On my radio today, I talked with Cathy Siciliano, Senior Director of Marketing at Elance about how to hire contractors, freelancers and consultants during these times. This is an especially important skill for us to learn since in order to be successful for the next few years. We need to keep our fixed overhead low and that means to hire as few employees as possible. We need to find what I call “variable available resources” to get the work done and that means finding people on sites like Elance. Cathy talks about how to hire an army of people to help you since as she says, the work still needs to get done.

Listen as Cathy and I talk about:

1. How can we leverage contractors to help your small business survive and thrive in this uncertain economy?

2. What are the benefits of hiring an outside consultant? How can we hire an army of people to help us?

3. One problem I have always had either as a consultant or customer is project creep. How do you clearly define a project when working with an outside consultant?

Listen now!

As the economy tightens, I recommend that we all look to make all of our resources variable- a percent of our revenue. To survive in a recession, a profitable business needs to reduce its overhead and make as many people resources as possible “Variable yet Available“. Anita Campbell at Elance states that “Analyst firm NelsonHall recently forecast that business process outsourcing (BPO) will grow to a $450 billion market by the year 2012. I’ve been noticing that small businesses are doing an increasing volume of outsourcing of project work and even certain parts of their business processes. It’s a strategy that helps you grow your business flexibly. You can increase your capacity and throughput, without adding fixed expenses that would be difficult to scale back.”

Anita interviewed me for the article- “I try to deal with contractors based on a fixed price since I can pay for a result. I can evaluate return by measuring the cost of delivering that result. I like to pay a deposit and then the balance upon completion of the project. I do not like to get into time based contracts unless the nature of the service makes it absolutely necessary.”