Yesterday, I covered the basics of subcontracting out work. Basically, whether you’re an IC who is overwhelmed with work, or an IC searching for work, subcontracting can be your best friend. It doesn’t just have to be in the writing field – transcription is a huge field for subcontracting, as is editing eBooks, editing articles, etc. Some work lends itself to subcontracting better than other work, but pretty much anything that can be done at home can be subcontracted to another person. Since the IC field is such a feast or famine world (I better take this work because I just went through a dry spell and I can’t afford to do that again!) it is very easy to go from too little work to too much work in one afternoon. People often bid on way more work than they could possibly handle because they’re assuming they won’t win all of the bids. What do you do when the unimaginable does happen, and you actually do win all of those bids? You could sit down on the floor and just cry, but an even better solution is to subcontract some of that work. Feel free to combine those two approaches as necessary though. 😉
Now for the downfalls: Some people, despite what their posts and their e-mails would suggest, really cannot write (or transcribe or edit) and you may end up needing to fix what they did. This can be done either by sending the work back to the subcontractor and asking that it be done right, or you can fix the work yourself and strike that person off your list of people to ask help from in the future or accept offers of help from. It may be easy to say, “Just send it back – they messed it up, they can fix it!” but if they turned the work in as it is, they probably don’t realize that they messed anything up, which would necessitate you sitting down and explaining to them everything that they did wrong, and how to fix it. Sometimes it’s just easier to simply fix it yourself and simply never use them again. This is a personal choice.
Pitfall number two to outsourcing your work: You are depending on another person to turn their work into you on time. Some people will accept work to be done, and then disappear into the night, never to be seen or heard from again. The deadline for the work to be turned in comes and goes, no work arrives, and you’re stuck having to explain why it is that you don’t have the work done on time to the person you got the work from, making you look unreliable and flighty. The answer is to tell your subcontractors that the deadline for the work is 3 days before you yourself have to turn the work in (or however long you think you would need in order to get the work done yourself if you absolutely had to.) This isn’t always possible, of course, because you may be up against a tight deadline and may not have that much leeway, but if possible, you’ll definitely want to give yourself some extra space. If you give the subcontractor a completion deadline of two hours before your deadline, if something happens (kid gets sick, someone gets in a car wreck, someone gets hurt, etc) then you’re up a creek without a paddle. Always give yourself breathing room if you can get away with it.
That’s subcontracting from the contractors point of view. Interested in being a subcontractor, but not sure how to find the work? Make sure to check out tomorrow’s blog, “How to Find Work if Interested in Subcontracting.”