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Jeremy Zick | 9 July 2026
When an architect calls me about adding remote talent to their team, the first question is almost always about the cost per hour. I understand the instinct completely. When you run a small firm, every dollar has a job to do, and an hourly rate is an easy thing to compare.
It is also the absolute wrong number to lead with.
One of the clearest examples of why comes from Tim Derrington, who runs Derrington Building Studio in Austin. Tim has hired three remote people at different experience levels, and he framed the lesson perfectly: Cost is what everyone worries about, but the real concern should be time.
Let me help explain what that means. Tim’s first remote hire was a young designer a couple of years into his career. Ambitious, self-motivated, and genuinely talented. Basically everything you want in a new hire. But Tim soon discovered that every couple of hours he would hit a wall, because that is what happens when someone does not yet have the experience to know what they do not know.
None of it was the new hire’s fault. But it meant Tim, or one of his senior architects, had to constantly stop their own work and pull him through. While the hourly rate looked cheap, the true cost, once you added up all that training and oversight, was not cheap at all. In Tim’s own accounting, which included the not insignificant expense of his time, it actually cost more.
Then Tim brought on another architect who had already worked in the industry for about seven years. He quickly discovered that unlike the cheaper but less experienced first hire, he could hand this second hire a genuinely complex task and she would run with it. While it wouldn’t always come back finished to the last detail, it would come back close, and any remaining work was covered in a tight, organized list of questions he could clear in a single sitting.
The minimal oversight and high accuracy, in Tim’s words, easily paid for itself.
The reason this matters so much for small firms is that your most expensive resource is not the person you are paying. It is you, and the senior people you have already trained. Every hour a principal spends unsticking a junior hire is an hour not spent on business development, client relationships, and the work that only you and they can do.
When you price a hire purely on their rate, you are quietly leaving that cost off the spreadsheet. Trust me when I say it does eventually show up, often in the form of your own exhaustion.
Tim shared something else worth repeating. While the math made perfect intellectual sense to him, it was the emotional fear of committing to the higher rate that initially held him back. That fear is real, and nearly every firm owner I talk to has it currently or has had it before. It is also, more often than not, the fear of the wrong thing.
None of this means you should only hire senior people. An emerging talent can be exactly the right call when the work is well defined and there is a strong senior person to manage them. The mistake is not hiring someone junior, it’s hiring for a rate instead of for a task.
This is why at WeCollabify we do not start our first conversation by quoting you the cheapest professional available. We grade talent by experience, from emerging through three levels of seniority. We then work backwards from what you are actually trying to get done to make sure you hire the right person.
Sometimes the honest answer is that you need production support at the emerging level that does come at a fairly low rate. Other times we’ll recommend a more experienced architect who will cost more per hour but cost you far less overall as shown in Tim’s example.
And that fear of committing to a higher rate is something you don’t need to fear at all. We always try to create a successful environment where your new hire becomes an important long-term member of your team, but we also know business needs change and so we don’t require long-term contracts. If things change, we work with you to figure out the best way forward.
So before you ask what someone costs, ask a better question: What is your time worth right now, and what will the task actually demand? Don’t let the rate get in the way of the most important driver of ROI, which is the quality of the work and the bottom line results.
The payoff will be worth it.
Jeremy Zick is the founder and CEO of WeCollabify, a global talent integration partner dedicated to transforming architectural and engineering practices. With over a decade of experience managing international teams and integrating global talent, Jeremy has become a leading voice in the industry.
Jeremy’s passion for innovation and efficiency led him to establish WeCollabify, with the mission to empower firms to leverage global resources for enhanced project execution and competitive edge. When he’s not driving industry change, Jeremy enjoys exploring new cultures and finding creative solutions to complex business challenges.