Should you hire a design agency, or freelancer?(for startups and small-medium businesses)

Choosing between a cost-efficient freelancer or a professional design agency can be a tough decision to make when you’re a business owner that cares about your cost and revenue.

🧠 Here are a few questions about their train of thought we’ve researched from business owners when asked about cost efficiency and revenues, related to hiring creative team, design agencies, or freelancers.

1. What is the cost of cutting corners?
2. What do they need to know before hiring one?
3. What’s the benefit of hiring an in-house design team?

What’s the cost of cutting corners?

The Law of Entropy in Business

Entropy is a scientific concept that explains what happens to energy as it powers your flashlight and the universe. When applied in a business context, entropy can show you where additional resources would make your business more efficient and that there are other inefficiencies that you can do nothing about.

The cost would be inevitable for running a business, however, it comes in various shapes and forms. Choosing the right one might save your business entirely.

Now the integrity of a business is challenged when faced with the ups and downs of the journey. A lot of companies cut corners because it might save their temporary P&L Report of the month.

Cutting Corners Hurt Your Brand

One of the best-known examples of the cost of cutting corners is the Ford Pinto fuel tanks. In the 1970s, Ford produced and sold cars with a gas tank that they knew had the potential to leak gas and create a severe risk of fire. This defect caused consumers injury and resulted in some deaths. Ford had discovered the potentially fatal design error in safety testing and still chose to release the vehicle rather than fix the mistake because it would have cost the company more money.

It cost Ford 50 million in the 1970s to put a bandage on their brand due to cutting corners.

💡 The real cost of cutting corners for your brand is measured by how much you dare to bet on losing when everything falls apart.

What does it mean for you and your brand when choosing between cheap freelancers vs professional design agencies?

When faced with options, of course, as a good business owner, you need to always have your options available. Now, using the metrics that suit your business in making those decisions, is a completely different story.

More often than not, our clients came to us due to the fact that they are having bad experiences with freelancers, and that’s not necessarily the freelancer’s fault. So in this chapter, we’re going to break down what it takes to hire a freelancer, and why would you want to hire a design agency.

When hiring a freelancer here are questions that you need to ask yourself;

1. Do you have the capacity to manage their work? Depending on the freelancer themselves, a lot of cases indicated that freelancers mostly work and contribute at the execution level rather than the strategic or managing level.
2. When setting up the project for success, working with a freelancer means that the communication level should be at the very top of the game. Do you have the confidence in communicating your project thoroughly, and that your freelancer will understand everything completely?
3. How do you manage your room for errors in the project? With no system in place, this could be messy.

The questions above should determine your answers in working with freelancers. Having the right resources, and working with them might be a great temporary solution for your business, especially if you’re in the very early stage and budget is one of the biggest constraints.

Now, here are why would you want to hire a design agency.

1. No BS meeting, and a complicated explanation of the expertise. Instead of selling you all the industry jargon with no real value, in DotDesign, the project manager communicates results and impacts at the level that the CEO, business owners, and other high-level decision maker would understand best. Not that they will not understand the jargon, but to cut the small talk, they make sure that the time spent, is really going to become really valuable insights to the team.
2. Proper management, and streamlined communication. Working with Branding Agency, or Website Design Agency is so much easier when you’re running a company, especially when it comes to project management. In DotDesign, most of our clients are B2B stream, which only makes sense for us and them, to always have one dedicated project manager in every project(not the client). So all your communication, updates, and account will be handled by one dedicated person instead of having to communicate to each and every team involved.
3. DotDesign runs with a strict deadline and timeline management. This practice is really helping both clients and the agency at the same time due to the fact that we’re making sure there’s no overlap bandwidth when it comes to onboarding clients, handing over projects, and other business management details.

Now if all the questions above are answered, and you wonder what others do before making the decision, we’re going to break that down in the next chapter.

When hiring a design agency, here are the things you’d want to know beforehand.

More often than not, when it comes to making decisions when hiring a design agency or freelancer, it all comes down to budget and resources, and as non-creatives, business owners, and CEOs, it can be hard to understand what is the right value in this investment so that you get what you really pay for. While it’s completely normal to feel that way, having the right frame of thought and questions can narrow down the process of hiring one.

So how should we frame our minds before engaging a design agency?

If you’re aware of the problem that you have and why you need to hire a design agency, then try to articulate it. If not, ask your design agency, if they have a discovery process and if so, how does that look?

Design agencies are essentially a bunch of problem solvers under one roof. They all solve different problems using different tools, through logos, communication, messaging, key visuals, motions, website design, experience design, and many more. While as a client, often you think that you hire them to solve a problem, more often than not, clients are not aware of what it is the actual problem they want to solve.

⭐ If your company have more budget and fewer time constraints, in DotDesign, we normally still suggest the client move forward with a discovery session, in order to both, validate, and challenge the problem articulation for your business.

So, if you think you have a problem, try to articulate it, this will set you up for a better understanding about the problem, and other priorities in your business. This will raise the question in your mind, what does this problem really cost your business, and what impact would it bring, if a design agency come in and solve it?

Be very clear with both parties, about what is it that you’re paying for, and what are the nitty gritty deliverables that you will get at the end of your project’s contract.

With freelancers, most of the time, companies have a set of tasks and deliverables ready and expected and timeframe agreed on your end. With design agencies like DotDesign, we deliver not just the design files most of the time, but also research documents on the train of thoughts and reasoning on why your brand uses a certain color. On top of that, to create a controlled and sustainable branding, we always deliver a rule of thumb for your companies to use, should you have your in-house design team, or even if you decide to go with another design agency in the future.

⭐ Be very clear in what are the deliverables, and be strict with your internal timeline management. In DotDesign, our deliverables depend highly on a rapid feedback system, hence, being engaged in the project 100% would benefit both your company, the project, and the design agency’s performance in delivering the best result you pay for.

Be detail oriented with the project deliverables, and timeline and be strict on your timeline should you be working on online/offline workshops or creative exercises.

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