Managing Free Agents

Even if you don't invest a lot of time and effort in leading your free agents, you still have to manage them. in fact, the more you back away from leadership, the more time you'll probably have to spend on management. If nothing else, you need to find them, then hire or contract with them, then keep track -- somewhat -- of what they're doing.

Finding free agents is easy. Finding good free agents can be a little trickier. If you're hiring them for the first time you won't know much about the quality of their work. Hopefully they will have some kind of portfolio or can provide qualified references you can check out. Finding free agents through sites like Elance or Guru.com allows you to see how they've done before, whether through employer feedback or links to portfolios. Craigslist is certainly an option too, but you won't learn anything more about them than they want you to know.

When it comes to actually hiring people, get some legal advice early on. If you're going to be doing this regularly you should have a standardized contract where you fill in the blanks depending on the project. Of course, by working with a free agent you've got less paperwork to worry about. There's no health insurance to worry about, no Social Security...just tax paperwork once a year, which is a lot less difficult than withholding taxes from every check.

How you pay your free agent is up to you. You can pay by the hour or pay by the project. If you do the former, you're really paying for the process, and you might be paying them for time they aren't actually working if they finish in less time than they quoted you. If you choose to simply pay by the project, what you're paying for is the product rather than the process...you need to figure out which method best addresses what's most important to you.

If you do decide to pay by the hour you'll need to find some way to track their work. That's tough. A lot of free agents will be working off-site. Now, with your regular employees, working off-site is not necessarily a problem because, ideally, you have a relationship with them that engenders trust, and you don't need to see what they're up to. But with free agents, especially when you haven't worked with them before, you don't really know that when they bill you for 30 hours they really worked 30 hours. So, either find a way to keep an eye on their billable hours, or agree on a price for the project and just go with that.

In any creative field, free agents are an important element. To stay fresh you sometimes need to be willing to reach out beyond your pool of talent and bring in something new. But that's easy to say, tougher to do. Leading Creatives who work for you regularly can be challenging, but making the best use of the talents of those occasional workers requires some extra management skills on your part. So before you jump into that make sure to think about what's required.