Benefits for Subcontractor and Service Provider

The relationship between you, as a service provider, and your subcontractors is beneficial on both sides. The fact that you’re making your clients happy and your subcontractors are getting work is just the tip of the iceberg.

Growing Your Business with a Team

One of the most important lessons you learn as a home business owner is that you can’t grow your business alone. If you’re working alone and you can’t outsource projects to others, than all you have is a job. If you get sick, have an accident or just want to go to Disney World, you’re stuck, because you’re the only one who can run your business.

Additionally, if you’re the only one doing the client work in your business, you’re not going to have enough time to do the marketing necessary to bring in more clients. You need more clients to replace those that move on and to continue to grow.

When you hire a subcontractor, you can hand off portions of your projects, or even the whole project and take a management role, freeing up your time to grow your business, while still maintaining quality and timeliness.

Your Management Role

If you are a virtual assistant, you’re role is to serve as a manager for your clients projects. You most likely have a lot of experience with your target market and with individual clients. So you know what is expected in terms of work quality and deadlines.

Your subcontractor is most likely new to the VA business. She may have many years experience in providing administrative assistance or in other positions similar to what she is doing for your team, but needs experience as a business owner and time to grow her own portfolio.

Here’s another example. Let’s say you’re an affiliate manager. Your role is to make sure your affiliates have the materials and answers they need, and to find out what those are. Your subcontractors will work with you to produce the materials or give those answers.

So not only are you growing your business, you’re helping your subcontractor grow hers. Total win-win-win for everyone involved.

Increasing Profits and Capacity

As you become more comfortable working with subcontractors, you’ll be able to add more people to your team. For example, if you’re a VA who provides web content to your clients, you might subcontract to a VA who specializes in audio and video. The content you write is turned into a podcast and a video cast, which then helps grow your client’s business. You might even subcontract a VA with web design experience to provide another dimension to the services you offer your clients.

The more you help your clients, the more services they will hire you for and the more income you’ll be able to bring in.

Not to mention, you won’t be tied down by the number of hours you can work in a week. You may be able to only work 20 hours a week, but if you hire three subcontractors and each of them works 10 hours a week for you, you’ll be able to complete 50 hours of work per week.

When you bill your client, you’ll charge for the time your subcontractor spent working and for the time you spent managing the project. Or perhaps you’ll setup a per-project fee that will take into account the amount of money your subcontractor charges for her services and the amount that you charge for your project management services.

Because more than one person is working on the project and each person is focusing on what she is good at, the project quality is better and the deadlines are easier to meet.

As your business grows, you can serve clients that you would have had to turn away if you were working by yourself. Your subcontractors will have more opportunities to grow their businesses under your tutelage.