Soon after landing a big contract, an organisation has to immediately start to strategise on fulfilling their promise to deliver quality, timely and reliable work. After the excitement of landing the deal fades away, real work has to start to build your credibility and boost your company growth. It’s time to evaluate your company’s capabilities and decide whether to subcontract or handle all the work independently. When should you subcontract?
When Working on a Huge Contract
Huge contracts require more expertise, machines and workforce. For instance, assume you’ve landed a deal to supply public furniture, but you need street furniture designs first. Your company doesn’t have the experience or skills to handle the type of work, and you are running out of time.
You’ll have to decide whether to hire or buy the necessary equipment and hire more experienced staff. This will mean investing more money into the work to cater for the equipment and added workforce. All this, even when the company is capable of financing, might take time. It would make more sense, hiring an experienced company to handle the task.
The most important reason to do this is the availability of a skilled workforce to handle the project. It might take a considerable amount of resources and time to finally round up all the skills you need for the project but subcontracting to an experienced company makes things move faster.
You are Assured of Quality Work
You might not have the necessary experience to handle all the project aspects, which makes you subcontract to a professional. You’ll have less stress and at the same time get the assurance that experts are handling the work. As you subcontract, you have enough time to take other responsibilities, enabling you to keep up with the set deadlines. You can deliver quality work to your clients, which makes them trust you with future projects.
You End Up Saving Money
As you subcontract, you don’t have to invest in costly machinery or employees’ benefits. Although you will still have to reimburse the subcontracted company, in most cases, the cost is less than what you would spend buying equipment and hiring a skilled workforce. For instance, if contracted to deliver concrete street furniture, you need a lot of cement to create the desired designs.
If you choose to subcontract a cement manufacturing company to deliver the raw product, you’ll save time and have quality cement for the project. Most speciality companies have the necessary skills and equipment to provide fast and quality products, even on short notice.
Projects that run longer than the set deadlines eat into the profits, and clients end up dissatisfied. You may lose your credibility and a chance to land better projects in the future just because you decided to handle the entire contract on your own or when you subcontracted, you didn’t take time to check whether the company is qualified or capable.
As you will realise, subcontracting makes everyone happy. You’ll have valued expertise at your disposal with little long term commitment or legal obligations. Most importantly, your client will be satisfied you delivered quality work on time.
