The Care and Feeding of Subcontractors
There will come a time in your freelancing life when you’ll tackle a project that’s too big for you to handle alone. Which may make you feel like the project is tackling you.
You can eliminate that tackling-you feeling when you think of those extra-big projects as extra-big opportunities for you to bill higher than ever before. And, since I’m well into the sports analogies realm, this article will show you how to build a virtual team for handling the work.
Let’s take website development as an example. You might be an ace at figuring out the design of the site. But the programming? Forget it.You couldn’t program your way out of a wet paper bag. And your Web Standards-based XHTML and Cascading Style Sheet skills may not be at expert levels.
So, you take the development of a content management system-based client’s site and break it down into tasks:
- You’re an ace at firing up Photoshop and creating a knockout design concept that the client absolutely loves. Time to get those wonderful Photoshop files turned into valid XHTML and CSS. Since this isn’t your area of expertise, subcontract it.
- Once you have the valid XHTML and CSS, it’s time to start building the site with the content management system (CMS) that best suits your client’s needs. And, since you’re not a programmer, you’ll need to subcontract to one who can get your files playing nicely with the CMS.
- Okay, so you’re probably thinking that this gig doesn’t require any more work on your part. Well, wrong. Now it’s time to build the site. And that’s going to be your job. After all, you can’t teach your client how to use the CMS if you haven’t delved into it yourself.
- Since you’re a thoughtful website developer, you’re going to take your “I just built your site with this CMS” experience and turn it into a training manual for your client. It will be a useful supplement to the hands-on training that you’re going to provide to the client. But, since your spelling and grammar aren’t always perfect, you subcontract the copyediting.
- Want to be sure that the site’s working and conforming to Web Standards before it goes live? Subcontract this job to a website tester.
On this project, your virtual team consists of:
- You
- XHTML/CSS specialist
- CMS Programmer
- Copyeditor
- Website Performance and Standards Tester
This might not be the lineup for every big project you take on. Some clients may need multimedia, which means that you’ll need to find a Flash expert. Or your client might be concerned about making the site accessible. Several years ago, I met a blind man who worked as a computer consultant. Website accessibility testing was one of the services he offered.
Five tips for the care and feeding of subcontractors:
- The secret to managing big projects is to stop viewing yourself as a one-man band. Those days are over. You’re a symphony conductor now.And, like real-life conductors, you may have to work out conflicts between subcontractors. You may need to cajole them into doing their best work. You might also have to quickly find another sub when the first one walks off the job. Or says that he can do the work, but never gets started on the project. It’s all part of project management, so brush up on those people skills.
- You’ve probably heard those stories about the ad agencies that tell the freelancers that they’ll get paid when the agency gets paid. And, six months later, the freelancers are still looking for their money. Hint to you: Don’t be like those agencies. Pay your subs quickly. It’s the cheapest public relations move you’ll ever make.
- Give your subs clear and detailed instructions. You want those instructions to be down to the level of telling the sub that you want your website pages’ filenames to have hyphens instead of underscores. And, even if you think you’re making things perfectly clear, be ready for questions and comments from your subs. In those questions and comments may be ideas that will help make your work better, so be open to them.
- Keep your subs in the loop about upcoming projects. Don’t expect them to drop everything when you land the Great Whale of a project.
- In tip #1, I warned you about the idea of having to quickly replace a sub if he or she walks off the job. This happened to me a couple of years ago. Fortunately, I found someone else to take over the work. Which leads me to the point of this tip: You’ll need to add “talent spotter” to your job description. Always be on the lookout for good subs. You never know when you’ll need them.
I’d like to close with a warning about subcontracting: There are times when jobs are best handled through referral, rather than subcontracting. Print designers usually have a stable of printers they prefer to work with. But it’s best to let the printer bill the client directly, lest the client decide not to pay you for the entire job because of some printing problem, be it real or imagined.
Same goes for search engine optimization. A few years back, I had a website redesign client who was working with my favorite SEO guy. In addition to being one of the most ethical people I’ve ever met, this guy was good. He had one of my business websites ranked #1 in Google for several years.
I’d subcontracted the work to SEO Guy, and guess what. Even though SEO Guy and I had repeatedly told the client that high rankings can take a long time to achieve, he didn’t think he was getting there fast enough. Long story short: I ended up having to refund $1,000 to the client. And I told said client to find someone else to handle his website work. (Some clients just aren’t worth having.)
A few months later, the former client contacted me with a question relating to the design of his site. Our conversation touched on the topic of search engine rankings. Former Client informed me that he’d found another company to do the SEO work – and he was paying them $6,000 a year for their services.
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Great article and just in time for me too as looking into this. Thanks for the tips!
An excellent article. Thank you so much for sharing this Martha
I’ve recently begun using subs over the past couple of months, and one consequence that I hadn’t anticipated was the additional administrative overhead related to prepping files and writing instructions before handing-off to the sub.
Even though using sub-contractors saves a tone of time in the long-run, you have to be prepared for the additional time it will take to get the ball rolling because as great as subs can be, they can’t read your or your clients mind.
I am amazed by the inefficiencies this article is treating as standard. What competent front-end developer can’t also wrangle a CMS? Why couldn’t he/she also check site performance and standards? Until a site has significant scaling issues an expert isn’t going to be worth the cost, especially on the shared hosting + standard CMS you’ll likely be using.
Inefficient teams, subcontracted or not, will vaporize your margins.
Point #1 in “care and feeding of subcontractors” implies it’s common to work with people who have been insufficiently vetted, which suggests a problem of a different sort. But simply increasing the number of unknown people involved is a backwards solution.
The budgets also aren’t quite adding up – any project that can afford 5 concurrent designer/developers shouldn’t even blink at a 6k/annual SEO bill. It only makes sense if your subcontractors are being significantly underpayed, which explains why they’re all a bunch of flakes.
All of that said – sometimes subcontracting is exactly the right choice, and points on keeping them in the loop (during and after the project) are well made. I couldn’t be all negative!
To clarify – shouldn’t even blink at a 6k/annual SEO bill *that’s generating returns.* There’s a lot of snake oil being sold in that field, and it can be had for any price you’re willing to pay.
Great article, if anyone needs some design work, we can definitely talk about. Looking to get some nice designers for a project coming up!
Great article. Spot on advice. I have been practicing many of these tips for years now and trust me, it will allow you, your business, your clients and your contractors to “grow”.
I think alot of the times freelancers are afraid to refer other contractors as well, in fear that they will lose business. I can only say one thing, become a referral machine, it only helps you and reflects highly upon you and your character in the end!
Wow – great post and right on time! I was just googling for what you can call ethics in subcontracting. Good to see a relevant topic on one of my favorite blogs
I work with some of my clients on hourly basis. One of those hourly clients requested something that requires little graphic design work. Usually, if I were to bill the client per project, I’d just outsource this bit of work to someone I know.
However, the problem is this project is billed on hourly basis. So, my question to you is: what are the *ethical* ways to add this little design project into my invoice, making it clear that the work was not done by me and still be able to make some profit off it?
I can’t believe my post was moderated. It was an alternate point of view, but reasonable, not inflammatory, and based on fact.
I doubt this post will make it through either, but dear editor – consider what this does for your integrity. I never had a reason to doubt it before. Now I’m disgusted.
The message that comes up after you post a comment says “Your comment is awaiting moderation.” Finish reading the notice next time. We don’t moderate on weekends.
My bad if I misread – I saw a notice that said “your comment is awaiting moderation,” and when I came back the next day I saw new comments but not mine. If there was a message about no moderation on weekends, then I missed it. Thanks for the response and the posting.
I’d had my eye out for an article addressing these very aspects of freelancing for a while now — it’s great to finally find it. Definitely builds confidence to see that some of my initial, instinctual notions about how to manage sub relations weren’t far off the mark.
Great article but… I have been subcontracting for a few years now and the real problem for me is how to make the electronic communication efficient.
Sometimes I have to pass documents that have 30+ pages to one of my programmers just to make everything clear – each point consinsts of screenshot + description of the problem that has to be fixed.
This is extremly time consuming and I have tried many solutions – Camtasia, Google Wave, Skype etc. Nothing seams to be the perfect solution
Everytime when I have to subcontract a lot I think that I should just learn the damn thing. This is how I went from Photoshop to HTML + Tables, than from HTML + Tables to XHTML + CSS, than from that to basics of PHP / MySQL and now I design, code and connect things to WordPress alone
I still subcontract a lot but from my experience it’s faster to do many things myself than to work 3-4 hours just to pass some work to my subcontractors
For screenshots and screencasts try Jing – http://jingproject.com/. It lets you take screenshots and screencasts, mark them up with comments, arrows, boxes, etc, and upload directly to your server. When you upload it copies the URL directly into your clipboard so you can just ctrl+v in an email or chat convo or Basecamp.
For example, it took me about 25 seconds to create, upload, and share this: http://www.clusterig.com/captures/matt/2010-03-31_1116.png
Maybe try one of 37signals’ projects like Basecamp for collaboration and sharing of the documents? Or a similar project management software. That way you could keep all of the information together for the project, and you might be able to cobble together some standard guidelines you could use for more than one project…
Great topic. I think subcontractors deserve even series of posts, there are so much about it. And it’s very hard to find and keep excellent ones, too.
On a lot of projects, there’s plenty of stuff you could easily outsource and save yourself the time, but the budget doesn’t allow you to hire freelancers working at or near the same rate as you.
One thing freelancers should consider is outsourcing overseas. If you can shave off 50% of your time on a project for 10% of the budget, you’re probably making the right business move. You’ll be able to spend your time on better things for you and your clients. The Philippines is a great place to outsource to. Education is high, labor costs about 12% of American rates, and the cultural work ethic is great. I can’t tell you how much better success we’ve had there than sending work to India. We love it so much we built a site for hiring subcontractors in the Philippines: http://www.easyoutsource.com. We also have a bunch of solid articles on outsourcing tips.
On that note, to share an experience I had recently with a “client” of mine. They had limited skills in anything outside of graphics, HTML and some CSS, whereas my skillset is mostly in backend work, secure systems, etc. I ended up doing piecework for a couple of projects, I’d end up doing the “hard stuff” and I’d get paid promptly and all would be good.
Last project I was approached for, I was given a list of things that were wanted, sent back a quote that I’ve been told by several people that I should’ve doubled or tripled for the work that was wanted (I’m no good at this pricing thing–kudos to FreelanceSwitch for the articles on setting rates!). I assume my breakdown of the quote got copied and pasted directly into the proposal submitted. Fast forward two months, three months, it’s been a long time, no news between then and now–I get an email, asking for my immediate help (one of those issues that has persisted for years, but is now an emergency?), with a friendly “oh, by the way, I think I lost the quote… they said the cost was too high, I said I’d talk to you and get your cost cut down.”
Uhhh…. What? In my experience with subcontracting, the contractor deal with the subcontractors directly, being the exclusive point of contact and communication with the client, and they don’t throw their subcontractors under the bus if they’re going to be providing the core value of your proposal…
I’ve been a bit soured on working for that particular agency now, and likely won’t work with them again… I’d suggest thus, to other contractors:
Don’t throw your subcontractors under the bus or blame them for losing a contract: it’s not *them* that’s the problem, you’re not selling the value of your service correctly. If you’re getting unsatisfactory work from a subcontractor, well, you’re their client too–deal with it early on, keep involved. If you’re not satisfied, if the customer isn’t satisfied–fix it.
And if you’re not going to have the company pay your subcontractors separately or deal with them separately, and if your subcontractors will never speak to your customers directly–you are the liaison. Don’t promise the clients anything you haven’t talked to your subcontractors about first: eg, lowering their prices, adding in a whole whack of new features, etc., because then you will either have unhappy subcontractors or a whole new quote you’re going to have to explain to your customer.
…Also, frankly, if you (being a contractor) need to lower your quote for some reason and I’ve already quoted you for my work, if we’re on good terms I gave you the best rate I can while still making it worth my while: if you really need to kick down the budget for your customer, here are suggestions: sit down with the customer and explain the value of your service at the rate provided; tell the customer that that’s the cost for the features they want, and work with them to narrow their featureset to match the budget; take up the slack in your own rates before telling your subcontractors that their work is too expensive (while your own is not, of course, even though they have skills you need and cannot do yourself!); or find cheaper subcontractors for this project.
…My two cents, anyway.
Subcontractors give me hart strokes! be carefull.