Several years ago I was a sub-par designer making an ok amount of money. Three years later, I’m a OK designer who makes a nice chunk of change every year. What happened in those three years that quadrupled my income? I read The 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris. This is not a post to sing the books praise, its actually not that great. However, I did take one great idea from it; the more work you hand to others, the more you can do.

Tim uses this creed of sorts to let him do whatever he wants; travel, learn a forgien language, be a tool, etc. I decided to see if I, a arguable crappy designer, could grow my business by partnering up with others in the industry or independent contractors.

To this day, I believe that this was the best business decision I have ever made.

I Can Do It All

One of the first hurdles I had to cross in deciding to start hiring contractors was justifying to myself why I should pay someone to do what I could easily do myself? Why should I let this stranger take a large portion of my bottom line? This is likely many peoples first thoughts on the subject of hiring contractors.

For what ever reason, people in this industry (myself included) feel that because they can do it all, they should do it all. That idea is great if you are a A-List designer/developer like Elliot Jay Stocks who can charge a premium for being a one man show. But not all of us red carpet wannabes can afford the luxury of premium pricing.

Most of the one man shows often have to take on more work than they can handle so that they have a steady stream of income. This is understandable, but what if there was a way you could take on more work, do less, and make more money?

You guessed it, hiring contractors is the answer to that equation.

Pros and Cons of Contractors

I might be going out on a limb here, but I am willing to say that the pros of hiring contractors greatly out way the cons. Having said that, some of the cons can at times be down right debilitating.

Unless you know the person you want to hire on as contractor, you are going to have to start working with a complete stranger. This is a major drawback for obvious reasons, which I will talk about more later. This con doesnt have to be a bad thing, but if the contractor goes AWOL on you or the relationship turns bad, you can be put into a very tight spot with a deadline fast approaching and not enough hours to meet it.

Unfortunately I have found no solution to that con other than a much more strict interview process.

Another con I have come to learn to live with is time difference. There’s a good chance that the person or people you partner up with will be in another time zone or even another country. So learning to deal with, and having to deal with, them can sometimes be a problem. As a result, communication with your new team members can be sporadic at best sometimes.

The last somewhat major con is the management one. Hiring a contractor means you have another person to be in charge of other than yourself and the client. You now have someone you have to relay information to, follow up with, and play boss to. Some people don’t want this kind of responsibility, so it may be a con for some.

At its most simple, the pros to this are simply; more money with less work or happier work.

The idea is, if you are currently a designer/developer, but love to design a lot more than code, you should partner up with a developer. In doing so, two major pros will come into play. One, you will be able to take on twice as much work, because you will only be doing half as much as you used to. Two, you will be much happier and probably create better work because you will only be doing the part of the project you truly enjoy. Which, if you ask me is the major selling point in hiring contractors.

If you are a truly ambitious freelancer, you could use the above model to really grow your business into a mini agency. For example, if you were to hire a designer and a developer, you could in theory, do nothing but find jobs and collect money. Ok, its not that easy, but you get the idea. To grow your business to a larger scale just rinse and repeat the above until it becomes to much for you to manage yourself. Whats nice about having a team of designers and developers is that you could pick and choose what projects you personally work on. You could pass on all the boring corporate stuff and only work on the projects that excited you.

HOW TO HIRE A CONTRACTOR

You know the old saying, “you get what you pay for?” That is certainly true when it comes to hiring contractors. If you expect to get Matthew Smith quality work from a design contractor who charges $20 a hour, you might be in for a rude awakening on your first project together.

Where to Look

There certainly isn’t a shortage of job boards out there these days. And there are even more Elance style market places. With so many sites to choose from, it can be dizzying to know where to start. I make no claims to be a professional headhunter, but I can tell you what I have learned about where to start looking for quality contractors.

Portfolio Galleries
It never hurts to start your search by contacting people directly. Browse portfolio and showcase type websites to look for people who have a style or quality you are looking for. Contact them directly and see if you can find a way to work together. The worst they can do is say no. Below are some of my favorite places to look for designers and developers.

Dribbble – (Follow Me on Dribble)

CSS Mania

Logo Pond

Envato Marketplaces

Sortfolio

Job Boards
If you don’t make any connections off contacting people directly, have no fear. There is an ocean of people who want to work with you. OK, maybe not you specifically, but who want to work none the less. I have found the job boards that require the “poster” to pay a fee tend to have better results as far as the quality and quantity of applicants. Make no mistake about it though, you WILL get a ton of shitty applicants though.

One would think that job boards where the applicants had to pay a fee to sign up or respond would solve this problem. However, it has been my experience that these types of sites tend to be over run with “firms” from third world countries and should generally be avoided. But, do what you like.

Here are some of my favorite job board posting sites:

Krop

Authentic Jobs

Behance Jobs

Freelance Switch Job Board (Free to Post)

Writing a Good Job Opening Post

Writing a good job post is one of the most important parts of this process. A well written post will help keep you organized and make it easy to weed out a number applicants right up front. Do yourself a favor and spend some time writing your job posting, don’t just throw it together when you find a job board site you like. In doing so you are likely to forget important criteria you may want from the applicant and just make a lot of headache for yourself when trying view applications and portfolios.

A good job posting should include the following sections:

• Quick Overview: This section should be a short paragraph that gives a summary of what the job opening is. Nothing too elaborate, as we will discuss it in more detail later in the posting.
• Requirements: Most people tend to put this list of requirements toward the bottom of the listing, which is silly to me. Why not put them up top so that the job seeker knows right away if he is a fit for you or not? This area tends to be a bullet list of required skills or experience.
• Detailed Overview: It is here that you write the full description of the job and what you are looking for in an applicant. Generally a solid two paragraphs is more than enough information to cover the position.
• Benefits: This area may or may not be relevant to you or you may just not feel comfortable posting it. Use this area to post compensation amounts and any other benefits that come along with working for you.
• How to Apply: This is one of the most important parts of the job posting and the part that will help you weed out a number of people right off the bat. In this section, included very specific directions on how a person should apply and what should be included in their initial contact with you. If an applicant hasn’t followed any of the steps, you know that person is simply copy/pasting their info on every possible job opening and is probably not someone you want to hire.

The Interview Process

Unless you are trying to partner up with someone with a very specific skill, you will probably get 50+ responses. If you are just looking for a designer or developer, expect well over 100. Due to the sheer volume, it makes the most sense to wait and view the applicants after a certain cut off date. Trying to view and respond to applications as they come is a very poor way to do things. I have found that create a spreadsheet of some sort is the best way to go. That way you have everything organized in one spot and can quickly run though the list and short list those applicants you want to learn more about.

Once you have your super short list, I strongly encourage you to call and chat with the applicants if possible. Even though you may never plan on calling them, it is a good way to see if you “click” with one other. To me, this is an important quality and probably equally as important as their quality of work. If the two of you click, then the odds are in your favor that you will be able to work well together. i find it important to be able to work with someone who can pickup things that I forget without having to talk to me about it first. In other words, I have found that contractors I click with often do a better job micro-managing themselves and cause me less headaches.

Reading Resources

Here are a couple great books on the subject of growing your business, hiring people, and how to interview them.

As of the time of this writing I have a brand spakin’ new seven week old baby boy. It’s thanks to him that the previous sentence took me four minutes to write. You’d be surprised how hard it is to feed a baby and try to type a blog post. Or maybe you wouldn’t, but as a new work at home dad I wasn’t anticipating just how much my work schedule would change from having a mini me around.

Vetren work at home dads, don’t get me wrong, I’m not so dense as to expect that thing would have remained exactly as they were before the baby was born. However, I did expect there to be a bit more balance. Lucky for me, our son is super chill and not one of those babies who seems to cry more than they breath. This has made things a lot easier for me working from home, but their have been some major hurdles I have had to learn to deal with in the past few weeks.

Be sure to check out these other great articles by experienced work at home dads:

3 Tips to Help Your Family Benefit from Your Freelancing at Home
Childcare Options for Freelancers
How Do You Keep Your Kids Busy While You Freelance?

Below are some of the things I have found that helped me keep business as usual, as well as just some random tidbits of truths for new work at home dads about what its really like working from home with a newborn.

5 Tips for Freelancing with a Newborn

Tip #1 – Get Up Early
I don’t know how most of you work, but I tend to be most productive early in the morning. Maybe its the eight hours of sleep or maybe its the caffeine, either way, I got a lot done in the first hour or two after waking. If this sounds like you, beware, as the morning time is one of the busier parts of the day for a newborn household. Between you trying to work, the baby waking up, and your wife going through her morning routine; your power hour of productivity can vanish before you get your first yawn out.

The only solution I have found for this is to get up earlier than I used to. Not every dad with a newborn will be able to do this. I just lucked out with a kid who likes to sleep! But, if you can make it up a hour earlier than your wife and kid, you’ll be able to get some of that extra productive time back. In fact, you might become more productive knowing there is a ticking time bomb of poop and screams looming just down the hall.

Tip #2 – Work Away from Home
Try telling your wife you want to do this and she might just laugh in your face. In the event that she gives you the OK, take full advantage of it. Schedule one day a week to work a full eight hours out of the house. While many people choose to work at coffee shops and book stores, I prefer the atmosphere of co-working spaces.

Co-working spaces give you the ability to work uninterrupted for as long as you like, but also offer up the opportunity to engage in conversation with someone who has actual control over their vocal muscles.

You’ll surprise yourself at how much you get done on these days away from home. The first time I worked for a full day away from home I got more done in three hours than I had in the previous three weeks.

Tip #3 – Schedule a Half Day
First let me say that this is a lot easier said than done. You would think it would be easy to say you were going shorten your work week by a day. But actually committing yourself to not work one day a week can be super hard.

I got this idea from Ryan Carson who only works four days a week and the nGen Works guys who just goof off on Fridays. I decided that every Friday I would do my daily business tasks for about an hour and then spend the rest day doing whatever I wanted. This “me time” is great in that it allows me to work on my own personal project that I otherwise would never find time for, quality time with my son, or to plan a long weekend away with the family.

As I said before, this is a hard routine to get into, but well worth it if you force yourself to do it.

Tip #4 – Start Thinking About Outsourcing
If you have ever thought about bring on a partner, outsourcing some work, or hiring an employee; now might be the perfect time to do it. Finding a away to share your workload while remaining profitable is a great way for you to grow your business, while at the same time reducing the amount of work you do. Be careful though. this isn’t the magic pill that’s going to make your life easier.

Finding quality contractors or hiring employees can be a daunting task. More often than not, it can almost be more trouble than its worth. I would almost suggest avoiding this route if you already have a newborn. If something goes wrong with your new contractor, you’ll end up working double time. Which is exactly what we want to avoid!

Another interesting form of outsourcing would be to use some website builder as a backend for your work. It’s a common issue when the client contacts you everytime he needs to switch a logo or add some extra pictures or texts to his website. Those minor changes can cost you lots of time and effort, while you can spend them on a new project. There a lots of website building and CMS platforms that allow building custom themes, which then can be edited via backend admin panel. This way you can save your own time and have your client handle all the further website maintenance on his own.

Tip #5 – Sync Your Home and Work Calendars
This is a two part tip. The first part of this tip is to tell your wife you are doing this so that you can be more involved and know whats going on in the family and with her. The truth is, I’m suggesting this so that you know when her and the baby will be out of the house.

The times that they are both out of the house are going to be power hours like you have never had before. You will end up getting so much done in the time they are gone that you will start to wonder why you ever worked eight hour days.

Tip #6 – Make the Most of Feeding Time
While I love feeding my son, I used to hate having to do it during work hours. Now, I actually look forward to it. Seeing as how its hard to do anything work related while feeding a baby, I started using this time to catch up on reading, podcasts, and videos. I used to never have the time for these, or would always add them to my iPod but never get around to them.

Now any time I have to feed my son during the day, I just pop on a video from FOWA, check out a nice long blog post, or spin up the latest episode of the Boag World podcast. Need some recommendations of good feeding time materials? Check out the following links:

• Boag World
• Think Vitamin Videos (Premium)
• Think Vitamin Radio Podcast
• Signal Noise Broadcast
• Freelance Switch Podcast

Must Haves for Freelancing Dads

Noise Canceling Headphones
As sated before, this can be a real lifesaver if you get easily distracted at home or want to work elsewhere with less distractions. Besure to check out this post I did a while back on noise canceling headphones.

Apple iPad
From this point forward you need to be able to work on the fly. You never know where you might have to get some work done and the iPad makes it a lot easier to do than a laptop or netbook. If you don’t mind giving ATT more money, go for the WiFi version.

Bumbo Baby Seat
I would hope that if you aren’t already a dad, you don’t know what this is. What it is, is a awesome chair that even super young ones can sit in. This is great because it’s hard to work at the computer while you are hold the baby in one hand. This chair will usually pacify them long enough for you to get chunks of work done at a time.

Advice from Other Freelance Dads