billion for this edition, while the 2028 Los Angeles Games  and the 2032 Brisbane Games are earmarked for $1.8 billion each. Christophe Dubi, IOC executive director of the Olympic Games, said, “We make more, everybody makes more.”

Each of the 206 National Olympic Committees (NOCs) around the globe and the dozens of International Federations (IF) for specific sports also generate their own revenues. The best known of the latter are probably FIFA for soccer and FIBA for basketball, but the list includes the World Archery Federation, the World Badminton Federation, and more.

The IOC spends 10% of its revenues on internal operations and distributes the rest through what it calls a solidarity program to local organizing committees, the NOCs, IFs and other relevant sports promotion initiatives. This revenue sharing system is considered essential to the survival of some modalities. “This is very important for smaller sports like rowing, archery and fencing,” said Renner. “I don’t know if they could have sustained themselves through Covid without the solidarity program.”

The local committee is expected to handle venue operations, the workforce, technology and games services. Local public officials control security and other essential public services. Capital expenditures, often but not always in the form of public-private partnerships, may include sporting venues, enhanced or expanded public transportation networks, housing (such as the Olympic Village) and more. Budget-breaking cost overruns tend to fall into the capital expenditures category. “The operations budget usually makes a small profit,” said Renner.

Whether or not they formally make a profit, proponents argue that the games still leave a positive economic legacy. An independent study touted by the IOC concluded that the Paris Games will end up generating between $7.3 billion to $12.1 billion for the city and surrounding Île de France region between 2018-2034. The big gains are coming from tourism, construction and the organization of the games, said the report published by the Centre de droit et d’économie du sport (CDES) of the University of Limoges. The $3.3 billion in public spending will generate a multiplier effect of three, said the study.

Not everyone agrees, of course. In Paris, already one of the world’s top tourist destinations, there is much talk about sports tourists crowding out others who would normally visit. Local press reports have highlighted sectors such as luxury retailers who worry that they will sell fewer handbags than normal. The emblematic bouquinistes, the second-hand book sellers who line the banks of the Seine, successfully fought off efforts by local officials to remove their stalls to make more room for the riverside opening ceremony. Taxi drivers are moaning about traffic restrictions.

“A common feature of the economics of large-scale sporting events is that our expectations of them are more optimistic than what we make of them once they have taken place,” wrote Ivan Savin, associate professor of quantitative analytics at the ICTA-UAB ESCP Business School in Spain and co-author of an article that he outlined on The Conversation, a website that encourages the dissemination of scholarly studies among the general public. Savin and two colleagues did an econometric study of the effects on tourism of large sporting events between 1995-2019. “Typically, expenditure tends to tip over the original budget, while the revenue-side indicators (such as the number of visitors) are rarely achieved.”

Dubi accepts the crowding out concept but argues that the phenomenon is already factored into studies showing wider benefits. He also stressed that the IOC is open to outside scrutiny, saying it “forces everyone to ask the right questions.”

Ultimately, the financial side is only part of the process, everyone agrees. As for the local committee breaking even or making a profit, “I suppose it’s a good result,” said Anaïs Guillemané Mootoosamy, director general for Strategy at the Conran Design Group, a London-based brand and design consultancy that is working with the 2024 Paris Games. “But the Olympics aren’t meant to be a cash machine. It is to push the values.”

— Read Part 1 of 2024 Paris Games: Can The Olympics Finally Claim Financial Victory?

The 2024 Paris Games organizing committee is projected to break even or perhaps slip into the black from the upcoming Summer Games, CEO Étienne Thobois recently announced. With a budget estimated in the $8 billion to $10 billion range, Paris is emphasizing the use of existing facilities and lower-cost temporary venues.

“Everyone has been conscious of every euro that is spent, that it is useful, and we should be careful not to spend any euros on things that are superficial. Frankly, that is a challenge in itself,” Thobois said in a press conference before the opening ceremonies.

The Paris results stand in contrast to the last two Summer Games, when local committees lost $7 billion in the delayed Tokyo Games in 2021 and $2 billion Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Leaving taxpayers holding the bag is nothing new: Montreal famously needed decades to pay off its debt from the 1976 games. Many cities, notably Athens in 2004, wound up with useless sporting venues often built to feature Olympic sports that are not popular at home, like the Velodrome meant only for bicycle racing.

Viewed through this historical lens, cost overruns and white elephants seemed almost inevitable. “Hosting the Olympics is like holding a wedding,” said Hank Boyd, professor of Marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. “You’re not going to be frugal.”

Scholars like Boyd have pushed the need for “structural reform.” And influential observers like Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College in Massachusetts, want to establish a single, permanent venue for the games—an idea that has been floated for years. Community groups have launched high profile opposition movements to their cities’ bids, successfully in Boston in 2012, but not so in Rio.

To address these issues, the Lausanne, Switzerland-based International Olympic Committee (IOC) has encouraged local officials to put the brakes on capital spending and change their bidding processes. After the Athens Games, “they told the organizing committees to not put up White Elephants and use temporary facilities,” said Chris Renner, Global Head of Consulting at rEvolution, a Chicago-based sports marketing agency, who has been working with the IOC since the 1990s. “London was the start of that. You can breakdown the facilities and reuse them elsewhere.”

Traditionally, the IOC evaluated bids just seven years ahead of time and awarded the games based on a process reminiscent of “a beauty contest,” said Christophe Dubi, IOC executive director of the Olympic Games. Now “we now have a very different approach to the awarding of the games” with a focus on long-term partnerships. “We are speaking to cities and regions interested in the games for 2040. And why? Because by having such a long perspective, you can design together the future of what the games would look like in region X, Y, Z. It doesn’t mean they could do it tomorrow, but it means that there is a future together.”

If 2028 host Los Angeles can repeat its showing in 1984 as the only local committee so far to turn a profit, this may begin to look like a trend. “Maybe Paris has cracked the code,” said Boyd, citing the 2012 London Games as a possible precursor. Those games broke even while leaving a valuable legacy of urban renewal and London Stadium, which has hosted multiple big events.

— Read Part 2 of 2024 Paris Games: Can The Olympics Finally Claim Financial Victory?

Due diligence can be especially tricky for firms that use freelancers located in multiple jurisdictions—even within countries, such as the US, that have federal systems. Plus, governments everywhere from Brazil to Serbia to the UK are moving the goalposts.

Governments often couch the new rules as defending exploited workers. But many independent contractors oppose legislation that would restrict their freedom in exchange for traditional work-related benefits. California’s landmark Assembly Bill 5, for instance, passed in 2019, extends employee classification status to most gig workers. It has been the target of lawsuits filed by groups running the gamut from truckers and Uber drivers to freelance journalists.

The debate can be heated, but many impartial observers believe that it mostly comes down to this math: Governments fear the real or potential loss of tax revenue. Argentinean officials estimate that they are losing billions of dollars in tax revenue from citizens who work remotely with clients abroad, says Jon Younger, co-author of “Agile Talent: How to Source and Manage Outside Experts.” Shortfalls may result even in places with efficient tax collection structures and even where most freelancers pay their fair share, as activists say they do.

Collecting from individuals is not as quick and efficient as a simple blanket payroll deduction, points out Steve King, partner at Emergent Research. John Lee, CEO of Work From Anywhere, says, “Many countries around the world are looking at this as a significant risk, particularly those with high social security spending.”

In Serbia, among other places, legislation aims primarily to boost tax collection from independent workers. Following the California model, other governments want to reclassify freelancers to prevent them from working independently. The California law revived a three-pronged, Depression-era standard called the ABC Test. The controversial B factor states that, to be considered independent, a worker must perform work that falls outside the hiring entity’s normal course of operations. Thus, a book publisher can call an electrician to fix the wiring in its office; but it could not temporarily bring on a freelance translator, since the latter role serves the employer’s core function.

The politicians who back such legislation argue that they are combatting the misclassification of people who should be considered employees under the law. And experts agree that misclassification happens. King estimates that 10% to 15% of independent contractors, or some seven million to 10 million individuals in the US, “should be classified as employees, and most of them would want to be.” Not included in this estimate are gray-area sectors such as ride hailing and delivery drivers. Misclassification is concentrated in a handful of industries, including hospitality, warehousing, and some industrial sectors, he adds. Safety and other labor conditions in these places tend to be substandard and the employers often prey on vulnerable groups such as immigrants.

At least in the US, new legislation would not seem to be needed to prosecute such abuse, however. “Enforcement is uneven and underfunded,” says King, “but the laws are clear on misclassification.”

As some jurisdictions attempt to restrict freelancing, others encourage it. Over 50 countries offer so-called digital nomad visas to serve the needs of foreign remote workers, many of them independent. Some municipalities in Argentina and the US, for example, are starting to offer subsidies for incoming remote workers.

“Some countries are clamping down, but others are opening up,” says Andrew Jernigan, CEO of Insured Nomads. “They’re saying, ‘Please come and spend your money here.’”

The surging numbers tell the story. A major hiring shift is transforming how businesses find and utilize talent and how that talent finds and establishes relationships with companies that need its skills. Outsourcing work to freelancers is by no means a new phenomenon, but as the figures indicate, in the past five years it has jumped to an entirely new level.

What once was incidental and supplemental is now routinely baked into companies’ operating model. An astonishing 72 million Americans, or about 45% of the workforce, reaped at least some of their earnings from independent contracting last year. Those classified as full-time freelancers, defined as putting in more than 15 hours per week, reached 26 million. Freelancers overall and full-time freelancers were up by a staggering 89% and 91% respectively, compared to 2020, according to the 2023 State of Independence in America report by MBO Partners, a US-based direct sourcing platform.

While best documented in the US, the trend appears to be global. Registered freelancers in Saudi Arabia, for example, jumped in number by 157% from 2020 to August 2023 and now account for nearly 19% of the kingdom’s labor force, according to press reports. The reported market for digital freelancing in the Middle East stands at $4 billion. In the Middle East and North Africa, 86% of employers planned to hire freelancers in 2023, and about 89% of respondents hoped to do more freelance work, according to a poll last year by Middle Eastern recruiter Bayt.

“There is a shortage of skilled workers,” notes Steve King, partner at Emergent Research, a California-based small-business focused consultancy. “Companies would like to hire them, but they can’t.”

For executives, the new reality might best be captured in the title of a paper recently published in the Harvard Business Review: “Highly Skilled Professionals Want Your Work But Not Your Job.” The paper describes how managers are grappling to establish and oversee blended workforces at employers such as Microsoft, M&C Saatchi, Mars, and others.

As with any revolution, this shift in the nature of work exposes a few rough edges.

“Many companies do not know how to work with freelancers,” says Jon Younger, co-author of “Agile Talent: How to Source and Manage Outside Experts,” who embraces the sobriquet “godfather of the freelance revolution,” given to him by more-youthful peers. “They try to treat them like employees, and they are not employees.” Efforts to herd them in often lead to friction. Younger is one of a handful of consultants who help both companies and hiring platforms smooth things over.

Freelancing covers an astounding range of occupations and ranks. King suggests an umbrella term such as “independent” or “nontraditional” workers. “Under the hood, there are segments based on what they do,” he notes.

A “fractional” professional will work for one or more clients, with fixed duties over an agreed-upon period of time or on a project basis. That period can be either defined or open-ended. Fractionals get paid regularly, often as a monthly retainer, or per project. The highest-profile fractionals would be C-suite-level executives, ranging from part-time, long-term CFOs to M&A specialists who pop in to help close specific deals. The category also includes anyone who receives a retainer, from a foreign correspondent to a training specialist.

“Independent contractor” generally refers to skilled individuals who work project-to-project. They may have portfolios of regular clients. They may also accept one-off assignments. Often, they combine both. They are sometimes referred to as “solopreneurs” when they run their own business singlehandedly.

Gig workers tend to get their work from online platforms, either fully automated—such as Uber—or human-curated ones, whereby platform representatives link up suppliers with clients. The European Training Foundation (ETF), a European Union agency, notes that platform workers are generally divided between the location-independent, such as software developers and graphic artists; and those limited by geography, such as ride-hailing and delivery drivers.

Location-dependent gig workers without high-end skills tend to be the lowest earners of the freelancing family, although studies often show that many of them appreciate the independence and flexibility offered by this kind of work.

A commercial infrastructure for hooking companies up with freelancers—whatever their place on the totem pole—has burgeoned in recent years. With the growth of platforms such as Fiverr, Upwork, and Toptal; and more-specialized resources such as The CFO Centre, Catalant, HashRoot in India, and Outvise in Spain, many high-end independent workers now rely on some form of matchmaking service to find and maintain client relationships.

The freelance trend has also nurtured such newfangled entities as the Rosely Group, a public relations firm that Jonathan Williams, managing director, calls a “remote-first agency” but that might best be described as a virtual company. While Rosely is properly registered in both the UK and the Netherlands, Williams says, “Everybody works remotely”: some in New York, some in New Zealand, and some in Bali.

Rosely operates as a full-service agency, but it also offers clients a smorgasbord of arrangements, says Williams. “If they say they want a different service, we can give them a different service” by bringing in someone with the right expertise for the job. Time zones and company culture offer challenges, but there is no overhead for expensive office space in New York or London.

The emergence of a platform industry has already engendered the world`s first platform association. Called R-evolution, it aims to promote freelancing and independent contracting in Spain, where the concept of freelancing isn’t “as mature” as in some other parts of the world, says Ana Kramarenko, marketing manager at Outvise.

The new freelance workforce includes people who have often been marginalized, such as unpaid family caregivers and people with mobility problems. Many parents struggling to raise children would prefer flexible schedules. That’s how Sara Daw became an industry pioneer two decades ago.

“I was doing well with a big corporation, but I couldn’t have a career and be a mum,” says Daw, CEO of The CFO Centre Group and the Liberti Group, and author of “Strategy and Leadership as Service: How the Access Economy Meets the C-Suite.” Now she runs a firm that matches up part-time corner-office professionals with small and midsize businesses “that can’t afford the C-Suite price tag but absolutely need their skills.”

In Canada, an Indigenous activist established an online freelance platform designed primarily to serve indigenous peoples. “Everyone on our platform has a story,” Bobbie Racette, CEO and founder of The Virtual Gurus, said in April at the Running Remote conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

Wage discrepancies are often highlighted as a key element of the global North-South divide. By applying what he calls “geo-arbitrage,” Emergent Research’s King argues that workers in low-cost jurisdictions can live better while remaining competitive on cost.

“In India pre-Covid, even if heavily underpaid, everybody preferred job security,” says Arjun Narayanan, chief growth officer at HashRoot, an India-based platform for software developers and engineers. During the pandemic, techies secured higher wages through his and other firms. Now almost everyone wants to remain independent, he says. “Freelancing is going to be the new law. Not just in India, but around the world.”

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, tech freelancers in the Western Balkans were making their marks on international online job platforms, reports the ETF. Of the region’s seven nations, five—all but Croatia and Kosovo—ranked among the global top 10 for the number of freelancers per 1,000 people in 2018.

The new breed of freelancers may yearn to be free, but these aren’t your huddled masses. They run the gamut of occupations, and many offer expertise in some of today’s hottest fields. The leading categories of independent workers include experts in artificial intelligence (AI), supply chains and logistics, data sciences, machine learning, and marketing—including digital marketing and content creation—along with C-suite-level executives.

Nearly three-quarters of European freelancers surveyed say they earn as much as, or more than, they once did on a full-time job, according to Malt, a Paris-based continental freelance management system and marketplace. Over three-quarters of US freelancers said they were “very satisfied” with independent work, according to MBO Partners’ report. Most independent workers in Europe seem content enough as well, reports Malt, 62% having no interest in changing to in-house roles and only 10% saying they are actively searching for full-time jobs.

These individuals, however, want the flexibility, independence, agency, and better work-life balance that freelancing promises in return.

“It goes deep into people’s values,” says John Lee, CEO of Work From Anywhere, a technology platform offering solutions to compliance issues for companies that use remote workers. “People may want to be closer to their kids or care for a sick parent. For any of a multitude of reasons, maybe the independent contractor or freelancer route might suit them better.”

In most parts of the world—even Japan, with its legendary salarymen—many workers have given up on the mid-20th century promise of corporate stability. In the 1980s, most American employees had defined-benefit pension plans; now, the figure for private industry is about 15%. The average time spent in a job in the US is about three-and-a-half years, according to King. If the advantages of traditional work amount to security, a regular paycheck, benefits, and less risk, today “there’s less security,” he suggests. “Covid-19 woke everyone up to insecurity. People start thinking about what they are doing with their lives.”

For many, that means becoming their own boss.

“In the age of Elon Musk, why not make your own pizza?” asks Younger.

Many old-school executives still claim to value loyalty, stability, company culture, and in-house intellectual property. But even they are being dragged along with the freelance revolution. They need that free-thinking talent.

Other executives see ways to use the trend to increase profitability. Whatever the case, they “are finally willing to admit that they can get great labor and not pay as much,” says Andrew Jernigan, CEO of Insured Nomads, an insurance company focused on remote workers.

That might seem counterintuitive, given that independent contractors often earn more by the hour than full-time employees. But freelancers do not receive health or pension benefits, or paid vacation time. The employer pays only for what it needs, not for dead time around the water cooler. Ultimately, companies want flexibility, agility, reduced fixed costs, and access to talent, King agues.

“Over the past hundred years, if a company was doing an M&A deal, they needed a very specific expert for a particular project of maybe 12 weeks; but they would typically have gone and hired a person for a full-time role,” Lee notes. “Which is insane, because I know the deal is typically a short-term project where you need very highly specific niche skills.” Now, companies are bringing in specialists for defined projects.

Some tasks require stable employees, of course, and fortunately for executives many individuals prefer regular jobs. The number of full-time freelancers is growing, but most independent contractors are moonlighting while holding onto something more secure, Younger notes. Many workers will never take the plunge, in his view, for three reasons: fear of income volatility, fear of losing ancillary benefits like health insurance, and fear of loneliness outside a traditional workplace.

“You need to bifurcate the work from a human resources perspective into operational and strategic: who runs the ship as opposed to who changes the course,” says Tim Toterhi, who, as a fractional chief human resources officer, sees both full-time and freelance workers as having their place in the same organization. “You’re going to pay more if you want loyalty for implementation”; but if you want to shift course, bring in the outside experts.

“Companies need some of the people all of the time, and some of the people some of the time,” Younger concludes.

Or, as MBO Partners CEO Miles Everson, puts it, “People who think they need a full-time employee have not gotten the memo yet.”