IT department for network business. Create your own or hire a contractor?

The modern market dictates its conditions to business owners. In order to keep up with the times, company founders, including those of networks, are forced to turn to specialists in the field of internet technologies.

If you are planning to launch your MLM company online, you need to create a website, connect an online store, develop a mobile application, set up landing pages, integrate payment systems, organize warehouse logistics, and much more. Owners of existing companies are concerned about quality software for automating business processes. When such a need arises, you are faced with a choice - to form your own IT department or outsource development to a contractor.

Suppose you still want to form your IT department. Searching for each specialist will take hours of work for HR or hiring manager. When people are found, time will be spent on their introduction to the business and setting up workstations in the office. Moreover, there is no guarantee that candidates will successfully pass the probationary period. After signing the employment contract and fully formalizing the employees, the company is responsible for the working conditions and their safety, stable payment of taxes and salaries. By the way, the average salary of a programmer in Russia is from 55,000 rubles, and in Moscow - 100,000 rubles per month (according to russia.trud). If the company does not have tax benefits, social security contributions are added to the salary, and for 2019 it is 30%. To start working with a contractor, it is enough to find, choose, and conclude a contract.

Forming your own IT department is a step that requires significant time and financial investment. Besides, the employer has much more obligations to an employee than to a contractor.

 

When you hire a contractor, you pay them for providing a specific service using their own resources. The hiring company is also responsible for taxing their income, relieving you of the burden of paperwork. By outsourcing IT development to a contractor, you get a quality result on time, and most importantly, according to the contract.

Contractor services, at first glance, may seem more expensive than maintaining in-house employees, which confuses many startups and sometimes experienced entrepreneurs. However, the actual costs of maintaining an in-house specialist often turn out to be significantly higher.

The FlawlessMLM team knows its job and has been working on projects for network marketing for many years. You won't have to "glue" a team from scratch, and you won't stumble upon dozens of rakes.

Main Differences Between Employees and Contractors

If your tasks can be handled by a ready-made, packaged solution, you are somewhat lucky. If you plan to expand and scale your business in the future, it is worth ordering custom development.

By outsourcing technical tasks, you get a fully equipped team with an extensive range of technologies used and the ability to quickly connect the necessary specialists to the project. The manager is responsible for the workflow, with a clear understanding of task planning and team organization, which includes backend and frontend developers, a technical writer, a tester (QA), a marketer, and a UI\UX designer. The latter four are not always needed simultaneously, but they all must work together.

When hiring an employee in-house, it will be difficult to fairly evaluate their work because you do not know how high-quality projects they have created before. It is also necessary to allocate enough time to test the results of each stage of development.

Advantages of hiring a contractor:

1). Higher quality and more in-depth development. A contractor, having years of relevant experience and having tested the practicality of their solutions, knows what works in the MLM field and what doesn't.

2). The team uses existing developments if they are applicable to the specific project of the client company. This helps reduce the company's labor costs and time resources and the client's financial expenses.

3). Consistency of technical support. Thanks to the team's coordinated work, during vacations or sick leave of team members, the project does not go unattended.

4). Communication simplicity with specialists. Communication takes place with one person - the project manager who coordinates the work of the development team.

5). Time savings. You have the opportunity to focus on the core processes of the company, increasing competitiveness and the quality of goods/services.

6.) Cost savings. No need to pay monthly salaries, taxes, insurance contributions, and vacation pay, or organize workspaces.

In other words, if a contractor will need to pay a one-time fee starting from 500,000 (the price depends on many factors, but this is the average minimum cost of development voiced by managers), then a staff team of 7 people will need to be paid approximately the same amount monthly. Reminder that the average salary of a programmer in Moscow is 100,000 rubles (according to moskva.trud).

From a psychological point of view, it is easier for an involved specialist to evaluate the activities of the client company impartially, to consider it from the outside, without taking into account the established practices and relationships within the company. The contractor takes into account only the factors that are truly significant from the perspective of the end result.

Several points to consider when choosing a contractor:

1). Lack of up-to-date information about clients. If a specialist is not ready to provide links to completed projects, there is a possibility that such cases never existed. Unfortunately, many companies exaggerate when talking about their achievements and often did not actually do what they claim.