Are you an entrepreneur starting a multi-million-dollar business or a small business owner? Is your business already established or moving toward growth? Regardless of your position, you might be looking for deals where you get the best bang for your buck. Starting out, a business first needs to build a brand.
A brand isn’t concerned with logistics and distribution, employee count, etc. A brand is only concerned with how you will position your business in the market and how you will sell the idea that your business is built on. Let’s start with creating the most basic branding material: the logo.
For some, the answer might be a custom logo design company they can outsource the work to, and that would be our recommendation. But why? That is the answer we want to give, to show you just how expensive the process is if you don’t avail of their services. So, let’s get started!
Should You Get a Custom Logo Design Company or Hire Your Own?
Businesses need logos, but that doesn’t mean you can make a logo and expect the work to be over right after that. Whether you are starting out or well into the years for your business, there will always be some need for a designer for this and that. If you have a website or an online business, you’ll always need developers for your website as well, whether for maintaining it or adding anything new to it.
What about doing it yourself? Well, if you can, then all the power to you, but that notion is only for the very few business owners who have both the time and technical expertise to be able to do that.
Human Resources (HR) and payroll responsibilities alone can be incredibly time-consuming, and doing the work that entire teams do over months is an unrealistic prospect for a regular, profitable business to follow. With freelancing and outsourcing, tracking and managing payroll, let alone the rules and regulations for different regions, can become a very hectic responsibility.
You might think this doesn’t directly relate to hiring one’s own team. Still, business owners rarely understand the breadth of responsibilities they have for running a business, so these considerations are necessary. After all, the problems you might have to address are not limited to just your web development team. So, let’s get into the thick of it.
Hiring a Dedicated Web Development Team
Hiring a dedicated team has a few things you need to take note of:
- Payroll costs
- Administration
- Offices
- Insurance and benefits
- Region
- Training
Plus, you aren’t just hiring one person; you’re getting a team. That means developers, designers, testers, writers, marketers, and other technical roles. Moreover, every designer doesn’t know how to create 3D logo animation, nor does every developer know all the languages. You have to account for your needs beforehand.
That also means understanding what you need. Take a hypothetical situation. You need a website, and your brand is hyper-focused on fun visuals. Your website will have minimal functionality, but the design is where you need some panache. Does that mean you need more designers, front-end developers, or both? Will more designers help or create communication issues? Should you have a small team or a large one? All these problems and their solutions are specific to your business.
The Cost of Hiring a Team
All that needs to be understood before the cost comes into play. On average, you’ll be paying close to $40/hours for a developer with experience and about $30/hr for a skilled designer. Those are the average, so the more skill and expertise you need, the more you’ll have to pay for it. That’s about $60-80k annually for just one employee–and a team can cost in the millions per year.
A full team can generally consist of the following:
- A full-stack developer
- A front-end developer
- A back-end developer
- A senior web designer
- A junior designer
- A logo designer
- A senior writer
- A junior writer
- An SEO executive
- A marketing executive
These are just the standard roles you’ll need for a team. Of course, we say you want a logo design team, but logos aren’t the only thing you’ll be making. Moreover, this full team will take time to hire and train before work begins in earnest, which can take months. That is potentially tens or even hundreds of thousands in monthly costs before you see any productivity.
Offices and Administration
Hiring your own team requires that you have somewhere for them to sit. You’ll need to rent an office, get workstation computers, pay for administration staff, chairs, coffee and snacks, water, electricity, toilet paper–every little thing adds to the costs. However, most businesses will likely already have offices, and modern work practices are making finding office spaces less of a problem through remote work.
Insurance and Benefits
You’re not just paying for your employees. You’ll also have to get insurance plans, benefits, bonuses, remuneration packages, and more. These aren’t just costs, they are sometimes necessary for attracting talent.
Region
This particular point isn’t about freelancers and outsourcing to a different country. This one is about where your business is and your pool of talent. If your business is in the central downtown area of a city, it will be very different from a city in a less populated area. For example, in a city, office spaces are more expensive, and you’ll probably have to pay top talent a lot more due to high living expenses. However, that also means you have a larger pool of talent.
Training
We saved the best for last: your team will require a mix of senior and junior personnel and training, orientation, and getting used to the company culture. You’ll need your employees to understand you, your brand, your business, your product, etc. This step will take time, no matter how well you prepared the business.
The Benefits and Drawbacks of an In-House Team
Hiring your own team has some problems you’ll need to deal with, but what about the benefits? What are you getting with all that cost and talent?
Having a team on hand means you can deal with any communication issues as they appear. Moreover, you will get domestic talent and be able to have your employees grow alongside your business, effectively getting a much better return on the investment you are making by hiring them.
Handling Change
However, that is also one of the more significant risks you can potentially take. In the business world today, anything digital is all about disruption, and disruption is happening on a yearly basis. That means you might have to pivot your business at a moment’s notice. Not literally, but in the business world, a few years is not a whole lot of time for a business to change itself entirely.
That extends to logo designs as well. Not every designer and developer knows everything. Some might be more proficient in 2D logo design, whereas others might create 3D logo animation better than anyone else. Who you hire can give you their expertise, but it can also limit your ability to pivot your business and change strategies.
That is where the custom logo design company excels. You aren’t hiring employees. You are buying a service. A cancel-anytime, project-based service that can net you plenty of positive results based on their cost, ability to adapt to your needs, and the expertise you get straight out the gate. They know how to create the logo to look good everywhere, whether you want effective billboard ads or social media content to be viewed on a phone. Having an inexperienced in-house team means you might need to know that beforehand–or discover the error after the fact.
The Services of Design Agencies
These are the problems that design agencies are there to solve. They provide you with everything: the team, the offices (at their expense), trained employees, and the service itself–all for a fraction of the cost.
Generally, where a project can cost you tens of thousands per month can cost you tens of thousands as a flat fee that you pay once. That alone is a considerable value proposition, and it helps save on costs considerably more so than any other method.
That is not to refute the validity of an in-house team either. However, with more and more work being remote, it becomes less sensible to go with the in-house team approach, especially if you are a small business that cannot afford an entire team for your digital marketing efforts.
Hit the Ground Running
Once you hire the services of a custom logo design company, you are getting experts in the field ready to work on your project. Want some designs and nothing more? Done. A few new ideas and logos for some new products you are launching? Just get their services, and you’ll be done in a week or two at most. Want to revamp your entire business and brand? They will have that, too.
Most design agencies adopt a one-stop-shop approach, making their entire digital marketing suite available to you, and you can pick and choose what you require. Of course, researching the agency, communicating with them, and all that takes time, but so does hiring your own.
