(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

I just finished up a small WordPress freelancing job which involved updating my Thesis custom page template code. This was a really fun piece of work, and I updated Whitepaper #3 as well.

It was an excellent gig. I finished up a piece of work that’s been hanging around far too long. I’d work for this client again (and I expect I’ll be writing more about this project again as well).

The money, however, was about break even, and the reasons are why you probably find it somewhat difficult to get good help for your own coding projects.

Here’s the story.

What you’re really paying for

If you haven’t ever supported yourself freelancing, here’s the most important thing you need to know when you work with a freelancer or an outsourcer, especially for very small jobs:

The actual work you need done is 1/4 of the time spent on the project.

Here’s how a typical job breaks down:

1. Time to make an initial contact. You email a freelancer. He or she takes 10, 15, 30 minutes to respond to your email. Perhaps several emails are necessary. Who pays for this time? You do. You also have to pay for the time other people wasted emailing back and forth and didn’t purchase. It’s called overhead. If the notion seems bothersome, think for a moment about who’s paying for the fuel to deliver food to the grocery store. Customers.
2. Time to scope out the work. Scoping out the work isn’t always necessary, but it’s not unusual. What this means is that your potential freelancer has to do a little background research to 1. ensure he or she can perform the work to satisfaction, and 2. deliver this work in a timely manner. You pay for this as well.
3. Time to do the work. This is the fun part.
4. Time to deliver the work. Often, a WordPress project requires implementing some sort of code to modify the behavior of the web site. Writing this code and making it work is about half the battle. Making that code useful for the client (you!) can take quite a bit more time.
5. Time to invoice the work. Smart freelancers will have a system allowing “invoicing-as-you-go.” Freshbooks has an excellent system for itemizing small-purchase products and services. For smaller jobs or one-offs, figuring out how to bill the work and charge the customer can seriously eat a freelancer’s margin.

That’s quite a list. Four out of five of those items have nothing directly to do with solving your problem. Those items are pure overhead. On a fixed price job, they reduce the hourly rate of a contract, and can easily destroy profit.

On an hourly job, when you contract to have “just the work done,” the freelancer has to roll the rest of the work (communication, invoicing, etc.) into the hourly rate for that work.

This is why you should expect to pay an hourly minimum for any work: even if the work takes 10 minutes, the amount time lost by the freelancer will be much closer to one hour than not.

Digression: when someone informs me that the work they want me to do for them will “only take a few minutes,” I generally decline. If it’s that simple, I always wonder why they don’t do it themselves.

Recommendations for finding and keeping freelancers

Once you find someone you can work with, who delivers the goods you need when you need them, hang on to that person! Here’s a few ways to do that:

1. Batch up your work into large, related projects rather than dribbling it out in small, unrelated pieces. Multitasking isn’t really an issue, it’s the context which matters. Productivity depends on ritualized behavior. Changing context requires unloaded a current ritual and reloading a new one. The productivity literature insists it’s best to take a break to change contexts. That break costs someone money.
2. Learn enough about the technology to communicate with your freelancer. Precision is important. Learn at least enough vocabulary to communicate with precision.
3. If you are going to need your freelancer to have access to your server, have all the required user names and passwords at your fingertips. Not having this information can consume an unbelievable amount of time.

As a freelancer, your ability to slash overhead will increase your profits. Slashing overhead is easier said than done, of course, and rates it’s own (series of) blog post(s).

Let’s hear your experience: are you a freelancer, or do you hire freelancers? Or do both as I do.