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Hiring Freelance Workers for your Small Business

When you start a new business, you’ll often be doing all the work on your own for awhile. That means you may need to strategically hire freelance help -  perhaps during the holiday season. Supplemental workers can help you deal with an influx of orders or help you with portions of your business that you have little or no experience with. Freelance workers can be a great solution when you’re not yet ready to hire permanent employees.

But like everything in life there are both pros and cons to using freelance workers. We’ll walk you through them, and then tell you where to find them.

Let’s start with the pros:

  • Experience – Since you are hiring someone to do one specific job, you can usually find someone knows how to do that one thing. This could be: setting up a website, taxes, advertising on Twitter, etc.

  • Cost – Freelancers cost you less money in the long run for a number of reasons

    • They are not permanent employees, so there is no salary to set up. You pay for the time they actually work or a set amount for the project.

    • Benefits and taxes are not something you have to cover. Not the case if you were to hire a full-time employee.

But there are drawbacks as well:

  • Confidential Information – You may have some information that you do not want leaked to the public. Most freelancers will likely keep their information to themselves (and you can make them sign Confidentiality Agreements), but bringing a short-term worker into your business does open you up to some risks.

  • Availability – Many freelancers work multiple jobs at once. This means they may be too busy when you need them or are unable to take on the amount of work you are requesting.

  • Control – Since a freelancer will not be your employee and may not even being working in the same place as you, you will not have as much control over how they spend their time. To mitigate this, make your time requirements and deadlines super solid from the get go.

There are a number of different options out there for business owners looking to hire a freelancer. A number of these services are free, or are relatively low in cost, but they require you to search their database to find the people you are looking for and they take a percentage of the fee you pay to the freelancer.

The best ones we’ve found are:

Upwork – Formerly two separate identities, Odesk and Elance, Upwork is one of the more popular options out there.

Fiverr – A relative new comer and growing quickly.

Guru – One of the older ones in the business, they have been around since the late 90s.

Freelancer – Once known as ScriptLance, where they provided help with websites and coding, they now provide more options and provides different levels of charges based on what you want, including no cost.

99Design – 99Design only works with images, logos, websites, book covers and so forth. They also have a fee.

We hope you find the perfect freelancer(s) for your busiest times of year. Good Luck and Good Sales

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