The arithmetic of a peak you can't hire for

Why hiring rarely fits a known window

A permanent hire for a six-month peak has to clear three hurdles and usually fails the first.

The search takes two to four months for anyone decent. Ramp-up takes another one to three. On a six-month window you're left with weeks of useful output, and a permanent employee at the end of it.

There are cases where it works: the peak is a symptom of growth that's going to continue, or you were going to hire anyway and the peak brought the timing forward. Both are worth checking for honestly before ruling hiring out, because a peak that repeats every year isn't a peak, it's understaffing.

The two routes that do fit

Individual contractors. Lowest day rate. Available quickly. You can hire exactly the skill you need.

The cost that doesn't appear on the invoice is management. Someone on your side scopes their work, reviews it, unblocks them, and covers when they're unavailable. For one contractor that's tolerable. For three it's most of a senior person's week, and that senior person was already the constraint.

The second cost is continuity. A contractor who takes a better offer mid-project leaves with the context, and there's no obligation on anyone to have written it down.

A subcontracted team. Higher day rate. Slower to arrange, though not much. Manages itself, covers its own absence, and has a contractual obligation to leave documentation behind.

The cost is the premium and less control over who specifically does the work.

The number that decides it

Not day rate. Senior hours consumed per week on your side.

Work out roughly how many hours of your own senior people the arrangement will take: scoping, reviewing, answering questions, covering gaps. Multiply by their fully-loaded hourly cost. Add it to the contractor day rate.

Two contractors needing eight senior hours a week between them are frequently more expensive than a managed team at a higher rate, and the difference lands on the person you could least afford to occupy.

The second question is what happens if somebody disappears. With one contractor, the answer is usually that the work stops. With a team that has a two-person rule, it doesn't. Whether that matters depends on whether the deadline is real.

What to insist on either way

Documentation as part of the work, not a phase at the end. End-of-project phases get cut when the timeline compresses, which is exactly when you most need them.

Access and credentials in your names from day one. Not the contractor's account with your project inside it.

A defined end. The arrangement should stop without a conversation. If it needs renegotiating to end, it isn't a peak arrangement, it's a rolling contract that nobody decided to sign.

The honest case for a single contractor

If you need one skill, for a bounded piece of work, and you have a senior person with spare capacity to direct them, an individual contractor is cheaper and simpler and you should use one.

The case for a team is specifically when you don't have that senior capacity, when the deadline can't absorb somebody being ill, or when what's left behind matters as much as what's delivered.