One of the challenges with growing a company is knowing when to add staff and when to add freelancers.

A great strategy to overcome this challenge is to form partnerships with 3rd party vendors. By working with partners instead of hiring staff, you can expand and contract your company needs without taking on overhead. It is a very simple strategy, but I think a lot of early entrepreneurs get excited about growth and want to expand head count. We fell into this trap early on, but now our goal is to grow revenue and limit headcount.

We have found two great partners as a result of this learning and I wanted to share. One, MatrixMT, provides all of our social media and seo/link building and PixelFanatix supports us in web design and custom development.

These partners are very specific to our business, but here is the process we went through to identify our needs.

1. Establish your core business product or service you are going to provide. This is your sales teams main focus and product they offer.
2. Identify your target customer or markets. Then look at what pain your product solves and what it doesn’t.
3. Evaluate additional needs your customers may have and see if these are complimentary to your product. Clients always have lots of needs, but you only want to think about needs that create synergies between your product.
4. Seek out partners that can fill these needs when needed
5. Create an open 3rd party so you can utilize these partners as needed without long term obligations. This is the key so that if your business flourishes you can bring high margin business in house.

This is a simple post, but embracing this philosophy will grow your business and at the same time protect it in a tough market.