At one time or another, every entrepreneur and business owner are faced with the same challenge: should growth be contained within the business, or should you expand with outsourced help? Whether you’re running an e-commerce business with an ever-growing presence or you have a marketing agency, or anything in between, web development is surely one of the core components of your business success. You need it either to provide a comprehensive service to your clients, or you need it for the sake of your own company’s stability.
In either scenario, outsourcing or hiring can mean the difference between saving on expenses, working with the best in the field, and failing to maximize your budget as well as your available talent. Both, however, come with perks and downsides, so it’s best to evaluate your own unique situation and figure out which model fits best with your needs. Let’s break down the expected benefits of both solutions and how you can make the most of the one you select.
Hiring: benefits of immediate collaboration
Although remote work has put more strain on certain companies in this past year, it’s apparent that hiring web developers and allowing them to become core members of your organization will certainly help with collaboration. They will be available at the same time as your other employees, they’ll have access to all your business software for collaboration, and they’ll work under the same contracts.
As for outsourcing, you might end up with someone overseas, or living in a different time zone, with multiple projects at hand. In time, this might diminish their capacity to collaborate in real-time with your employees, no matter how dedicated or top-notch they are.
Outsourcing: scalability suitable for growth
For fast-growing companies, scalability is one of the main factors when choosing to hire or to outsource. To retain and ensure your business scalability for the long haul, outsourcing seems like the better, more secure choice.
Agencies that provide web development services can, depending on their size, offer service packages that are flexible, and you can always ask for more hours on your particular project, or more people if the workload increases. Hiring is possible in this scenario, too, but time-efficiency is a possibility only with outsourcing.
Hiring: quality control and time management
Companies whose core services heavily depend on web development know just how vital quality and performance are in order to remain competitive, let alone a leader in any field. Knowing that, and recognizing the importance of web development in your business model, hiring makes all the more sense: you hand-pick web developers based on their experience and credentials, and you work directly with them, ensuring their productivity.
In-house web development often requires the use of the best time and attendance software to ensure proper workload distribution, time management, training, and project organization. Having your developers under your direct supervision gives you an insight into how much time they need for each task, and where the most common bottlenecks happen. This, in turn, enables you to improve your internal processes with education over time and boost the quality of your end-product or service.
With outsourcing, you never know what kind of web developers you get, and you have no control of what kind of training and education they obtain in time to stay on top of the latest web development trends.
Outsourcing: cost-efficiency in the long-run
For companies wanting to focus on growth without breaking the bank in those initial stages of business development, the main perks of outsourcing are the ones that will preserve your budget. Especially if web development isn’t your core business process, but rather a supportive one, you can reduce your employee management expenses tremendously with the help of outsourcing talent.
Unlike employing, which includes taxes, healthcare coverage, and other financial expenses, outsourcing comes at a fixed rate that you can adapt based on your financial capabilities. Of course, companies that have a considerable budget to work with don’t need to consider this factor as the most relevant one, but it certainly helps when you can preserve your finances, especially in circumstances such as these, during the pandemic, when uncertainty is the only certainty we’re all facing.
Hiring: brand loyalty and commitment
As any versed leader knows, building a powerful brand identity in this day and age doesn’t depend solely on the visionary behind the idea. It also depends heavily on the people who bring that vision to life, or in this case, your employees.
It might take more time than finding a web development agency, but hiring gives you the opportunity to carefully choose and groom your employees. You hire them based on the values they share with your organization, meaning that they will be devoted not just to wrapping up their daily tasks, but to the overarching purpose of your business, whatever it might be.
Outsourcing: specialized service and immediate availability
Unlike spending time crafting perfect job advertisements, creating tests to qualify talented people, and going through resumes for weeks on end, hiring an external service agency or even a single freelancer specializing in web development is a quick and efficient solution. You can almost immediately find a number of agencies that offer specific web development services and service packages that can accommodate your needs easily.
The hiring road might take more time and more effort, since you would need to work hard to find and filter the right candidates for your business. Most companies are looking for specific expertise and skills, as well as experience levels, all of which can be neatly achieved with the help of outsourcing.
Although both options have their merits, you’ll discover that your business will benefit from a specific choice, especially if you focus on the factor of long-term, rather than immediate perks. Do some research, compare your options, and start building your web development team in the most suitable manner for your business.
