Companies rarely look for an AutoCAD technical drafter because they have time on their hands. The reason is almost always lead time: a set has to be finished, the drawing office is full and the schedule has no room left to shift. Our team is ready to go, so there is no recruitment process and no onboarding period in between.
With our large, variable team, we scale with each project: one drafter for a small assignment and, at a peak, as many people as the project needs.
If it is urgent, we add people straight away instead of first finalising a schedule. We can start as soon as we have enough information, meaning as soon as the existing drawings, the changes and the drawing conventions are with us. We respond to a new enquiry within 1 to 2 working days. The work is done entirely remotely from our own office, on our own licences. You are welcome to visit, but the work itself requires no workstation and no access to your systems.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
When it pays to outsource to an AutoCAD technical drafter
Outsourcing is not always the answer, and we would rather say so up front than halfway through. Work that is closely tied to knowledge that only exists within your company is better kept with your own drafting team. Think of a design that is still changing every day, where the drafter sits at the table with the people coming up with it. Engineering is also ruled out, because we draft and model and do not run calculations. Where outsourcing does pay off is the high-volume, repetitive part of the drawing office. A revision round across a stack of existing DWG sheets is a textbook example.
The content is known, the tasks are clear and the work mainly takes hours, exactly the hours your own team needs for the ongoing project. The same applies to a set that has grown along with an installation and in which the latest changes were never processed properly. A third category is the peak that is not structural. If you take on a permanent drafter for three months of work, you are left afterwards with staff who have no assignment.
Outsourcing solves that without any change to your headcount. If someone is ill or on holiday, we also replace them, so the peak does not end up being left undone after all. A final consideration is what your own team does with the time freed up. If that time goes into the work where your margin lies, outsourced drafting is essentially a shift of hours to where they deliver the most. We discuss that trade-off in the first conversation, and we also tell you when we think part of the work is better kept in-house.
The cost side of hiring an AutoCAD drafter
The cost of outsourced drafting arises in one of two ways: by the hour or per project at a fixed price. Both forms are possible, and we decide together which suits best based on the documents you supply. For hourly work, a strict principle applies. We only charge for actual working hours, meaning time genuinely spent working on the set. If someone spends five minutes at the coffee machine, the meter does not keep running.
A fixed project price is a better fit once the scope can be assessed in advance, for example with a clearly defined series of sheets that only need updating. What keeps costs down in both forms is the quality of the input. Complete information, a clear drafting manual and files we can open without any detours save hours straight away. Work with a lot of repetition is cheaper per drawing than a collection of separate one-off tasks, because the set-up only has to be done once. The number of correction rounds plays a part too, and that is exactly why we deliver in batches.
In addition, a cost item disappears that always comes with an in-house drafter. There are no ongoing salary costs, no costs for workstations and licences, and no paid hours in a period without work. If someone is ill or on holiday, we replace them, so you never pay for downtime. We deliberately do not work with prepaid hour bundles or a monthly hours subscription, because that commits you to hours you may not need. What makes an estimate realistic is a look at the existing set before a single sheet is drawn.
No ongoing payroll costs and no idle staff once the peak is over. If one of our people is off sick or on holiday, we replace them and the work simply carries on.
Clients looking for an AutoCAD technical drafter
Our client base consists of engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, and more broadly of businesses with technical drafting work. Around the table are managers, team leaders and owners, in other words people responsible for a schedule rather than for a single drawing. The problem they bring to us is remarkably consistent. There is too little drafting capacity for the amount of work coming in, and it pinches at exactly the moment another assignment arrives that cannot be turned down. At a manufacturer, it is often product documentation that lags behind reality. At a contractor, it is as-built material that still has to be processed at the end of a project. At an engineering firm, it is a set that needs drawing up while their own people are already working on the next project.
In greenhouse construction, a specific pattern recurs. A lot of work there is done in AutoCAD, and piping diagrams involve a lot of repetitive manual work. A valve in 90 and in 110 is drawn by hand again and again, even though it is in fact the same component in a different size. Work like that piles up in the hours without anyone naming it as a problem. We do see it, because we work with that type of set every day. So the question these clients ask is rarely about drafting technique and almost always about capacity, pace and hitting a deadline. That is why we do not start with drafting tips, but with the question of which part of the work can be handed over fastest.
From first conversation to batch delivery
A project starts with a conversation in which we go through the project. Barry, our project manager, is usually the first point of contact, after which Sam, our team leader, takes over the technical side. That gives you a fixed point of contact, so you do not have to work out who to ask which question. In that conversation, we discuss the scope, the preferred sequence and the deadline.
You then supply the details, usually together with existing drawings that need revising. At the same time, we ask for the template and the drawing conventions, because we work to them.
As soon as that is in, we can start. We then deliver in batches rather than only at the end. A first batch goes to you early, you review it and give feedback, we process it and move on to the next part. That way, a different preference in layer structure or dimensioning comes to light at ten sheets instead of a hundred. We match the rhythm of contact to the pressure on the project. With a tight schedule we speak every two days, with a calmer project weekly.
Contact runs via email, phone and meetings, and on larger projects we work with software that you can log into to follow progress. For one-off AutoCAD drafting work, we deliver by email. Before a set leaves the building, it has been through at least three review layers, so that you do not have to act as the first line of review yourself.
Frequently asked questions about hiring an AutoCAD technical drafter
Hand your AutoCAD drafting over to us
Send us your documents and drawing conventions and we will let you know within one to two working days what we can take on and when.