Small and medium businesses (SMBs) whose core competency is not technology have always had a very difficult time finding competent technical help that can be used in a variable cost structure. The internet and web-based applications are becoming more and more important for doing business every day and that means that SMBs as a whole are falling further and further behind the large corporations that can afford to support huge technology departments.

The current technology options available to SMBs are:
1) Hire freelance consultants
2) Hire a consulting company
3) Hire in-house

Freelance consultants

Freelance consultants typically come in two varieties.

The first variety is highly skilled and very competent. This type of freelance consultant is not only extremely rare, but they are also always extremely busy, and very expensive.

The second variety is the other extreme who are not good technologists at all. In fact, these people cannot last very long working with other technologists, which is the main reason they prey on SMBs. These freelance consultants are the subjects of horror stories you’ve heard where a company sinks $30k into a project only to have two broken web pages and a database with five tables in it to show for it. These are also the freelance consultants that mysteriously become unavailable when the gig is up and the client is on to them. Sadly, these incompetents make up the majority of freelance consultants.

There is a very high risk that you will get taken to the cleaners when using freelance consultants without doing extensive research or relying on referrals.

Consulting companies

Consulting companies pay their consultants under a fixed cost structure. This means that they must pay consultants that are not working and the consulting company’s hourly rates must be inflated to compensate.

This also means that it will be exceedingly difficult for you to find a consulting company that is willing to do just one, two, or even ten hours of work for you. Consulting companies almost always require either a retainer or some sort of guarantee of the number of hours that they will be working for you. Smaller consulting companies may be willing to take contracts with lower guarantees to get started. However, that mentality is only temporary for them and is ditched as soon as they start landing larger contracts. This means that their SMB clients will likely be ditched as well.

Furthermore, consulting companies do not operate as an extension of your business. You will not be able to turn to a consulting company for small, but sometimes necessary, tasks. For instance, if you wanted to setup nightly backups for your databases, have a bug fixed on your website, or switch hosting providers, you will most likely not be able to find a consulting company to take care of these issues for you.

Overall, consulting companies usually have a high level of technical competence, but you will pay extensively for their services, and you will not be able to use them as an extension of your business.

Hiring in-house

The biggest issue with hiring in-house is finding someone in the company who has enough technical knowledge to be able to hire an adequate technologist. In the majority of cases, SMBs do not have anyone technical enough to distinguish between the real thing and a fraud, so any novice technologist can pass themselves off as an expert technologist.

Additionally, when the core competency of the business is not technology, supporting a fixed cost individual to handle all of the technical needs becomes difficult to justify. This is especially true if that individual is not competent in the first place and the work that needs to be getting done isn’t getting done. SMBs can rarely afford to hire an expert technologist, so they are usually forced to hire a novice.

Overall, hiring in-house is the worst of the three options because you will get the worst of both worlds – lack of technical competence and a fixed cost structure for technology.