Working With Contractors Made Easy

This may seem like a cumbersome and unnecessary expense to you, but it’s the single most important thing you can do to ensure that you are investing in the right person. Even if your budget’s very tight, it is still worthwhile to undertake small paid trials of under $100 to try out contractors. Most contractors will see this as a reasonable step towards new business and will be happy to do it.

More reasons for doing a paid trial:

• It’s a sure-fire way to find out the real quality of your potential contractor right away -- for very little investment. Spend $300 today to avoid client dissatisfaction, more contractors, missed deadlines, or other frustration tomorrow.
• If the trial goes well, your job gets done -- you’ve lost nothing and gained a good contractor. If it doesn’t go well, you’ll have lost a pre-determined amount of money, but you’re otherwise unharmed. Since you choose a task that’s relatively safe, you don’t risk any client work on the trial.
• It demonstrates to the contractor that you’re serious and motivated, which will allow you to attract better talent.
• It’s a great way to create a new relationship with a happy contractor who’s been paid right from the start.
• Trials build your business network and create a series of valuable relationships.
• The process gives you the opportunity to refine your project management, communications and negotiation skills.
• It helps you avoid having to try out a new contractor on a chaotic or low-budget project.

Typical trial projects should consist of small, distinct tasks that are fairly simple to explain and execute. Avoid trial projects with large learning curves, or tricky definitions. The objective isn’t to ‘test’ the contractor, it’s to see how well you work together.

I usually look for a small test project in the $100-$250 range. I explain that the trial project is mandatory but a successful trial will lead to at least one larger project in the near future. In my experience, approximately 75% of contractors in our industry provide poor service, have poor communications, lack adequate work standards, or are otherwise disqualified from my consideration.

Overall, I’d estimate that I endure an average of 8 failed trial projects before I find great contractor. Most of the contractors will submit usable code, but will have poor communications or standards. Still, I haven’t ‘wasted’ the trial money -- the job got done, I just didn’t like the contractor.

At an average cost of, say $175, this means that I invest around $1400 on trials to find a contractor. I can recover that investment with a single project and continue making profit on the contractor from there.

Examples of Trial Projects

Trial projects are surprisingly easy to find once you become accustomed to the fact that you’re going to allocate some funds towards the effort. In fact, you’ll probably find that, once you’ve budgeted some cash for the trials, you’ll become emotionally removed from the ‘risk’ involved and just hope for the best. After all, you already know that you might not get a successful result from many of the trials -- that’s just part of the game. You are after new relationships, not small project successes, so a few failures along the way are expected.

Pick projects that are low-risk, small, non-urgent, and simple. Internal projects work best, but client work can also be fine as long as the client isn’t exposed to any risk. Consider these 3 actual examples.

A Trial for a Web Programmer

I have a client who runs a Perl-based property rental Website. Every few months, they ask for some very small enhancements to their site – usually with a total value of $300-$750 for 2 or 3 minor tasks. The client is easy-going, and is more than happy to have a turn-around of 3 or 4 weeks on the work.

I run a mirror site of the client’s application on one of my servers, so it’s easy for me to expose a new programmer to the codebase without affecting the client, or risking a high-profile blunder. In addition, this makes it easy for me to ‘clean up’ any ‘sloppy programmer’ disasters by simply rebuilding the mirror environment based on the still-intact production site.

When this client sends me their desired changes, I’ll almost always use these as a trial for new programmers. I create an account for them on my server, and give them a deadline of exactly 1 week to complete the work. This leaves a generous margin for error in case things go wrong, and my main team is always on standby to jump in and do the work if need be (this is a must, given that most trials don’t succeed).

I’ll offer the new programmer the same amount of remuneration that I’d pay my ordinary team. Why? Because a good programmer is happy to do a trial, but knows that they are in demand – they’ll also be ‘trying’ me out. Relationships go both ways, and a 50% pre-payment of a good project price goes a long way in setting the right tone for success.

Designers are Easy

Design trials are famously easy because they require little client contact, can be completed quickly, and payment can be attached to client acceptance in the initial agreement. In other words, most designers will submit a comp for a relatively low amount of money upon the understanding that their price will rise if the work is accepted by the client.

In this model, I have my regular designer on standby, as always. Early in a design project, my team creates a comprehensive creative brief which, once signed-off, becomes the basis for all creative work, as well as legally binding milestone and deliverable. If my regular designer is at a fixed-rate of, say, $1000 for basic look/feel creation, I’d offer the new designer $250 for a ‘comp submission’ with the agreement that if the client accepts the work the rate would be raised to the $1000 level (or whatever the designer’s usual rate is).

Again, I will require that the designer make their submission before the staff designer is scheduled to begin. This leaves a generous allowance for problems, and gives me plenty of time to decide whether I want to submit the trial comp to my client, or just move on and look to the next trial.

Every project is an opportunity to create trials for new contractors and employees. It’s something to consider during the planning phase of every project. Just as I use each project as an opportunity to train and improve my employees and existing contracts, I will also be sure to leave plenty of trial-friendly phases and deliverables.

Decision Time

By the time you’ve done your due diligence and given prospective candidates a trial, you should have little difficulty identifying the person for the job. In the next article in this series, we look at managing contractors.