When your business is growing, or simply when you are in it alone, you might feel that you need help with some of the tasks. These are the times when people most frequently decide to do things themselves or (if they already have employees) keep everything in-house.
This approach has many benefits.
- First and foremost, needs handled internally do not directly involve invoices that would need money to pay.
- The helping hand is always available, and probably also needs less explanation.
- Overtime and weekend work are easy to negotiate.
There are of course hidden or deferred costs involved as well, most notably time, risk, expertise – including management overhead.
Is your own time free of charge? Or should you price it at managerial rates?
When you work alone yourself, you won’t only save money but also sacrifice your time that could be devoted to the parts of your business only you can handle. When assessing the returns and costs of your time, your work carries the price tag of a founder, a manager, not the actual cost of the task you are handling.
This is an opportunity cost in the form of hours not spent on sales, strategy, client relationships, developing your product or service offering, and so on.
There might even be a “competence ceiling”, because some of the tasks at hand might not be in line with your strengths and expertise – and this can mean technical knowledge of a certain software, a general preference for speaking more or speaking less, and so on.
Doing a job yourself doesn’t mean doing it well (heard it from a friend).
There is also a wall in terms of scaling or capacities. Working solo will not give you more than 24 hours a day, and in the long run, it might even lead to burnout. Good decisions are valuable but usually benefit from a fresh and well-rested mind, making the opportunity costs of working on your own even higher.
And finally, when it is only you running the shop, it will be difficult for you to take a holiday – and, as a worse scenario, you might even need time away for medical reasons.
And what if you involve someone?
It is very easy to reach out to one of the freelancer platforms out there and simply post an ad for the job you are trying to handle.
There is, however, a competence limitation here as well. In case you are not familiar with the domain, how can you go about making the right call? The responses you receive will mostly be nicely compiled portfolios and ratings of other users you can look at.
If this is a domain you do not understand, you will be forced to evaluate portfolios and sales pitches instead of actual competence.
During the past years we have gradually established contact with experts in various professional areas. For each such cooperation we do internal vetting, beginning of course with the marketing material received and overall impressions gained, and we always put new vendor partnerships to the test gradually – first starting with simple and low-key tasks that can be redone if needed, and in the case of which delays are not so much of a problem. The tasks broaden gradually with time, and we always maintain our quality control so that any changes in vendor output can be identified early on.
This is a path available to anyone, but if you feel you don’t want to try 3-4 freelancers until you find the right one, we are at your service.
Even if there is a small task that needs handling, a professional touch is (usually) better than a cheap alternative. For instance, even if you just want to design a simple flyer, customers will base their decisions about your business on their first impressions. This also raises the question of availability and loyalty. When approaching someone on one of the freelancer recruitment platforms, they will most likely devote their attention to clients that are long-standing and recurring or appear to be high-ticket.
Even if you spend a relatively meaningful sum on your freelancers in total, each of them will make their decision on the significance of the cooperation from their individual perspective – and a job that is crucial for you might end up being too small for them.
Since we maintain a continuous working relationship with our freelance contributors, we have a better position when it comes to such negotiations, for instance if a tighter deadline is needed, there are many discussion rounds, or the project brief is relatively detailed compared with the total size of the specific job at hand.
When it comes to involving freelancers, another challenge is to know in advance which specific expertise a task needs. Hiring through freelancer platforms generally requires you to specify the skills before being able to find a partner to work with. However, if you are not fully versed in the subject matter at hand, you might start off in a wrong direction, e.g. ask for a “short-form video” when what you envision is a video that is short, or try to gather “qualified leads” when what you really mean is a contact list that has reliable data in it.
When working with us, we have a discovery call to handle these gaps, and if later down the road the scope changes slightly (e.g. you want to include existing photos animated using AI as part of your video project), our back-office team can absorb such requests internally – you will not be faced with the problem that your original partner of choice cannot handle the request.
Beyond the question of scope, availabilities, or the “single point of failure” risk can also be significant. If you work with a specific freelancer, while the cooperation might be smooth, you might randomly be faced with unavailability, for instance in the case of the early autumn illness season.
Such a negative scenario will be limited, should you decide to work with us.
You can do things with AI, too. Lots of things.
The scope of competence remains a requirement for AI prompting as well. While at first glance it appears that AI is the very tool that would relieve you from the burden of being an expert, AI output tends to be only as good as the prompts provided – not to mention the importance of fact checking and sanity checking, addressing problems caused by hallucinations, which do require time and some domain expertise.
There are also times when AI agents don’t go the whole way, or their output is just mediocre or feels off.
All these gaps require a knowledge of the area at hand and the numerous AI tools as well, unless a run-of-the-mill blog post or ad copy is enough (it could be, for instance for hundreds of webstore imagery and descriptions).
Agentic skills can be broad, and our related human capabilities are wide ranging.
You can work with in-house employees. Remote or on-site.
Employees on the payroll involve fixed costs, which include monthly salaries, holiday allowances, office space and utilities, required equipment and its upkeep. There is probably an initial cost arising from the hiring process itself (the time lost from when the need arises until the employee has been onboarded, and perhaps even the cost of advertising for the job). Unforeseen expenses can also arise in the form of sick leaves, and perhaps legal costs related to severance or – the worst-case scenario – indemnification.
There is a risk involved with hiring: the person you decide on might not work out in the end (hence the “probation period”), or might even decide that the position at your business is not really for them.
AI adds to this risk, because you might realise that some of the anticipated workload can be handled using AI – and full-time employment is not easy or cheap to undo or change.
With full-time employees, efficiently filling their time with tasks that match their availability and skills is also a challenge – we wrote another article just about this very subject back in April.
We also discussed, back in July, how to document processes so that both new employees and outsourcing partners can quickly attach to your workflows.
Not to mention our article detailing the actual disadvantages of outsourcing.
Each of these approaches provides you with benefits but also has some disadvantages.
Will a new hire work out as hoped? Can you efficiently assign tasks to each member of your team, considering capabilities, schedules, and workload? Will the chosen freelancer, who has been briefed in detail, be available the next time you need them, or will you need to find and brief someone else from scratch?
And, more fundamentally, will you realise you need something different, something more, or something less halfway through the work?
These are the situations that we can help you navigate. Our services are designed with flexibility in mind, with no required retainers or minimum hours. Book a discovery call with one of our colleagues to discuss further.
