Hiring People On The Cheap = False Economy

Today, my husband / business partner and I were reviewing one of our projects and it hit home why we had made such huge strides in the past few months compared with only inching forward for over a year beforehand.

This particular project involves an enormous about of software development, but the principle I'm about to share applies to anything: hiring people on the cheap is often a false economy.

When we began this project (can't say what it is... yet) we wanted to pay our programmers the bare minimum. We thought we would get the job done whilst saving $$ that way.

Well, we were dead wrong. Through the heart break and frustration of dealing with a long line of people who promised the world but never delivered - we ended up wasting thousands and thousands of dollars on 'cheap' providers.

Right now we are paying top dollar and the progress we have made in a very short time has been astounding. What can I say? Had we focused on hiring the best, rather than the cheapest, from the beginning, we would have had this thing launched a year ago, and in doing so, saved a huge amount of money, time and, importantly, lost profits.

Now, what is 'cheap', 'top dollar', etc is all relative. And the point of this post is not to say that paying any amount of money is a guarantee of anything. I am well aware that there are gems who charge what is a low amount of money in countries such as Australia and U.S. but is a great wage in their countries.

And, to be honest, we did use an expensive programmer who turned out to be useless as well. So yes, it really comes down to hiring great people, not cheap or expensive people.

BUT, our experience has definitely been that you are more likely to find great people among those who charge the most.

And that's only logical - great people are in high demand and aside from being able to charge more, pretty much have to charge more in order to keep their workload reasonable.

So here's the point: don't be afraid to look for the best people and pay them top dollar. If they are really good, they will do the work faster, add a lot of value, and not just save you money, but make you more money - by allowing you to launch faster and produce a better product (whether its software, a sales letter, articles or whatever).