Introducing: Fractional Hiring. Fractional hiring engages professionals or experts on a part-time or project-specific basis instead of hiring full-time. This approach allows businesses to leverage the expertise and experience of highly skilled individuals as needed, without the long-term commitment of a full-time hire. Some companies (including yours truly) are even productizing their services. More on that later, but the idea is you can hire a design team or engineering team for a monthly fee, and cancel at any time.
How fractional hiring saves money
Saving money. Do we have your attention? Of course we do. We can and should be looking to save money anywhere we can without compromising on quality.
Salary
We’re starting with the obvious. Your company specializes in installing irrigation systems and you recently discovered Facebook ads. After quickly creating an ad using a royalty-free stock picture, your Facebook account is gaining traction. The potential for success is clear, and it’s time to invest in a custom ad design. The design only takes two hours of work, so you’re not paying a full-time staffer for 40 hours of work. Fractional firms or free-lancers are reasonably priced (Mr. Market makes sure of that). You’re paying for the work you need. That’s it. From $2500 every two weeks, to a one-time $500. Stop paying when you no longer need the work.
Time
On average, it requires 42 days to fill an open role. That’s a significant amount of time. Forget the time to fill. Once hired, how much onboarding do your employees need? How many “meet the team” lunches will happen before the new hire is actually producing? At Spoke.dev, we’ve started on work on the day the client reached out to us. Most fractional or freelance workers will start the work within a week. There is always nuance here. The size, scope, etc. of work. But for the most part we don’t ask about your company’s vacation policy or Hawaiian Fridays.
Flexibility of fractional hires
I struggle to pick which is the biggest advantage of fractional hires. Right now I’m leaning towards flexibility. Need 4 hours of dev work to wrap up and deploy an existing project someone else left behind? No problem. Need a ground-up website built with a forum, comment section, blog pages, and more? Sure thing. The flexibility of fractional development and design companies allow you to pick and choose expertise for your current needs. ChatGPT recently blew everyones socks off. Mine included. It’s not easy to ramp up on new technologies that come out seemingly every week. So pay someone who can for a fraction (yes, I know) of the price.
Hire expertise
Wine-1-1 is an example of this. When we we’re approached earlier in 2023 with a proposal to think of ways AI and wine can be connected, we suggested training chatGPT to become a personalized wine sommelier. Let it know what your dinner plans are, and what your budget is, and it will give you the best bottle for the night. Wine producers don’t want to think about building AI, they did however want to see how they could leverage it. The proposal was well received and now the world can use it for free to find the best bottle for their next meal. This project took about a week of researching different applications, and two weeks of development work once a proposal was selected. That speed of execution is difficult to replicate inside large “legacy” organizations. How many developers that are experienced with OpenAI APIs work for wineries? My best guess would be none.
Start and stop when you want
The last point I’ll make is more relevant to Spoke.dev than other fractional hires. While some require upfront contracts, we let you stop and start at any time. If your business changed half way through a project and you can’t justify completing the last half of the project, you decide when we stop. Productizing our services gives you flexibility and predictability of a SaaS tool, with the personalized attention of a services offer you’d expect.
If you got this far, thanks for reading. Reach out to us below if we can help answer any uncertainty you have. Not sure if hiring fractional is right? Send us an email with what your needs are and we’ll give you an honest opinion.
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