How to Build an All-Star Remote Contractor Team

In this episode of Agency Journey, Chelsea Brady from 7th Sight shares her story of building her agency and a high-quality remote contractor team.

Here are the main takeaways from the interview:

Manage Expectations with Your Contractos

If you’re hiring and building a contractor team, it’s important to remember that these individuals have their own businesses, and you are just another client of many.

This means that sometimes your work won’t take priority.

To help with this, it’s essential to build a relationship and set expectations.

Tell them what you expect from them and their work and how you’ll treat them and gauge how they respond to it. Test to see if they’re a fit.

You will get more out of your contractors if they are more bought into your business and vision and more closely connected to you. If you treat them like just a cog, you won’t get the same service level from your clients.

By setting these expectations and having an understanding between you and the team, you’ll better be able to manage workloads, discover who’s reliable, and avoid projects falling through the cracks.

Chelsea works with contractors on a project basis. She knows that the freelancer life is built around the flexibility of the lifestyle, so she also wants to keep good contractors around with means of good pay for projects, so they maintain that.

This means working this into your pricing structure from the get-go and not just focusing on hiring the lowest cost contractors.

Focus on Yourself

A lot of agency owners do put everyone else’s needs ahead of their own.

Clients, vendors, partners, employees, etc.

But at the end of the day, the owner started the business for themselves and their vision for their life.

This means working hard to be fairly compensated for the work you do and making sure that there’s a profit for you at the end of the day.

You also want to find a way to hand off the work that you don’t enjoy or want to do to others to focus on your core strengths and build the business.

It may be easy to think that what the owner is doing may not be as important as the technical work, but leading and managing is what makes the agency run and ensures that clients are getting the work they deserve.

To get to this level, owners need to think of what’s on their plate they could give to someone else, build a process around it and then outsource.

By handing off work and fairly paying themselves, agency owners can experience greater professional and personal satisfaction at their agency.

If you want to connect with Chelsea, you can reach her at the 7th Sight website.