7 Warning Signs to Watch for When Working with Subcontractors
Subcontractors can make a world of difference when it comes to how quickly you can complete a project. But if a problem creeps in, the back and forth with a subcontractor can drag out a project.
Making sure that you work with reliable people, whether we’re talking about a subcontractor you work with normally or another freelancer you’re bringing in just for a particular project, is important.
After all, on a project subcontractors are helping you with, you’re ultimately responsible for their work, as well as your own. If anything goes wrong, you have to fix it or take the ding to your professional reputation.
There are certain warning signs that are worth looking for, to make sure that you have the best opportunity for a smooth project. If you see any of the signs listed below, it may be worth choosing another subcontractor. Continue Reading
Creating an Agency: Getting Freelancers to Work with You
Hi. I’m Shane. I tweet about my misadventures running (with some pretty smart people) a 100% freelance driven agency at @justlikeair. Working with freelancers offers an interesting conundrum. In a polygamous environment, a genuinely free market, how do you build loyalty? Why would a great freelancer choose my urgent project over someone else’s? How do we stay attractive after the 3rd date (project)? What about after dating (without getting married) for 3 years? After all, the best freelancers get to pick from a wide pool of suitors.
Check out the slides from the entire talk. The article below elaborates on section 4. Continue Reading
The Pros and Cons of Being a Subcontractor
Photo credit: Jenah Crump Photography on Flickr
Previous blog posts have extolled the time-saving benefits of subcontracting. Sure, if you’re the person subcontracting work, it can help boost your income, keep clients happy, and prevent from you turning away new work even when you’re busy. But is it a sweet deal for the subcontractor, too?
That depends.
A mid-summer look at my income spreadsheet showed that I earn much of my income through subcontracting agreements. I hadn’t thought about my patchwork of copywriting, blogging, and journalistic projects it in those terms, but much of my work is (either formally or informally) structured this way. So I can say from personal experience that subcontracting with advertising and PR agencies, creative staffing firms, and other freelancers is a mixed bag. Here are some of the pros and cons. Continue Reading
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.
When You Need to Subcontract
Subcontracting can be useful for a freelancer: maybe a client wants a complete website and expects you to handle everything from design to content. If you’re primarily a web designer, you can subcontract the parts of the project dealing with content to a writer. You can wind up with some extra income from the project if you do it right. But how do you know just what is necessary to subcontract? Where do you find a subcontractor? How do you pay him?
The Question of Outsourcing
Outsourcing has been on my mind a lot: I’ve had to turn down a couple of projects lately that I just didn’t have time to do. I keep thinking that if I could have outsourced at least part of those projects, I could have gotten them done — and gotten the paychecks that went along with them.
The idea of outsourcing is pretty attractive on the surface. If you work with another freelancer in your field — perhaps one with a little less experience — you can take on at least a few more projects than you might manage to otherwise. If you work with freelancers in other fields, you can take on bigger projects: a web designer, for instance, might take on the whole development of a website (including the content) and subcontract the writing to a freelancer who specializes in web copy.
As long as you’re the freelancer who went out looking for the project and arranged to bring in other freelancers, you get paid. Even if you only get a small slice of the pie on a project where someone else does the lion’s share of the work, you still get paid.
