How freelancers help you scale your business responsively to your needs.
Consider this. You’re a small business owner, an artisan, perhaps, or a consultant. You’re working busily pretty much near your capacity but open to a new client with a small to average project for you. But, you get a call for a nice lucrative deal that’s a bit too much for you to take on right now, but you really want to and it would be a great deal for your business because success here could open some new doors for you.
You’re not quite ready to expand your business unless those doors actually do open. You don’t want to hire on a staff, deal with payroll issues, provide space and equipment and incur all the overhead that this strategy involves.
What if there were a way to scale up your business to the next level just for this project and find out if you’re ready to expand?
In today’s freelance economy, there are other options. Freelancers are, essentially, contractors. They do the job you need done, the projects or work that you can delegate. And you contract them for the duration of the project and that’s it.
The number of self-employed people who are available for these kinds of engagements continues to grow. Being self-employed, they work out of their own space, provide their own equipment, and, in most cases, the only payroll hassle you have to deal with is the 1099 and, of course the ubiquitous reporting to the government – no payroll deductions, workers comp., W-2s, and W-4s. You don’t have to worry about any benefits.
If you need them for an hour this week and five hours next week, all is well. There’s no need to find things for them to do.
As a small business owner, you probably don’t need a graphics department unless that’s core to the business, so when the need arises, you can hire a graphics artist for the task at hand. You probably already have such arrangements with, your accountant, lawyer and bookkeeper, for example. You don’t need a full time financial department. At least not yet.
By taking full advantage of the talents available to you through the freelance economy, photographers, marketing experts, consultants, coaches, web designers and virtual assistants like myself, for example, you can let your business get bigger when the demand calls for it, and scale back to a smaller size easily when your busy season comes to an end, knowing that you have the ability to call upon those resources again next time.
