Why choose a freelancer instead of an agency?
Key Takeaways
- Freelancers offer more personal attention, faster response times, and more loyal commitment to your business.
- Typically, freelancers have more experience and a more varied skill set than the junior staff at an agency, who are often hired to cut costs.
- Freelancers are more cost-effective than agencies and can complete projects quicker due to their focused approach, flexibility, and lack of a chain of command.
When embarking on a new design or web project, you are first faced with the decision of who you want to work with. If it’s going to be outsourced, then you have a choice: freelancer or agency.
What is the difference between a freelancer and an agency?
Usually, a freelancer is one person offering their expert services. An agency is a team of people that will work on your project.
There are several clear advantages of hiring a freelance web designer over an agency.
Personal Attention
As the freelancer is working directly for you, they are able to give you more immediate and personal attention. This means you will usually get a much faster response to your questions or queries.
An agency will usually have several people working on your project. It might often happen your message will go into a pile to be answered as they get to it.
Experience
It’s easier to find out how much experience the freelancer has, as opposed to the experience of the whole agency. An agency might have started business decades ago but hire juniors to do the work, in an attempt to keep their costs down.
You will often find that a freelancer already has a number of years’ experience before going solo, and that their skill-set will be more varied, due to the wide range of projects they have completed on their way to becoming successful.
Loyalty
A good freelancer is more loyal to your business, where agency staff will often be more loyal to their own company. A freelancer can offer you exclusivity, agreeing not to work with your direct competitors. An agency is more likely to have a conflict of interest with other clients.
The freelancer will tend to work harder and take more pride in their work, not only because this is their own business, of which they are proud, but client retention and repeat business is important. The freelancer knows that the more successful your business, the more lucrative projects you can offer to him or her in the future.
Price
Freelancers are more cost effective than an agency, as they do not have the overheads that a big agency might have, so invariably work out to be cheaper.
Speed
Freelancers can be more focused on a project, and be more flexible with their ideas. A member of an agency may be governed by the expectations of the agency. Freelancers generally complete projects quicker, as they have no chain of command to follow. They don’t need to wait for the boss to sign off work – they are the boss.
Most importantly, you can build a relationship and a rapport with a freelancer, so much so that it feels like they are part of your own team, which is a lot harder to achieve with a larger agency.