{"course":{"slug":"independent-creative","title":"Working for Yourself","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative","level":"intermediate","track":"create"},"lesson":{"slug":"hiring-and-subcontracting","title":"The first person you pay","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative/hiring-and-subcontracting","position":72,"of":84,"minutes":9,"answer":"Work out which shortage you have (too much of the work you like, time spent below your rate, or time spent outside the craft) because the management cost is front-loaded and amortises only with repetition.","keyIdea":"Work out which shortage you have (too much of the work you like, time spent below your rate, or time spent outside the craft) because the management cost is front-loaded and amortises only with repetition, which makes one regular subcontractor worth far more than five occasional ones."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## When the work exceeds your hours\n\nAt some point the work exceeds your hours and there are only three options: refuse it, raise prices until demand falls, or bring somebody in.\n\nBringing somebody in is the one that changes the shape of the business, and it changes it in ways that surprise people. The most common outcome of a first hire is that the freelancer earns roughly the same and works more, because they have added management to their week without adding much capacity.\n\nThat outcome is avoidable, and avoiding it starts with being honest about what you are actually short of.\n\n## What are you short of?\n\nThree quite different shortages, with different remedies.\n\n**You have too much of the work you like.** Bring in someone at your level for overflow, on a project basis. No management overhead to speak of; you are effectively becoming the agency in somebody else's subcontract arrangement.\n\n**You are spending your time on work below your rate.** Production, file preparation, resizing, retouching, cutouts, admin. This is the highest-return case, and it is usually the one people leave longest.\n\n**You are spending your time on things that are not the craft at all.** Invoicing, chasing, scheduling, inbox. A few hours a week of a virtual assistant or bookkeeper returns more than most creative hires, and it is much easier to specify.\n\nWork out which one you have before deciding whom to hire, because hiring a junior designer to fix an admin problem produces two problems.\n\n## The arithmetic\n\nFor a subcontractor to be worth it, the difference between what you charge and what you pay must exceed the cost of managing them.\n\nManagement is not free, and the numbers people use are too low. Briefing, answering questions, reviewing, correcting, and the risk of having to redo it yourself at the deadline: assume this is meaningful on the first few jobs and falls sharply afterwards, provided it is the same person repeatedly.\n\nWhich produces a clear rule: **one person you work with regularly is worth far more than five occasional ones.** The management cost is front-loaded and amortises only with repetition. A rotating cast of subcontractors means paying the learning cost every time.\n\n## Subcontract before you employ\n\nEmployment brings obligations that vary by country and are almost always heavier than people expect: payroll, deductions, notice, leave, sickness, insurance, and a fixed monthly cost that continues through a quiet quarter.\n\nSubcontracting keeps the cost variable, which matches the variability of creative income. For most independent creatives, a small number of trusted freelancers is the right structure indefinitely.\n\nIf you do employ, take proper local advice first. Classification rules (whether somebody is a contractor or is legally an employee) are enforced in most countries, and getting it wrong creates back-liabilities for taxes and entitlements. Working consistently, full-time, under your direction, with your equipment, for a long period, tends to look like employment regardless of what the paperwork calls it.\n\n## The paperwork you need with a subcontractor\n\nThree things, and they are short.\n\n**Rights assignment.** They must assign to you the copyright in what they produce, so you can pass it to the client. Without this, you cannot deliver what you promised, and neither of you will notice until it matters.\n\n**Confidentiality.** They are seeing your client's material.\n\n**Payment terms, and whether they depend on your client paying.** Be honest here. Making a subcontractor wait for your client's payment passes your risk downward; paying them on your own terms regardless is better practice and costs you cash flow. Whichever you choose, say it before they start.\n\nAlso agree the boundary: are they permitted to approach your client directly? Reasonable either way, and it must be explicit, because the alternative is a discovery.\n\n## Briefing, which is the actual skill\n\nMost subcontracting failures are briefing failures. The freelancer assumes shared context that does not exist, receives something wrong, and concludes that delegation does not work.\n\nWhat a usable brief contains: the outcome, the constraints, the file specifications, examples of what good looks like, the deadline, what to do when stuck, and, most importantly, **the things that are not obvious**. The client hates a particular colour. The printer needs a specific bleed. The name is spelled unusually.\n\nGive a small paid test first, on something real but low-risk. It costs one small fee to learn whether somebody is reliable, which is cheap compared with finding out on a deadline.\n\n## What you remain responsible for\n\nEverything. The client contracted you; a subcontractor's error is your error as far as they are concerned, and saying otherwise damages you more than the mistake did.\n\nWhich means you review before delivery, always, and build the review time into the schedule. A delegated task that arrives the evening before the deadline has not been delegated; it has been gambled on.\n\n## Telling the client\n\nNorms differ by market. Many clients assume and accept that a freelancer uses collaborators. Some have confidentiality requirements that prohibit it without consent, and some contracts forbid subcontracting outright.\n\nRead your own contract, and if in doubt say something neutral and unapologetic: \"I work with a retoucher on larger jobs: everything comes through me and the confidentiality terms apply to them too.\" Clients rarely object. What damages trust is discovering it.\n\n## The limitation\n\nDelegation raises your ceiling and it does not raise your income proportionally, because the margin on somebody else's hours is thinner than the margin on your own and the management time comes out of your billable hours.\n\nIt also changes the job. Time spent briefing, reviewing and coordinating is time not spent making, and some people discover, often several years in, that they have successfully built a business around work they no longer do. That is a legitimate outcome and a bad surprise. Worth deciding on purpose, before the second hire rather than after the fourth."},"check":{"question":"A designer uses a different freelance retoucher on each of five projects to keep her options open. Each job needs extensive briefing and correction, and she concludes delegation does not work for her. What has she actually demonstrated?","options":[{"text":"That retouching is too specialised to delegate without a detailed written specification, which she should produce once and reuse across suppliers.","correct":false,"tempting":"A reusable specification genuinely reduces briefing cost and is worth writing, but much of what a regular collaborator learns is tacit and never makes it into a document."},{"text":"That she is briefing poorly, since a good brief should allow any competent freelancer to deliver correctly on a first attempt.","correct":false,"tempting":"Briefing quality is the commonest failure and improving it helps, yet even an excellent brief carries a first-job learning cost with someone new."},{"text":"That she paid the front-loaded learning cost five times and never reached the repetition where delegation becomes cheaper.","correct":true},{"text":"That she should have employed someone rather than subcontracting, since only an employee accumulates enough context to work without correction.","correct":false,"tempting":"Context does accumulate with continuity, but continuity is available from a regular subcontractor without payroll, obligations or fixed monthly cost."}]},"prev":{"slug":"audience-and-patronage","title":"One to five per cent","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative/audience-and-patronage"},"next":{"slug":"becoming-a-studio","title":"A different job with the same name","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative/becoming-a-studio"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'The first person you pay', in Working for Yourself. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/independent-creative/hiring-and-subcontracting (Accessed: 13 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"The first person you pay","courseTitle":"Working for Yourself","module":{"index":7,"slug":"beyond-hours","title":"Income that is not hours"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"Work out which shortage you have (too much of the work you like, time spent below your rate, or time spent outside the craft) because the management cost is front-loaded and amortises only with repetition, which makes one regular subcontractor worth far more than five occasional ones.","hero":{"kind":"plate","image":null,"alt":null,"caption":null},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"when-the-work-exceeds-your-hours","runs":[{"text":"When the work exceeds your hours"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"At some point the work exceeds your hours and there are only three options: refuse it, raise prices until demand falls, or bring somebody in."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Bringing somebody in is the one that changes the shape of the business, and it changes it in ways that surprise people. 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This is the highest-return case, and it is usually the one people leave longest."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"You are spending your time on things that are not the craft at all.","b":true},{"text":" Invoicing, chasing, scheduling, inbox. A few hours a week of a virtual assistant or bookkeeper returns more than most creative hires, and it is much easier to specify."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Work out which one you have before deciding whom to hire, because hiring a junior designer to fix an admin problem produces two problems."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-arithmetic","runs":[{"text":"The arithmetic"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"For a subcontractor to be worth it, the difference between what you charge and what you pay must exceed the cost of managing them."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Management is not free, and the numbers people use are too low. 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A rotating cast of subcontractors means paying the learning cost every time."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"subcontract-before-you-employ","runs":[{"text":"Subcontract before you employ"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Employment brings obligations that vary by country and are almost always heavier than people expect: payroll, deductions, notice, leave, sickness, insurance, and a fixed monthly cost that continues through a quiet quarter."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Subcontracting keeps the cost variable, which matches the variability of creative income. For most independent creatives, a small number of trusted freelancers is the right structure indefinitely."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"If you do employ, take proper local advice first. Classification rules (whether somebody is a contractor or is legally an employee) are enforced in most countries, and getting it wrong creates back-liabilities for taxes and entitlements. 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Making a subcontractor wait for your client’s payment passes your risk downward; paying them on your own terms regardless is better practice and costs you cash flow. Whichever you choose, say it before they start."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Also agree the boundary: are they permitted to approach your client directly? Reasonable either way, and it must be explicit, because the alternative is a discovery."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"briefing-which-is-the-actual-skill","runs":[{"text":"Briefing, which is the actual skill"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Most subcontracting failures are briefing failures. 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The client contracted you; a subcontractor’s error is your error as far as they are concerned, and saying otherwise damages you more than the mistake did."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Which means you review before delivery, always, and build the review time into the schedule. A delegated task that arrives the evening before the deadline has not been delegated; it has been gambled on."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"telling-the-client","runs":[{"text":"Telling the client"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Norms differ by market. Many clients assume and accept that a freelancer uses collaborators. Some have confidentiality requirements that prohibit it without consent, and some contracts forbid subcontracting outright."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Read your own contract, and if in doubt say something neutral and unapologetic: “I work with a retoucher on larger jobs: everything comes through me and the confidentiality terms apply to them too.” Clients rarely object. 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