Why It Is Cost-Effective to Hire Freelancers for Your Product Design Business

Running a business is not always an easy undertaking. This is doubly true when you’re a start-up with a limited budget and a small team. There will be days when you find yourself in the middle of seemingly-countless tasks, all of which require your attention at the same time. Sometimes your to-do list is filled with various activities of which you have neither the skills nor experience to accomplish.

You have at least two options to deal with such a situation: recruit an additional full-time staffer or two or hire a freelance product design service to tackle some pressing business needs. The former most likely come at a high cost—these are expenses you may not be prepared for. On the other hand, the latter offers potential huge savings as it requires no actual formal employment contract. 

Full-Time vs. Freelance Employee

Recruiting full-time employees comes with a lot of benefits. Even when the recruits do not quite understand the business during their first days or weeks, they learn about it over time. Soon enough, they will become integral parts of the team by slowly—but surely—acclimating to the culture.

With the right training and guidance, full-time employees should be able to fulfill their specific duties and roles in the business, and then some. They may continue to excel and show improvement as more responsibilities are assigned to them. Full-time employees can be invaluable assets with many positive contributions to the long-term development of the company.

All these benefits do not come cheap; when a company hires full-time employees, it is responsible for providing a range of benefits. This typically includes health insurance, sick leave, paid time off, and, of course, salary. The company has to pay all those expenses for as long as the employee is on its payroll.

CAD drawing freelancers are not part of your company’s regular staff; in fact, they are not your staff at all. These professionals are free agents and not part of any company’s permanent team/employees. Other than the agreed-upon hiring fee, a freelancer is not entitled to employee benefits, as mentioned. When a project (for which the freelancers are hired in the first place) is finished and the company pays for it, the term of employment ends.

There isn’t even any formal hiring process necessary because in most cases, the company can just post a project on an online freelancing marketplace and receive offers from several qualified 3D modeling freelancer. Such hiring simplicity makes freelancers more financially-viable options than their full-time counterparts, yet it is not the only good reason why it is cost-effective for businesses.

Specialized Expertise

Some people believe that freelancers are not as skillful as full-time employees. While this could be true in the past, freelancers, in general, have made quite a lot of improvements in terms of professional skills. One of the driving forces behind it is none other than competition.

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About a decade ago, many people were not that interested in making a living by being a freelance worker, but things have changed as the ‘gig economy’ becomes more prevalent. As the demand for specialized 3D rendering services keeps on increasing, more skilled workers now consider freelancing a financially-rewarding profession. Some turn to it as their sole source of income while others keep their daily jobs and freelance for extra money.

Nowadays, freelancers have tough competition. They have to provide satisfactory works in every project, otherwise, they cannot keep up with all the others who offer similar services. The talent pool is rapidly increasing too, with professionals from various educational backgrounds are flooding the market. Some have worked with dozens of companies of all sizes, accumulating a lot of experiences over the years.

As an example, let us say your company needs a 3D animation for the next social media marketing campaign. However, none of your current employees can do the job for various reasons. At the same time, the company has no budget to hire a full-time architectural design service. The answer is to outsource the work to a qualified experienced professional.

Hiring a freelancer for the job saves time and money without sacrificing quality. Most 3D modelers will be willing to do some revisions if needs be, so at the end of the project, the 3D animation created is an exact match to the specifications you wanted all along.

On-Demand Professionals

Many projects and new ideas do not always require your company to conduct an entire recruitment process to hire full-time employees or set up a whole new department within the organization. Certain types of work are not the company’s operational routines, so hiring a person full-time to do the job is not a practical business decision—far from it.

The example mentioned earlier talks about marketing campaigns, which most likely is an on-going task in just about every company. But unless you are 100% sure that 3D animation services will have a lot of work, adding another employee into the company’s payroll is a waste of money. The right decision in this situation is to outsource the job to an independent freelancer.

Despite the urgent need for a 3D modeler to create the content, the project still does not justify spending resources on long-term staff. It is a one-off assignment that should be handled by a project-based hire. Freelancers are “on-demand professionals” to help your company get the job done without all the hassle of a formal recruitment process and expenses that may follow.

You don’t know if, in the future, you’ll need more content of a similar nature; even when you do, it is always possible to get back in touch with the same freelancers as before. You can even look for another on-demand professional just because there are hundreds of equally qualified options.

Financial Flexibility for the Employer

The kind of job that requires a freelance 3D product modeling service involves only a specific task, for example, creating a 3D animation for a social media marketing campaign. For both the employer and freelancer, the project usually ends when the content is delivered and received.

Throughout the project, however, both parties work together to determine every aspect of the 3D animation including storyline, duration, characters, and script to minimize the risk of mistakes in the final delivery. As soon as the project ends, the freelancer gets paid for the services provided, and that’s about it.

The freelancer receives no benefits in the same way that full-time employees do. As an employer, you don’t have to provide bonuses, sick leave, paid holiday, and so on.

Less Strain on a Company’s Resources

Today’s freelancers are good at what they do. Most (if not all) of them are highly specialized; each only provides a specific set of services. This is a real advantage for businesses with a limited budget for training new employees.

Hiring freelancers also reduces the risk of making bad recruitment decisions, assuming you properly conduct the pre-screening process to shortlist only the most reputable and qualified freelancers for the project.

The closest thing to hiring freelancers is outsourcing tasks to independent agencies or contractors. With the latter, you have the option to assign the entire works involved in a project, rather than just a specific portion of it. An agency usually is big enough that it has a team of professionals for more demanding work, unlike an individual freelancer with only so much capacity to handle a very specific assignment.

For a business that requires 3D animation for social media marketing, a freelance 3D product animator is more suitable for the sole creation of such content but an agency will be able to take care of the entire marketing campaign including the analysis and performance report. Of course, an agency will cost more.

Known Drawbacks

Despite all the good things, hiring freelancers is a cost-saving option because it also comes with some disadvantages, including:

The Lack of Formal Structure

Once again, freelancers are free agents—independent workers who are not attached to any company or organization except when they are hired to provide specific services, which they offer, for a short period. They are only attached to their employers for as long as the work is not completed.

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The term of employment ends as soon as the job is finished. There is no formal contract, and so you have very little control over what the freelancer is doing throughout the project. You don’t always know what happens unless you micromanage. You cannot even rule out the possibility that the freelancer simply disappears in the middle of the assignment.

Absence of Quality Assurance

Not only is there a risk of freelancers quitting before project completion, but also employers receiving low-quality services or work. Even a full-time employee under your supervision for some reason may suffer from subpar performance, let alone a freelancer you’ve never met. Before deciding to hire freelancers, make time to check their portfolio, and verify their preferences. Another idea is to hire a freelancer on a trial basis first.

There are an Ocean of Freelancers out There

Although it is easy to hire a freelance mechanical engineer, the same thing cannot be said for the search process. It may take a while (and perhaps some trial-and-error instances) to find the right freelancer with all the qualifications you need. There can be hundreds of freelancers offering similar services, but you can always check the references to get a glimpse of their previous works.

A lot of online freelancer platforms offer an easy way for potential employers to make the hiring decision. Some are even willing to take care of the “choosing” hassle by assigning only the most qualified freelancer based on your requirements. You can also analyze how one particular individual stacks up against the competition by comparing their profiles.

Final Thoughts

In the old days, freelancers were often considered inferior to their full-time counterparts. There are many reasons why people believed that, but today, the workforce has changed favorably for the freelance community.

More modern companies including startups and entrepreneurially-minded organizations are more open to the idea of hiring freelancers, not merely because these companies have no budget to hire full-time employees, but for the practicality of it. Cost efficiency is the number one reason yet not for the lack of quality, only cost-saving thanks to the absence of formality.

Cad Crowd has a network of the best freelancers available. If you’d like to hire a freelance 3D modeler or CAD service, contact us today for a free quote.