Whether you’re a startup or a small business, you might be wondering if it’s worth it to hire a full-time employee or outsource some work to freelancers. It’s a big consideration, with lots of financial implications, so it’s something you shouldn’t decide on blindly.

For most businesses in the early stages, it makes more fiscal sense to outsource work to freelancers. However, it can also benefit you from an operational and quality assurance standpoint too. In this post, we’ll walk you through a few of the core benefits of outsourcing work to freelancers.

1. Cost Savings

The primary reason people outsource work is because it costs less than having a full-time employee. Employees cost more than just their salary. There are also benefits, taxes, and insurance fees to consider. An employee with a $60,000 annual salary can easily cost your business $80,000 a year or more.

Freelancers work on a contract basis with a set fee, so you only pay for what you need. Once you find someone you work well with, you can use them on a long-term basis. So it’s like having a dedicated employee but without the extra overhead.

2. Increased Efficiency

Freelancers are experts in their trade, which means they can accomplish tasks and projects much quicker than someone just learning or being trained. If you need work done well and quickly, a freelancer is often your best bet.

Not to mention, you can hire multiple freelancers if you have a large workload coming up so that you can turn around services quickly and move on to new contracts.

3. Flexibility

Working with freelancers means you only must create a process for finding and hiring experts. You don’t have to spend hours creating process documents and adjusting them every time the market or your business changes.

This makes you much more flexible when it comes to taking jobs or tweaking your service to fit a customer’s needs. All you must do is deliver the right instructions to your freelancer, and the job will get done exactly to the spec.

4. Access to Experts

Finally, hiring freelancers means you have easy access to experts in their respective fields. You can hire a professional graphic designer, web developer, copywriter, and more for a reasonable fee. That’s much more efficient and cost-effective than hiring someone full-time.

Next time you wonder if you should hire an employee or outsource work, think about these four benefits before you decide.