Seattle Small Business Blog

The relationship between you, as a service provider, and your subcontractors is beneficial on both sides. The fact that you’re making your clients happy and your subcontractors are getting work is just the tip of the iceberg.

Growing Your Business with a Team

One of the most important lessons you learn as a home business owner is that you can’t grow your business alone. If you’re working alone and you can’t outsource projects to others, than all you have is a job. If you get sick, have an accident or just want to go to Disney World, you’re stuck, because you’re the only one who can run your business.

Additionally, if you’re the only one doing the client work in your business, you’re not going to have enough time to do the marketing necessary to bring in more clients. You need more clients to replace those that move on and to continue to grow.

When you hire a subcontractor, you can hand off portions of your projects, or even the whole project and take a management role, freeing up your time to grow your business, while still maintaining quality and timeliness.

Increasing Profits and Capacity

As you become more comfortable working with subcontractors, you’ll be able to add more people to your team. The more you help your clients, the more services they will hire you for and the more income you’ll be able to bring in.

Not to mention, you won’t be tied down by the number of hours you can work in a week. You may be able to only work 60 hours a week, but if you hire three subcontractors and each of them works 20 hours a week for you, you’ll be able to complete 120 hours of work per week.

Because more than one person is working on the project and each person is focusing on what he/she is good at, the project quality is better and the deadlines are easier to meet.

As your business grows, you can serve clients that you would have had to turn away if you were working by yourself and your subcontractors will have more opportunities to grow their businesses under your tutelage. A win-win for everyone.

As a successful home-based service provider you will soon realize, if you haven’t already, there are not enough hours in the day for all the projects you could be working on. You also may have discovered that you don’t have the skills necessary to complete every task your clients – or potential clients – need.

You may have already turned away clients when your project calendar filled up, sent clients to a colleague or tried to meet their needs with disastrous results. Have no worries, it’s happened to the best of us, but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with too much work, not enough time. And there is a better way.

1. 1. Subcontractors Can Take the Extra Work

By hiring subcontractors, you can increase your workload exponentially. For example, let’s say you schedule twenty hours of work in one week for two clients. By hiring a subcontractor, you can schedule in two more clients for another twenty hours of work that week.

Because the subcontractor charges less than what the client is paying, you still make a profit on those extra hours, even though you did not do the work yourself. In this situation, you serve as a project manager, quality control officer and client liaison. In other words, you hand out assignments, inspect the work to make sure it’s up to standards and communicate with the client and with the subcontractor.

1. 2. Subcontractors Can Add New Skills

Hiring subcontractors with a complementary skill set can also help you expand your services. For example, if you are a web designer, you could hire a ghost writer to help those same clients add great new content to their websites and blogs in order to make the most out of their online presence. This way, the client can continue to work with you, and you can meet more of the client’s needs. This means more money for you, money for the subcontractor and happier clients.

1. Subcontractors Mean Less Paperwork

Subcontractors also come with a special set of benefits that you wouldn’t get from hiring employees. A subcontractor comes with their own office, their own equipment and their own training. She/he often is running their own service business and therefore has a stake in making a good name for herself – and for you. The subcontractor is also responsible for their own taxes, sets their own hours and is usually self-motivated. You only pay them for the actual work they do and you are also usually not their only client.

On the other hand, an employee needs space in your office and you need to provide them with equipment and training. While there are good employees available, you could easily end up with someone who simply wants a paycheck, regardless of whether or not they worked for it.

You would also need to set hours and pay for the hours they are “on the clock” even if they don’t have a full list of tasks that day. In other words, if there is no work, you still have to pay the employee. And then there is the whole business of withholding taxes and Social Security and other paperwork that goes along with employing someone.

Growing Your Business with Subcontractors

Hiring subcontractors can be a relatively inexpensive way to grow your business quickly and efficiently. It’s a win-win situation for you, the service provider who gets the help they need, and the subcontractor gets the work she/he needs.