Independent contractors have long been a part of the AV industry. We depend on this talented group of technicians for big projects, projects requiring specialized skill sets, and to help when we’re short staffed on a big project. While these folks enable AV companies to operate with maximum flexibility, ensuring contractors on your projects are contracted properly and  properly insured with Worker’s Compensation can be time-consuming and often confusing. But if the contract & insurance are not set up properly, it could place your company at serious risk.

Tasks such as locating the right type of experienced attorney to develop contracts, ensuring proper insurances are in order, managing tax paperwork, and coordinating payouts are among the many administrative burdens we must get through to work with contractors -- but when we have so many other to-dos, tacking on these additional tasks can quickly overwhelm our schedules.

Rather than putting on yet another hat, many AV schedulers look to contractor management services to alleviate the administrative tasks and legal issues that arise when working with independent contractors.  

Here are just a few of the ways working with an all-in-one contractor management service to manage your independent contractors can lighten your administrative workload, and save you legal headaches.

Proper contracts reduce legal risks

Contracts are drawn up to iron out the details of each party’s (yours and the independent contractor’s) responsibilities and liabilities when entering into a project. While it may seem easier to use generic contracts or cheaper to hire a general practice attorney to develop these agreements, going either of these routes can leave significant gaps in ensuring the contract is properly crafted. Working with AV contractors requires specific clauses and agreements that your generic contract or general practice attorney may not know to include.

Drafting well-developed contracts for working with AV contractors takes a high level of experience and expertise specifically in the audio visual industry. By utilizing a contract development service that relies on specialized knowledge of the AV industry to develop contracts, you can eliminate legal risks and rest easy knowing that every angle of your AV company-AV contractor relationship has been covered.

Reduce insurance liability

Verifying independent contractor insurance means checking off a lot of boxes.

Before a contractor can begin working with your team on an AV project, they should be properly and presently insured with general liability and workers comp insurance — and those levels of coverage need to be at the level that is required by the venues that you’re working in. If your venue requires 1 million in general liability and 1 million in worker’s comp, as an independent contractor those are the levels of coverage that your contractors need to have for those projects, working in those facilities, working for your company.

If just one of these boxes are skipped or left unchecked and something happens to your freelancer on-site, your insurance is not going to cover them and you may be held liable for their injuries.

No one ever said lining up and verifying insurances was easy. But you can ensure all of these boxes are checked off and verified in less time and with certainty by partnering with a trusted, skilled, and reliable contractor management services that is specialized in servicing only the AV industry.

Streamline your payment process

You could say working with full-timers is “easy” -- you know exactly when and how to pay them, you know where to find their time sheets, and they know exactly when and how they will be paid.

This isn’t always the case with independent contractors, whom you have to pay separately, mail payments and tax information to, and who send you their hours at different times throughout and after the project has ended.

Instead of juggling all of these payment processes, a contractor management service, like Mertzcrew, can facilitate payments to your independent contractors so you don’t have to. You can even get instantly generated invoices from contractors by incorporating your AV crew management process into Mertzcrew’s easy to use online crew management system if you want to further reduce your administrative tasks.

Make the entire independent contractor relationship a breeze

Managing contractors effectively is vital to seeing a project through to a successful completion but many AV schedulers can have up to 20 projects at once -- leaving little time to properly attend to the contractor onboarding process and the tasks that go along with it.

When it boils down to it, finding ways to maximize your time has a huge impact on the projects you manage and can save your company money.

Bringing on a contractor management service, like Mertzcrew allows you to outsource tasks like insurance, contracts, and payments to a specialized partner who is skilled and knowledgeable when it comes to the unique ins and outs of the AV industry and working with AV contractors.

Mertzcrew Contractor fits seamlessly into your crew management process, simply by taking all independent contractor management tasks out of your hands so you can focus on the rest of your crew scheduling and management responsibilities and complete your project without a hitch.

To reduce your crew management tasks even more -- from independent contractors to full-timers and beyond -- schedule a free, live software demo to learn how you can schedule, track, and gain instant reporting insights on your AV crews by utilizing Mertzcrew’s all-in-one AV crew management system, designed specifically for AV companies.