Why Small Businesses Find Promise in Freelancers

Published in

GigTricks

9 min readDec 10, 2018

Being an entrepreneur is not an easy task. Starting your own business from the ground up, building an empire from scratch, can be one of the hardest things in life. But the rewards if you manage to succeed are beyond imaginable. Entrepreneurs can be inspiring and motivational if they conduct their business properly. But when it is a small business, it is difficult to find stable footing in this economy.

The Struggles of Starting Small

Small businesses and startups often struggle to manage their finances and analyze where to invest their money and where to not. Starting a business, no matter small or big requires a lot. You have to think of every detail and plan accordingly. The financial aspect of your business should be thoroughly analyzed as it can pose many problems. From finding an appropriate workspace, utilities, hardware, software, to employees, it all requires a strong financial background and plan.

Small businesses may be small in scale but require just as much financial preparation as more prominent startups do. If you do not hire a proper team of accountants to help you analyze and plan according to what you want your business to be and grow, then you have failed even before you have begun. You have to think of all the expenses you would have to bear, significant or not, and keep in mind how you would not be earning much in the beginning. That is why you have to come up with alternatives and cost-effective methods so that you can spend your funds appropriately.

Who Are Freelancers

The workforce is a huge issue that startup entrepreneurs often face. Hiring a team of skilled and experienced workers that believe in your vision can be tough. Your employees should also share a similar passion as you in the field you have chosen to become a part of. But hiring a whole team can be heavy on your startup budget. For such challenges, freelancers show much promise because of the way that they can be hired and utilized according to what your business needs.

In recent years, more and more people have joined the freelance workforce around the world. Freelancers are the people that work independently on short-term contracts and do not have strict terms for hiring. They specialize in a particular field and offer their services for a rate that is pre-set. The reason why the industry has seen such an increase lately is that the freelance workforce is not only cost-effective but also efficient. They do the work that you assigned them, submit it by the particular deadline you set, and then you pay them using their payment methods. That’s it. This should prove to you why you need to hire freelancers for your small startup.

Why Freelancers Can Help You Succeed

Freelancers always provide with high-quality services no matter their expertise because their own business growth depends on you. If they do great work, you recommend them to others and so on. You also have to provide full-term employees with not just a permanent salary, but benefits, equipment, proper workspace for them to be efficient, etc. Hiring freelancers would cost you only money, definitely less than an in-house employee, and nothing more.

In order to better gauge, the whole concept and the benefits that the freelance workforce show, we are going to discuss some of the reasons as to why hiring them could help your company not only grow but also succeed.

1. Understand Your Niche

Freelancers can be from many different fields of work. If you think you cannot find a freelancer in a particular field, then you are wrong. You can find a freelance worker who specializes in graphics/web designing, writing/editing, research, accounts, app/web development, human resources etc. Once you have chosen the field for your business, it should be easy to find freelance workforce who are skilled at the work you want to do.

Freelancers are skilled and experienced in what they do. If you find one that specializes in the task you need them to do, then you will be guaranteed work that is of exceptional quality. Freelancers do not need training, which your newly hired full-term employees would require, so hiring them would not only save you money but also save your precious time. Freelancers are also skilled in providing work in record time because they do not have regular work hours, which means you will get your work done quicker than an in-house employee.

2. Help in a Crisis

Since freelancers work 24/7 and have no proper work hours, it means you can hire them any day of the week or any hour of the night. In the case of a crisis, your best bet would be a freelancer. Let’s say your company received an urgent order of designing a website from a client but you are already packed with many orders and do not want to lose the client since the company is struggling to strive in the competitive market.

Losing a client at this stage can prove to be drastic for the overall revenue. So, you’ve decided to acquire the support of a freelancer to help you in this crisis. You explored the freelancers on various platforms or tried to find one with a referral to avoid any scam. The freelance web developer helped you for less money than it would’ve cost to lose that deal and so you ended up gaining a loyal client.

3. Fill the Gap

Sometimes companies get random orders for the services they do not offer at the moment. Let’s say the same small company gained some exposure and attracted new clients who wish to acquire animation services for their corporate website. For such random projects, it is not a smart approach to hire a full-time animation designer because the workflow may come and go like seasons.

For the time being, hiring a freelancer for the seasonal work is a cost-effective approach. Just hire the individuals or a single freelancer for the random projects to fill the gap. If you are satisfied with a freelancer’s work and receive positive feedback from your client, then it is recommended that you keep that freelancer close and in contact for any future gig of the same genre.

4. A Fresh Perspective

The market is ever evolving, change is vital to stay in league with the latest requirements. A fresh perspective on things is sometimes the only thing that is required to become successful. Freelancers are workers that have had experience in their specific fields and know more than a little about it. They can help you with their experienced opinions and ideas which could make your company improve and grow.

Freelancers can also help your company to have a fresh perspective on things. For instance, the freelancer you hired to help you in the crisis or to fill the gap made you gain new clients and you received good reviews on the services. Now the task done by the freelancer will help you and your team gain a fresher perspective on customer demands and current market trends. They can help you learn what techniques your team can adopt or what changes you can bring to their training or development to help them become the asset your company needs to succeed.

5. Cost-Effective

Another primary reason to hire freelancers for projects rather than full-time employees is the cost-effectiveness. With in-house employees, you are required to pay full salaries, offer incentives and benefits, while freelancers can be hired on a temporary basis which would help reduce the costs considerably and not be a pressure on your budget.

Similarly, if you are an entrepreneur with a startup business, chances are you do not have enough funds to pay rent for an office space, furnish it with the required computer systems and other pieces of equipment; making things not so favorable for you. You can avoid the extra unnecessary expenses by going unconventional in your business, hiring freelancers on a project basis rather than employees on the payroll.

6. Virtual Workforce

The best aspect about freelancers is that they work from home. That means you do not have to spend money on providing with a proper workstation or equipment to do their task. The freelance workforce keeps increasing worldwide every day. More and more people have started working from their homes as freelance workers.

For small business owners, this is a great benefit. It means that they can save funds on by hiring independent workers who can work around the clock. If you find it difficult to find someone that is available to perform the task you need them to, which seems unlikely, you could even look towards international workers. Since freelancers are virtual workers, you could hire someone from a different country who could do your job in less money than if you had hired a full-term employee.

7. Flexible Timings

Freelancers do not work on a specific schedule. They work when they want to or need to. That means they can work any hour of the day or day of the week. In-house employees only work during the early hours of the day and require days off during the week. Freelancers have no such rules.

When you are a small business startup, time is your most precious asset. The more time you save, the more you can spend it on growing your business and thinking of ways to improve. If you hire freelancers for a lot of the tasks, they would get done more efficiently and quickly. You could get it done while you are home asleep. And you would also be guaranteed work that is of good quality.

8. Experienced and Efficient

When you start hiring employees, you have to spend not only time but also money on them to get them work-ready. Usually, all new employees require a particular period of training to become skilled enough to carry out the tasks you give them correctly. That means you spend months of salary and time on an employee who may not even turn out to be a great addition to your workforce.

Freelancers, on the other hand, are highly experienced workers in their specific fields. They have spent time crafting their skills to be perfect so that they can provide quality work to each of their employers. Hiring them would mean you save time and money from having to train them or supply them with equipment. You would get excellent quality of work from the get-go. The time and money you save from spending on them could be utilized in improving other aspects of your business.

9. Available Talent

Any company, big or small, looks for highly skilled and experienced workers for every position they hire for. No company wants to hire an average employee no matter what they are required to do. But that could prove to be a rather tough task. Sometimes you are unable to find an employee that has precisely the set of skills or the amount of experience you are looking for. In that case, you are forced to hire a subpar individual whom you can only hope to train to become better.

The freelance workforce is a diverse and vast field. You would not find it challenging at all to find a highly experienced and talented worker in whatever particular field you are looking for. Rarely would you ever find a freelancer who is not extraordinary in what it is that they do. That means you would get to hire experts in all positions and fields which would improve the quality of your work, efficiency of your result and increase the satisfaction of your clients.

GigTricks is a platform with a unique selling proposition that is a blockchain based ecosystem launching in a phased manner to benefit entrepreneurs to strengthen their business and client base by hiring the best talent from all over the globe. Hiring an expert in each field is always better than having ordinary employees with mediocre skills and a set of limitations.

GigTricks Main-Sale is LIVE, buy GBTC Tokens now!