When you're looking for outside help with your business or project, these tips could save you headaches and help you have realistic expectations.
1. Have a minimum budget
As a business looking to hire outside help, you're of course going to think: what is the maximum I am willing to spend?
But why would you want a minimum budget? Shouldn't it be $0?!
Well, not really. There are fair market (range of) values for the results you want. Here are some factors you may want to consider:
- Consultant's time to completion. Usually, the faster you want something done, the more costly or lower quality it would be. A classic triangle!
- Consultant's quality of work. A better quality website would be easier to maintain or change down the line, whereas a cookie-cutter solution may not be able to adapt to your changing needs.
- Your time. Last, and sometimes most importantly, completing a project requires oversight from you. If you need to spend tons of time making sure the work gets done, or you always have to ask them about progress and find they are behind or unclear in their estimates, that takes time away from you focusing on other important things.
- Desirability of your project. High-end consultants will often turn down work that is below a certain budget, to avoid the costly onboarding/closing of a project or contract. Those will often ask you about your budget. If you want to avoid disclosing your maximum out of (a legitimate) fear of receiving a quote for 1 cent less, then be prepared with a minimum.
2. Pay commodity price, get commodity value
The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market.
— Joel Spolsky, Finding Great Developers
This is one of the invisible truths of the business world in general. For example, many of the best engineers are never on the market. Similarly, you can expect that many of the best consultants don't need to spend serious money on advertising. People find them!
When you hire the lowest price freelancer from one of the many freelance marketplaces by posting a project, the results are likely to be more of a copy/paste operation than a solution really tailored to your business. In some cases, that may be fine. Most of those cases will be easier to solve technical problems, or design solutions that look like the majority of what is out there.
However, for your business to stand out, you want to work with someone who values and quality. And those values are difficult to find on freelance sites.
