CGC Guides

Freelancers vs Employees: Building Your Crew

By Dario Nouri and Kyrill Lazarov | Updated October 12, 2026

Start with freelancers. That is the closest thing to consensus in the Creatives Grab Coffee archive: a freelance crew keeps your overhead near zero, flexes to every job, and lets you learn the business before you bet it. The first employee only makes sense when the math changes, when consistent, recurring client work can carry a salary even through a slow quarter, or when what you are already paying freelancers for one role starts to rival what that role would cost full time. Going fully in-house is a third, much bigger bet that pays off in margin and speed, but only if you can keep the work flowing every single month.

That is the short answer. The long answer is a genuine argument. Below are eight owners and producers on the record, from a three-person shop in Jersey City to a 26-person in-house agency in London, including one founder who built a team of nine and then deliberately shrank it back to three. They disagree about ownership, loyalty, and whether an employee can ever care the way you do, and those disagreements are exactly where the useful lessons live.

Key Takeaways

  • Freelancers are the default, not a compromise. Nearly every owner in the archive started freelance-first, and several run national operations on contractor networks alone. Low overhead and per-job flexibility are structural advantages, not signs of a small operation.
  • The tipping point is math, not ambition. Hire your first employee when consistent, recurring work can support the salary through a slow stretch, or when freelance spend on a single role approaches what a full-timer would cost.
  • Hire one at a time, and trial first. Pat Henderson added one role per bottleneck and confirmed the business was still comfortable before the next. Rodrigo of Republic24 starts every hire on a three or six-month contract that usually turns permanent.
  • In-house is a margin and speed play with a hard condition. Rupert Rixon’s 26-person team wins on reliability, training, and turnaround, but only because the work never stops coming. Without a full pipeline, the model runs in reverse.
  • Processes break at every doubling. Perspective Pictures hit walls at seven, eleven, and fourteen people. Middle management, not more hustle, is what made a bigger team manageable.
  • Ownership is the hardest thing to hire. Freelancers push because their reputation is on the line every job. Getting an employee to feel that same stake takes the right person, in the right role, at the right time, and several owners concluded it is rare.
  • Vet before you trust, either way. Word of mouth first, then a real vetting call with job-specific questions. A clean budget is a green flag, a reel only shows someone’s best work, and a bid far below the going day rate is a warning, not a bargain.
  • Say team, not subcontractor. Clients hire the people in front of them. Present your crew as the team for their project and keep the staffing model under the hood.

The Default: Start Freelance, Stay Lean

Braeden King of There Media tried the employee route exactly once, a full-time hire on the marketing side, and concluded the management stress was not worth it at his stage. His logic, from how to find work in your local community, is blunt: unless someone has a stake in the business, nobody will ever be as invested in it as you. Freelancers choose the jobs they want and build their own brand through yours, which keeps everyone motivated. His alternative to hiring is mentorship, bringing up PAs who want to grow into bigger roles, which builds a loyal crew without the payroll.

The freelance model also scales further than people assume. Mike De Robbio built Pickle Pictures from a solo operation into a company serving clients across Australia on a lean, contractor-based network, taking on large projects without full-time overhead, as he lays out in adaptability, sales, and SEO. And Gabe Nazario runs Offbeat Creative in one of the most competitive markets on earth with a three-person core, himself, a producer, and an editor, plus a 1099 crew where many contractors have been with him five-plus years. As he explains in winning on trust in a crowded market, different shoots call for different shooters, so the crew flexes to the ask. That flexibility is a big part of what separates a production company from a solo videographer in the first place.

The Tipping Point: When Freelance Spend Becomes a Salary

So when does a freelancer become an employee? The two clearest answers in the archive agree almost word for word. Pat Henderson grew Path8 Productions from a one-person operation into a six-person Boston studio one deliberate hire at a time, a story he tells in empowering your team and elevating morale. His test was never how much cash he had in reserve. It was whether consistent, recurring client work could support another salary even if things slowed down. Each hire solved a specific bottleneck and often replaced a chunk of freelance spend with a role, and he confirmed the business was still comfortable before making the next one. Knowing your market’s real freelance day rates is what makes that comparison possible in the first place.

“I'd rather hire an employee, or at least have that be part of an employee's salary, than a space that we go to.”

Pat Henderson, Path8 Productions (Episode 52)

Rodrigo built Republic24 across two of Mexico’s biggest cities on the same trigger: when freelancer spend on a role grew large enough, he brought it in-house. His safeguard, from growing a video business with Google Ads, is to start every hire on a three or six-month contract, a calculated risk that usually turns into a long-term employee. He is also the archive’s strongest voice for what happens after the hire.

“A lot of people think the client goes first. I learned that if the employee is happy, the client will be happy too.”

Rodrigo, Republic24 (Episode 97)

Both models assume you actually know your numbers per role and per project, which is the same discipline behind pricing video production work well: if you cannot say what a role costs you in freelance spend each month, you cannot know when the salary math flips.

The Case for Going In-House

The strongest case for full-time employees comes from Rupert Rixon, who took Perspective Pictures from a shed in his parents’ garden to a 26-person in-house agency in London working with Red Bull, LEGO, and TikTok. In growing and investing in your team, he frames in-house as a margin and speed play: employees are reliable, they can be trained in the digital and social skills many freelance filmmakers lack, and they let the company pull clients into every stage of the production process, including the edit, with fast turnaround. His other big idea is talent density, borrowed from Netflix: the higher the quality of the team, the less structure and process you need, while a single weak performer drags everyone around them down.

“The more people you hire, the more problems you're going to have. Your processes just break every time you double in size.”

Rupert Rixon, Perspective Pictures (Episode 45)

That quote is the honest fine print. Perspective’s processes broke at seven people, then again at eleven, when Rupert was still personally managing everyone, and again at fourteen. Introducing middle management and splitting the company into four teams of roughly seven is what made 26 sustainable. And the whole model rests on one hard condition he freely admits: a consistent flow of work through the door, every month, to feed the payroll. If the bigger growth question is on your mind, our guide to scaling a video production company covers when to push and when to hold.

The Case for Shrinking Back Down

Craig Bass has lived both sides. At its peak, his Chicago studio Motion Source had eight or nine full-time employees. Today it runs on three, plus regular freelancers, and that was a choice. As he explains in lessons in leadership and creativity, carrying eight salaries turned out to be a heavy, time-consuming responsibility that pulled him away from everything else he wanted to do, including his own filmmaking. He still grows the business, into new markets, deeper client relationships, and better pricing, just not in headcount.

His hardest-won lesson is about ownership. Freelancers hustle because their next call depends on this job going well. Employees can drift without that same stake, and manufacturing genuine ownership takes the right person in the right role at the right time, like the lead producer he hired straight out of school who helped shape the company for a decade. He is also honest about the exit costs: with a freelancer, the breakup is easy, while parting with an employee takes hard conversations that a soft-hearted owner will keep postponing. His one non-negotiable applies to both models: whoever you bring on, freelancer or staff, deserves respect, fair pay, and good working conditions in an industry that too often exploits contractors.

Where the Owners Disagree

Put these owners in one room and the argument writes itself. Braeden and Craig would tell you nobody will ever care about your business the way you do, so keep the core tiny and rent everything else. Rodrigo would answer that the caring is the owner’s job to create: put employees first, invest in culture, and a loyal team produces loyal clients. Rupert would add that the freelance market cannot teach the skills his clients pay for, so training your own people is the moat.

They also split on timing. Rupert argues a downturn is the best time to hire, because talent gets cheaper and better when freelancers go looking for stability, his sandcastle built while the tide is out. Pat’s calculated-risk test points the other way: hire only when recurring revenue already covers the salary, whatever the market is doing. And even the definition of a successful hire is shifting. The old three-to-five-year retention run has compressed badly; Kyrill puts today’s realistic expectation at closer to three to six months for junior roles, which quietly strengthens the freelance case, since a bench you rent cannot quit on you. None of them is wrong. They are optimizing for different businesses: a lean owner-operator shop, a culture-first regional firm, and a trainable in-house machine are three different machines with three different staffing answers.

Vetting the People, Either Way

Whichever model you run, the crew is only as good as your vetting, and the deepest playbook in the archive comes from Maddy O’Shaughnessy, an executive producer who has staffed commercial shoots across four continents. Her process, from vetting and managing talent, starts with word of mouth, but when that runs out she will find people through Google or Instagram and then put them through a real vetting call with job-specific questions: which camera and lenses, whether they have a drone operator if the shoot needs one, whether they can walk through a pre-production meeting. For directors on big jobs, nothing is awarded on a reel and a handshake; there is a full treatment and a line-by-line budget review first.

Two of her filters translate directly to small-studio hiring. First, a clean, familiar budget is a green flag, because production budgets look nearly identical worldwide, so someone who sends one you can read at a glance has done this before, the same fluency clients look for when they research how much a video costs. Second, a reel shows someone’s best work, not their consistency, so always ask for examples that match the job in front of you: a great narrative DP is not automatically a great corporate or green-screen DP, and a reel shot entirely outdoors can mean they never learned to light an interior. Her sharpest warning is about price: real day rates sit in a known range, and a bid at a fraction of that is a risk, not a bargain. Pat adds a screen of his own for the hard-to-test roles like producers and operations: a pre-interview question sent before anyone talks live. Most candidates skip it, which narrows the field fast, and the ones who answer reveal how they think before the interview starts. It is the same diligence clients are told to apply when choosing a video production company, pointed in the other direction.

Our Take

Lapse has been deliberately lean from day one: the two of us plus a trusted freelance crew we have built up over years. The chunk mindset made that work. Every project pays Kyrill, pays Dario, pays the freelancers, and leaves a chunk for the business, and as long as that holds, a small core with a great bench beats a payroll we would have to feed in January. We even ran the numbers on the version of growth everyone assumes comes first, a studio space, and realized it would have put us in the red. Pat’s line about preferring an employee over an office is exactly where we landed too.

Two honest caveats from our side of the table. First, presentation matters more than the org chart: we once lost a pitch because a leftover word from a government RFP, subcontractor, spooked a client into liability worries. The staffing model is your business; the client just needs to meet the team for their project. Second, lean has a real cost at the edges. When a trusted client comes back with a small ask, a half day of manufacturing footage for an internal video, an in-house team absorbs it profitably, while booking a DP at a full day rate for a two-hour shoot barely pencils out. We accept that trade because the freelance math wins the rest of the year, but it is a trade, not a free lunch. Our advice: stay freelance-first until the spend on one role makes the salary question ask itself, then hire slowly, one person at a time, and rerun the math every year.

The Playbook

The composite path through all eight perspectives:

  1. Start freelance and track your spend per role monthly. You cannot spot the tipping point without the number.
  2. Build the bench deliberately: word of mouth first, then a vetting call with job-specific questions about gear, budgeting, and process.
  3. Benchmark real day rates for your market and treat a bid far below them as risk, not savings.
  4. Test specialists against the actual job. Ask for reel work that matches the shoot in front of you, not just their best work.
  5. Watch for the tipping point: consistent recurring revenue that could carry a salary through a slow quarter, or freelance spend on one role approaching full-time cost.
  6. Hire one person at a time, on a three or six-month contract first, and confirm the business is still comfortable before the next hire.
  7. Present whoever is on set as the team for the client’s project. Keep the staffing model under the hood.
  8. Rerun the math every year, and give yourself permission to shrink back down if the payroll is costing you the business you actually wanted.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should a video production company hire employees or use freelancers?

Start with freelancers. They keep overhead low, flex to each job, and carry their own motivation because their reputation is on the line. Hire employees only when consistent, recurring work can support a salary through a slow stretch, and add one role at a time. Several successful companies in the CGC archive run entirely on contractor networks by choice.

When should you hire your first employee?

When one of two math signals fires: consistent, recurring client revenue could carry the salary even if a few months go quiet, or your freelance spend on a single role is approaching what a full-timer would cost. Trial the hire on a three or six-month contract before making it permanent.

Are full-time employees cheaper than freelancers?

Only at volume. A full-timer is cheaper per day than freelance day rates once you have enough steady work to keep them busy, and an in-house team can absorb small jobs a freelance model cannot price profitably. Below that volume, salaries become fixed overhead you pay in slow months, which is why most small studios stay freelance-first.

How do you vet a freelancer you have never worked with?

Word of mouth first, then a vetting call with job-specific questions: gear access, budgeting system, and how they run pre-production. Ask for past work that matches your specific job, since a reel only shows someone’s best moments, and be wary of quotes far below the going day rate. For bigger roles, a small paid test or a pre-interview question filters fast.

What does going in-house mean, and when is it worth it?

An in-house model staffs shoots and post with your own employees instead of per-project freelancers. It wins on margin, speed, training, and client collaboration, but only if you can keep work flowing every month, because payroll does not pause when the pipeline does. Expect your management processes to break each time headcount doubles, and plan for middle management past roughly ten people.

Source Episodes

Every perspective in this guide comes from an on-the-record conversation. Go deeper with the full episodes:

The Hosts

Dario Nouri and Kyrill Lazarov are the co-founders of Lapse Productions, a Toronto video production company, and the hosts of Creatives Grab Coffee, a weekly show about the business of video production.

About

Creatives Grab Coffee is a podcast about the business behind video production: sales, strategy, pricing, team building, and everything that happens off camera. New episodes every week on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Lapse Productions is a Toronto-based video production company serving tech, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing clients with corporate, promotional, event, and testimonial video. New to commissioning video? Start with our guide to the types of corporate video.