Question about hiring someone, who you works in a different city.

[harmonica44]

For doing some post production work on a project, I have decided to hire someone in a different city. A different country even. I will send all the footage online. However, I am paying him by the hour, but since I cannot supervise him really, how do I know how many hours he has worked? When hiring this way, how do you come up with a system, of keeping track of hours?

Thanks.

 

[ItDonnedOnMe]

It seems that fixed fees, can cause people to want to do it all without any collaboration, and want to get pain in the end, with an unsatisfactory product, that I did was not given any access to approve, during the working progress.

So how do you avoid that with a fixed fee?

It all comes down to negotiating things up front and putting them in writing so that everyone is clear on what's expected. With a fixed fee it's common to include revisions in the contract - typically one or two rounds of revisions after scheduled reviews. So you might schedule a first review to take place once the rough cut is finished, and you'll provide your notes on desired revisions at that point. They'll take those notes, perform the revisions, and then you'll have a second review after which you provide your final changes that they'll incorporate for the final cut.

It's also common in fixed fee contracts to have a clause covering the extent of permissible revisions - i.e. revisions that will increase the original time estimate by more than 10-20% will require additional fees. This protects the service provider from a client attempting to completely change direction at the revision stage.

As mlesemann mentioned, you'll generally also want to structure the payment so that it progresses along with the work milestones. Something like 1/3 up front, 1/3 after the first review, final 1/3 paid upon delivery. The specific breakdown will depend a lot on your working relationship with the person and the size of the project - short projects with someone you've worked with before may just be paid fully on delivery, while projects stretched over many months may have more milestones and a more complex payment breakdown.

It's all up to you to negotiate this stuff, and there's no one correct way to do it - but the key is to make sure that everyone is clear up front on what's expected, what's acceptable, and what constitutes a situation where the contract needs to be renegotiated.