Specialists on Call

The Paid Trial

The best portfolio I have ever been sent belonged to a designer in Cluj who could not follow a brief. I hired her in the summer of 2020 to redraw the covers for forty of my templates. Her samples were beautiful: clean type, careful colour, a rebrand for a Romanian wine bar that I still remember. I paid a deposit of £400 on the strength of them. Ten days later the first batch arrived in the wrong dimensions, with my product names misspelt on three covers and a palette I had specifically ruled out. When I pointed this out, she wrote, "I thought it would look better this way," and she was right, it did look better. It was also unusable.

A portfolio shows you someone's best work, chosen by them, made for a client you will never meet, under conditions you cannot see. It tells you nothing about how they behave when the brief is dull, the deadline is Thursday and the person paying is five and a half hours ahead of them. What you need to know is how they work for you, and the only way to find out is to pay them to do it.

So I stopped hiring on portfolios. Every new specialist now does a paid trial first: one small, real task, taken straight from my Run Log, at a fixed fee agreed in advance. It should take two to four hours. I pay whether I use the result or not, and I pay within a week. My usual figure is £60 to £120, depending on the skill. When I recruited my current cover designer in 2022 I trialled three people at £80 each. That cost £240, a little over half of what the Cluj episode lost me before I had a single usable file.

The task matters less than what it reveals. I look for four things, and the finished work is only one of them:

• Did they ask a question before starting, and was it a good one?
• Did they deliver on the day they said, or warn me early if they could not?
• Did they follow the brief where it was specific, and use judgement where it was not?
• When I asked for one change, did they make exactly that change?

Two of my three trialists in 2022 produced better covers than the third. She was the only one who asked whether US buyers needed a separate size.

A Brief That Needs No Follow-Up

A brief is a Run Log entry with the founder taken out of it. Everything you would have decided on the fly while doing the task yourself has to be written down in advance, because the specialist cannot ask the version of you that lives in your head. My test is blunt: could a competent stranger finish the job without sending me a single message? If not, the brief is not done.

Daniel learnt this the expensive way. His first brief to his production designer in Lagos, sent in July, read in full: "Menu refresh for the Ancoats client, files in the folder, usual style." It produced eleven messages over three days and a menu with last season's prices on it. He then rewrote it from his Run Log entry for menu updates, keeping the same six headings. This is the version he still uses, with the client's name changed:

• Task: Update the dinner menu for Corvo, Ancoats.
• Trigger: Request 47 in the queue, received Tuesday.
• Steps: Open menu-dinner-v6 in the shared drive. Replace dishes and prices from the client's list (attached, changes highlighted yellow). Keep all type sizes. Export an A4 print PDF with 3 mm bleed and a 1080-pixel-wide PNG for Instagram.
• Decisions: If a section overflows, reduce line spacing before font size. If a dish name runs past two lines, shorten the description, never the name. Prices always show pence (£12.50, not £12.5). If anything in the client's list is unclear, leave a comment on that line and finish the rest. Do not wait for me.
• Time: About 90 minutes. If it passes two hours, stop and tell me why.
• Done when: Both files are in the Ready for Review folder, named corvo-dinner-v7, with a note listing anything you flagged.

The Steps are the easy part; any designer could have guessed most of them. The work is in the Decisions, and every one of them was a mistake Daniel had already made or corrected. The overflow rule came from a menu where the starters shrank to eight-point type. "Do not wait for me" matters more than anything else on the page, because a question sent at the end of someone's day can stall a job for a whole night. The two-hour stop protects both of them: the designer is not quietly working unpaid hours, and Daniel hears about a problem while it is still small. And "Done when" means nobody has to ask whether it is finished.

The rewritten brief took Daniel forty minutes. The next menu came back in eighty-five, with one comment in the margin: "Is the halloumi still vegetarian if it's fried in the same oil as the chicken?"

Paying Fairly, Owning Everything

Daniel pays his Lagos designer £22 an hour. He could find people on the same marketplace offering similar work for £8, and in his first month he tried two of them. One vanished after a deposit; the other delivered on time and then took a full-time job with a London agency a fortnight later, because the agency paid properly. A specialist paid at the bottom of the market will leave for the first better offer, and the cost of replacing them lands on you. At £22, the Corvo menu cost Daniel £33 for ninety minutes. His client pays £1,450 a month for the subscription. The arithmetic is not tight enough to justify squeezing anyone.

My own rule is to pay the rate the skill commands where I sell, discounted modestly for the fact that I supply the work steadily and never haggle over invoices. I pay in the freelancer's currency, I absorb the transfer fee (usually 1 to 3 per cent) and I pay within seven days. Reliable payment buys more loyalty than a higher rate paid late. I have watched specialists turn down better-paid clients to keep me, and the only reason I could find was that my money arrived on Fridays.

Fairness runs in both directions, and a contract is how you write it down. Mine is a page and a half. It says the work belongs to me once it is paid for, that client files stay confidential, that either side can end the arrangement with two weeks' notice, and that the specialist may show the work in a portfolio unless I say otherwise. Nobody has ever objected to it.

The bigger risk is in the accounts themselves. In 2017, during my brief career as an employer, one of my four staff set up our support inbox and the scheduling tool using her personal email address. It was quicker. When she left in 2018 she was perfectly pleasant about it, but she was also in Dubai, and it took nineteen days, three password resets and one notarised letter to recover a mailbox I had been paying for all along.

Now everything is registered in my name, on my card, with my phone number for two-factor login: domains, storefront, shared drives, design files, automation accounts. Freelancers get their own logins with limited access, never mine. When one leaves, I remove a single user. It takes about four minutes.

Two Deep on Every Role

In February 2023 the man who built my spreadsheet formulas stopped answering. He lived in Kochi, he had worked with me for three years, and I had never once needed to chase him. Day three, nothing. Day seven, nothing. I had a new payroll template promised to 340 people on a pre-order list and a launch date of the 20th. I learnt later that his father had been taken into hospital, and his phone had been left in a house he did not go back to for a month. Nobody did anything wrong. I simply had one person where I needed two.

The launch slipped by twenty-six days. I refunded 61 pre-orders at £29 each, which comes to £1,769, and spent the rest of the month answering emails that began "Is this still happening?"

Since then every role in my Specialist bin has a second name beside it. The rule is plain: if a freelancer disappeared tomorrow, someone who has already done the work, been paid for it and knows the files could start on Monday. A name on a list is not a bench. The backup needs recent hands-on experience, so I give each one real work, roughly one job in five, at the same rate as the first choice. For formulas that comes to about £140 a month that I would otherwise have spent with one person. I think of it as insurance that hands me finished spreadsheets.

Daniel's bench is two production designers: the one in Lagos, and a second in Nairobi who takes the queue on Fridays. Both work from the same briefs, the same shared drive and the same Ready for Review folder. When the Lagos designer lost power for most of a week in October, Daniel's clients noticed nothing, apart from one who said the menus had come back "a bit tidier than usual". Daniel chose not to pass that on.

The downside is real. Two people means two invoices, two sets of logins to manage and a slower build-up of trust with each. Some roles are too small to split. For those I keep a written brief and the email address of the trialist who came second, and I accept the risk with my eyes open.

This Week

Write down every person in your Specialist bin, and beside each the name of whoever would take over if they vanished on Monday. Where the second column is empty, pick the gap that would hurt most and book a small paid trial with a backup, using a brief taken straight from your Run Log. Then add up what you paid all your specialists last month, bench included, and write the figure somewhere you will see it.

Daniel did the sum on a Sunday evening in November. It came to £1,912, and he had no idea whether that was a lot.