Unfortunately, MercuryMinds has completely stopped working with the partners (freelancers, middlemen and agencies) by the end of 2012. We have been working through some freelancers and agencies for the past five years, to get projects from them. Because of some below listed issues we have stopped working with partners completely. One of our biggest and toughest decision in the current economic scenario where our major chunk of revenue is coming from!
NDA and Data Security:
NDA (Non-Disclosure agreement) is one of the major reasons why we stopped working with partners. The real client is getting signed with two NDA’s without his knowledge, which means that one from the freelancers or agencies and another from MercuryMinds. Because of this MercuryMinds is supposed to get agreed with both NDA’s to best suit the client’s requirement.
Data Security is one prior thing which has to be adopted by the developers and others who are working on the client’s project. MercuryMinds has faced various difficulties in maintaining Data Security when working on the agencies and freelancers project, especially Data security is highly important in E-Commerce industry.
Different delivery model & Bad Morale
We have defined our work culture in MercuryMinds to concentrate highly on the quality of the delivery. Every middlemen/agency/freelancer has their own way of working style & delivery model. Adapting to everyone becomes highly impossible and results in bad morale. We don’t want our team to be burnt to do the work faster, which ends up in a low quality output.
Delivery
So many agencies win work first and then try to resource later. We face this problem regularly as we are brought into projects at the last minute and are forced to lie about their status as a developer. Many times, we end up having to proceed with the projects ourselves with little or no support from paymasters. Even though the work is done by senior people, clients are ended up getting none of the benefits. In many cases web design consultancies act little more than employment agencies, hiring people cheaply and simply slapping a margin on their day rate.
At this moment we want to thank the agencies and freelancing partners who gave us business so far. At the same time, MercuryMinds wants to notify that we never outsource our client projects to any Freelancers or other ecommerce design and development companies. We always do the work in-house and always ensure the best quality of work. MercuryMinds always love to drive our staff to do better things. We need to share our views directly with the clients and not to anyone else. So we don’t have any other option other than quitting with the agencies. Still we are open to work with consultants/agencies at rare situations where agencies/consultants who allows us to coordinate and work directly with the client.