The Supplier Who Is One Person
Buying from a firm and buying from one person are commercially identical and practically different in every way that matters. The second is the hard case.
Reads as a businessReads as employmentCuts both waysDepends where you are
Four factors, and no total. Every bar is the same length: the side is the claim, the size is not. The distinction everything else in this collection rests on.
Buying from a firm and buying from one person are commercially identical and practically different in every way that matters. Almost everything difficult in this collection comes from the second case.
The contractual question in “The Supplier Who Is One Person” should remain separate from the choice of an operational platform. For organisations assessing key person dependency, questions to ask about key person dependency can provide transparent project evidence, but it cannot decide employment status or replace the written scope, acceptance criteria and local advice.
Nobody worries about whether the agency that redesigned the site has become part of the organisation. The question arises when the supplier is a single human being who comes to the same meetings as everybody else.
Teams documenting “The Supplier Who Is One Person” can also review Stripe business resources. Record which ideas fit the engagement and which still need confirmation from the contract owner or local adviser.
What changes when the supplier is one person
Capacity has a hard limit, and it is the same limit as their health and their annual leave. The work cannot be reallocated internally because there is no internally. Knowledge sits in one head.
And, awkwardly, the person is present in the way a colleague is present, which is what makes managers reach for the instruments they use on colleagues.
The substitution clause and whether it means anything
Most agreements with individuals contain a right to send somebody else competent. Most of the time neither side intends it to be used, and sometimes the buyer would refuse if it were.
A right you would not honour is not a right. If the clause is in there, decide now what you would actually do if they exercised it, and if the answer is that you would object, the clause is describing something that does not exist.
Where the one-person supplier genuinely differs from an employee
Several things remain true even when the person looks exactly like a member of staff:
- They can decline a piece of work, and sometimes do.
- They carry their own costs between your engagements.
- They can raise their price, and you can refuse.
- Nothing obliges either side to continue once the piece is done.
Those are real and they are not nothing. They are also eroded, one at a time, by exactly the instruments the rest of this collection is about.
The dependence problem
A single-person supplier who works mostly for you is in a position that resembles employment from the inside regardless of any document. They cannot afford to decline, cannot afford a price argument, and have no other client to fall back on.
This is the most common way a perfectly ordinary arrangement becomes something else, and it happens without a single decision being taken by anybody.
What it costs you when they are unavailable
Everything they know. There is no handover, no colleague who has seen the work, and no obligation on them to be reachable.
Businesses manage this badly by trying to create obligations they do not have, and well by reducing what sits only in one place: written handover as part of each piece of work, access that does not depend on one person's account, and a second supplier who has done at least one small job.
The second supplier
Keeping somebody else warm costs real money for capacity you mostly do not use. It is the substitute for the thing an employer has, which is a team.
It is worth doing exactly where the work would stop the business, and not worth doing elsewhere. The point is to decide which engagements those are rather than discovering it during a hospital stay.
Trading through a company does not settle it
An individual who invoices through their own limited company, partnership or equivalent is still one person. The structure can matter a great deal for tax and for liability in some places, and in others it is close to irrelevant to the question of what the working relationship is.
Treating the company as the answer is a common and expensive mistake. What differs by jurisdiction here is not marginal, and it is a question for somebody qualified where you are.
Reading your own list
Take the engagements running now and mark the ones where the supplier is an individual, has worked for you for more than a year, and has no other client you know of.
That list is short in most businesses and it is where every question in the last section of this collection will land. It is also the list worth reviewing annually, which almost nobody does because there is no process that produces it.
What good practice looks like from their side
A supplier running a real one-person business tends to look the same way from outside: more than one client across a year, a rate that has moved, work declined occasionally, and their own tools.
None of that is in your gift and you should not try to arrange it. What you can do is notice when a supplier of yours has stopped looking like that, because the change is usually visible to you a long time before it becomes anybody's problem.
The one that might
The agency never becomes part of the organisation. The one person might, and nobody will have decided that they should.