I cannot emphasize enough the importance of keeping your clients completely separated from your employees. Once you make the transition from freelancer to small business owner, you must understand that you're becoming a type of middle man. If your clients can contact your employees directly, or if your employees can contact your clients directly, you will be in a perilous position, and you could very well lose the business that you've worked hard to build.
For example, lets say that you're a computer programmer with a large client network, and you decide to hire an assistant programmer in order to increase your productivity and earnings. Somehow, your ambitious assistant manages to contact your client directly. Unbeknown to you, your assistant then cuts a back room deal with your client, selling their services for a fraction of the price you charge. Suddenly you find yourself with less jobs coming from this client, which has now become the client of your assistant.
What is the likelihood of this happening? I can tell you from my own experience that it can happen, because it has happened to me. One thing that you must understand about all human beings is that they are primarily driven by self interest, and when the opportunity arises for their self interests to be fulfilled, if it requires them to go behind your back in order to do so, they will. Regardless of whether or not you “think” your own employees or assistants will do this is irrelevant. As a self employed business owner who worked very hard to find your accounts, you must do everything possible to prevent them from becoming the accounts of your assistants, as this is counter productive to your goals.
There are a number of ways in which this can be achieved. The first is to never, under any circumstances, allow your clients to maintain any type of contact with your employees. Always act as the intermediary, and in fact, none of your employees should ever have access to the names, numbers, email addresses, or other contact details of your accounts. If the employee doesn't have the contact information of the account, it is impossible for them to contact them directly, which means that you don't have to worry about any back room deals being made at your expense. I personally consider this to be extreme and it could end up constricting growth rather than promoting growth.
The second technique that you can use to prevent your employees from having access to your clients is a technique that I will call “compartmentalization.” This technique is best used when working with a large team of employees on a complex project. With compartmentalization, your goal is to break the complex project down into parts which are more simple, and then split your team into compartments that work on the parts individually. Because each compartment is working on a part of the project, no one has access to the entire picture, which means they can only speculate as to the true nature of the project.
Compartmentalization is a wise strategy because if the entire project is concentrated in the hands of one team, it is possible that the team, or certain members of it, may be able to trace the project to the client who is paying for it, and can then contact them for further work at your expense.
Another danger that must be considered when dealing with virtual and physical employees is the issue of intellectual property rights. This is a hot topic that is likely to intensify in the future as the Internet continues to evolve as a tool for international business. As of this writing, the Internet is more or less like the Wild West; the rules regarding intellectual property rights among different jurisdictions are vague. Sure, if a company within the United States violates the copyright of another American based company, this company can sue them. But what happens when the copyright violators are living in China or the Philippines, where U.S. copyright laws hold less water?
For instance, lets say that you're the leader of a team of computer animators that do modeling and animation work. In this hypothetical scenario, lets say that most of your employees are virtual, and operate out of the Philippines. Your team is hired by an independent American company that is looking to create an animated movie. You outsource some of the work to your virtual team members in the Philippines, and despite the fact that you successfully complete the project, a year later, you find that the an illegal copy of the movie has been circulating over the web. Not only that, foreign websites are selling copies of the movie, a complete violation of U.S. copyright law.
Your client, who is furious that you would distribute the movie after they've paid you to work on it, fingers “you” as the culprit. Even though it is clear that your virtual team members in the Philippines distributed the film without the permission of you or your client, it is you who will now pay the price, by potentially being dragged into court by your client. These are the types of problems that I expect to see in the future as more small self employed individuals continue outsourcing projects overseas. When it comes to copyright laws, someone living in China has very little to worry about, at least when it comes to American copyright regulations.
The danger in hiring virtual team members is that doing so can put the project at risk. If they decide to distribute the product without your permission the consequences can be disastrous. There are only two ways around this problem, and they are to either break the projects into parts so that no side has access to too much information, or hire physical team members and make them sign a contract stating that they will be dragged into court if any part of the project they're working on is illegally distributed by them.
Regardless of which option you choose, this is an issue that must be taken very seriously, because the integrity of your business is at risk. The last thing you need is for your growing company to suffer a blow to your reputation because your employees decide to use copyrighted materials for their financial gain. Equally worse is being subjected to a multi-million dollar lawsuit.