Insight

At some point the invoices from your agency or consultant add up to more than a salary, and hiring someone in-house starts to look obvious. Sometimes it is. Here is what to weigh before you decide:

• The cost line is the wrong place to start. If the work is continuous, only needs one discipline, and someone inside your business can scope and manage it, an in-house developer makes sense. If any of those three is missing, the salary comparison is misleading.
• Digital work is rarely one discipline. A website or app needs front-end and back-end development, design, testing and someone to manage it. One hire covers one of those. A consultant or agency gives you the rest as you need them, without five salaries.
• Someone still has to manage the work. If nobody in the business can gather requirements, set expectations, estimate and prioritise, that job lands on the developer. Some people can carry it. Most developers were hired to build, and every hour spent managing stakeholders is an hour not building.
• You may not know a good developer when you see one. Interviewing technical people without technical people on your side is a coin toss. A bad hire costs you the salary, the recruitment fee, the months of low output, and the cleanup after they leave.
• The salary is not the whole cost. Add superannuation, leave, equipment, tooling, recruitment and the ramp-up period before they know your systems. Then add the gap when they resign.
• Consultants have their own overheads. Every engagement starts with getting up to speed on your systems and processes, and some context is lost between projects. That is real time you pay for.
• The quick sanity check is worth more than it looks. A consultant who has seen a hundred businesses will often stop you going down an expensive wrong path in a five-minute conversation. An in-house developer, however good, has usually only seen yours.
• You can do both. An in-house developer for the continuous work and a consultant for direction, architecture and the occasional sanity check is a common arrangement. As your team grows, the consultant becomes unnecessary, which is how it should go.

There is no answer that fits every business. We have told clients to hire a developer and stop paying us, and we have told clients not to hire because nobody inside could direct the work. If you are not sure which situation you are in, that conversation is what our consulting is for.

Still have questions? Give us a call, book a quick meeting, or send us a message to understand more without any pushy sales tactics.