I’ve got a lot of complains lately from those who hire freelancers or even full-timers and spend a lot of time and money without getting the expected outcome that could qualify to be a product ready to be launched.

I’ve seen it a million times, a client contact a company like mine @Simpleia for a proposal, after checking out the figures he instantly thinks, why would I pay that, I could hire a freelancer or two or even full-timers and get it done for a fraction of the price, also will be able to directly manage them.

He even may dig in agencies portfolios and teams and contact one of the employees directly for a freelance job, thinking that an individual designer or developer can get the job done just like his company.
After few months maybe even a year spending money and time he figure out the project/product in hand will never be finalized and delivered as desired.
And that’s because this person in an agency he’s not working alone, for example for a UI Designer he’s working side by side with a Strategist, UX Researcher, Information Architect, Interaction Designer, Copywriter and above all that the team Director, that I think should not hold less than 10 years of experience, so he’s capable of getting the job done by managing the team efficiently producing more productivity in the right direction.

The problem is clients think they could manage teams by their own without depending on an experienced director/manager.
Even after discovering that freelancers just won’t cut it, they think it’s because the freelancer or full-timer isn’t qualified enough, not because the whole team and expertise required aren’t in place.

More than half our clients have tried once or more to work with freelancers or full-timers before contacting us, and they have horrible stories to tell of losing money, time, miscommunication and other unfortunate events.

We often reply back leads with proposals knowing that they’ll refuse it, but the thing is we can’t offer less time/cost estimations as we already delivered 38 projects in the past and much more for me personally even before Simpleia and we know how much time, effort & expertise it takes to be done.
But after maybe a year maybe the same client come back willing to accept whatever proposal we have for him after learning the hard why that it’s not about a couple of freelancers to get it done.

Don’t repeat the same mistake, if you have a project you want done, you have one of 2 options. either to hire a full team with their director (It’ll be most probably very hard and costly to find & hire a director) or you’d hire an agency like Simpleia so you have access to the required team and expertise that’s already working together for awhile and already delivered many projects before.
You can even make the effort and contact their past clients to make sure the agency is qualified and trustworthy.
Other than that you’ll be losing your money and more importantly your time on uncertain trials of coming up with a product that from my experience never works, and you’ll either fed up and surrender or you’ll have to spend just what you already spent in your many trials all again to an agency.

That’s the importance of valuing expertise, anybody can make a car that may do the job but a Mercedes will not be equal to an old Toyota that barely moves, it’s more embarrassing than functional.

I have another solution that may not be perfect but it’s much better than nothing, I offer mentorship on hourly basis, so if you have an in-house full-time UX/UI team but you’re not satisfied with the outcome as explained, you can hire me or any other experienced enough mentor to work with your team on hourly basis, so each week there’ll be an hour or two session with the designers and maybe the stakeholder/manager as well to go over their work this week and gently criticize the flaws that maybe there in a way that’s descriptive and professional so designers understand why it’s wrong or why another solution is better and be able to work on the fix or improvement.
This comes out with a much better result but still it’s not perfect as the agency/mentor is not responsible of delivering he’s only responsible of providing the mentorship hours, and often face objections from the stakeholders if tried to explain we need one or two more team members or to apply a certain process etc… and clients/stakeholder often directly interfere the work without passing by the director/mentor as a week is a very long time not to, but still it’s better than nothing solution.

Sorry for the long post, I hope it’s beneficial and if you got any questions or experiences to share please comment of PM me.