Owning a business can be quite overwhelming, particularly when you are on a budget and at the same time there are many things that have to be done and paid for. Your goal is optimize your costs while giving your clients the best experience possible, so they keep going back and provide good recommendations.

In many cases, you don’t necessarily need an IT department, at least not immediately. Owning one generates plenty of costs before you even sign your first contract. You need to find a person with skills that you need, recruit that person, introduce them to your vision and tasks and verify their work if necessary. That process costs you both – time and money, and since time is money… you get the drill.

Cooperation with a software house is giving you the best quality for money, without any hidden costs or risks that come with hiring your own team.

Recruitment and verification

This one is tricky. In order to recruit a specialist you need to have much more than just a vacancy. You have to make yourself look attractive to those specialists. From that point you have two options – make everything by yourself or hire a headhunter who will find you the employee you need. The thing is – it costs money, it costs time, and also since you’re a new player on the market, there is a possibility that your headhunter is providing the best contacts to bigger companies. You don’t know and you can’t really tell.

Later you have to run some meetings, probably a lot of them, and make sure that the final contract is beneficial for all parties. Having only one employee is tricky again, because of the variety of tasks and also things like holidays or someone being sick.

More importantly however, can you be sure that the person you hired is as qualified as they claim to be? Can you actually check their skills? So many questions and so many potential risks.

By signing a contract with a good software house you pay for the result and the know-how. Technicalities don’t bother you. You explain your needs and goals, discuss the plan and possibilities, sign the contract and relax, because the final product will be delivered to you. It will save you money and energy.

Hardware

Hiring your own employees means providing them tools they can use to perform. For you it means more expenses, especially if you cannot really verify what’s actually necessary and what’s just some fancy stuff that will never pay for itself.

That problem doesn’t exist if you cooperate with a software house, because, again, you pay for the result and not the means. That means savings of hardware, energy to run it, resources for maintenance and space to keep it. Moreover you don’t have to think about the best or optimal tools for your business, because that’s another thing that somebody else will take care of.

Making a deal with a good business partner will again save you a lot of money and effort.

Knowledge and security

There are two things that cannot be emphasized more. When you begin a cooperation with an external company, you will probably have a team and team manager designated to your purpose which doesn’t change the fact that the software house itself is a mine of shared knowledge and experience. And you pay for this, instead of hiring a few people who might have or might have not the experience you need.

Cooperation with a software house brings to the table the knowledge from multiple people and practical experience from other projects. The latter usually come with recommendations and a lot of software houses will be more than happy to show you opinions from their past clients and some samples of their past work before you seal the deal.

The same thing one can apply to security issues. You don’t have to know everything, but security is crucial to your client’s and that’s why it’s important to choose a business partner who will help you with that aspect of running a business.

The point is to let you do what you do best and develop your startup. And finding a partner to help you with that seems like one of the best investments you can make as an owner.

Author: Leszek Warzecha, Digital Marketing Specialist at ITSG Global