Small Business Entrepreneur Blog

One of the biggest challenges when running a small business is hiring. Not only that is hard to offer the same level of benefits a bigger company does, but, no matter what, you will have to provide enough revenue so you can pay your employees. Last year, hiring was one of the hardest business decision we had to make for our small business.

Then, I realized something. While for a bigger company hiring part time or on project base might not be acceptable (usually you need to have all the resources available during working hours), for a small business is perfectly acceptable to have part time employees or project based people. I think there are several reasons for this:

• You don’t necessarily have so many customers that require that particular thing your part time employee is doing. Like for example if you are building sites, you won’t necessarily need a designer every day
• Small business owners are capable of handling little bit of everything. Usually a small business is started based on the abilities of the founder. This means that for the most of the things you might have short term solutions
• It’s cheaper. You don’t have to pay a full salary and you don’t have to pay for the dead times an employee has. Basically if you hire full time, not only that you have the challenge to have enough money in the bank each month, but you also pay sick days, smoking breaks and so on. A project based employee gets paid only for the work that gets done

• It’s easier to get abilities in a multitude of directions. Because you don’t have to accumulate all the knowledge in your company, you could have a part time employee or project based for each important task. If you are not forced to hire full time, then you can have a best PR person, a best designer, a best everything.
• Someone else is paying most of your employee money. Chances are that a part time or project based employee already has a 9 to 5 job that pays most of the money he needs. So no matter how often or how much you are paying, that person already has some level of satisfaction and security.

There are some downsides as well. While I believe for a small business the benefits of hiring part time are much bigger than the downsides, let me list some of them:

• Your not building a company culture. Because that part time employee does not really care of your company culture, for them it’s just another place to work and get paid
• Part time or project based people might be unavailable. They have less commitment towards your business, so you will have to carefully plan projects, delivery times and so on.
• They are harder to motivate. Because they don’t care of your company culture, have less commitment, how else can you motivate them than money?