What a project manager actually costs you
I want to be careful here, because good project managers exist and I’ve worked with some. This isn’t about them being bad at their jobs. It’s about what the role costs you when you’re a small business buying a website, and why that cost never appears as a line item.
The money
Start with the obvious part. Someone whose full-time job is coordinating your project is being paid, and that salary comes out of the same pot your invoice goes into. Industry-standard project management overhead sits somewhere around ten to fifteen per cent of a build. You won’t see it broken out — it’s baked into the day rate of everyone you do see.
For a large build with six people who genuinely need coordinating, that’s fair value. For a five-page site for a plumbing business, you’re paying a coordination premium on a project that has nothing to coordinate.
The time
This is the cost people underestimate. Every question I’d answer in ninety seconds becomes an email to the PM, a note in a ticket, a wait, a reply that half-answers it, and a follow-up. Something that should take two minutes takes two days.
It’s not incompetence, it’s structure. The PM is protecting the developers’ focus, which is the whole point of the role. But you’re the one absorbing the latency.
The translation loss
Here’s the one that actually hurts. You say:
We need people to be able to find us — most of our customers ring rather than fill anything in.
That reaches the developer as “add click-to-call button to header.” Technically a correct summary. But what you meant was that your phone number should be the most prominent thing on the site, that the contact form is almost decorative, and that if someone’s on a phone they should be one thumb-tap from calling you. None of that survived the summary, because summarizing is lossy and the person doing it wasn’t in the room when you explained your business.
So the first draft comes back with a small button in the header, and you say it’s not quite right, and nobody can work out why, and you burn a revision round getting back to what you said in the first place.
When you do want the middle layer
I’m not claiming this is universal. If your project has multiple stakeholders who disagree with each other, a compliance review, three integrations and a hard launch date tied to a trade show — you want a project manager. That’s a real coordination problem and coordination is a real skill.
- Multiple teams or vendors who need sequencing — get a PM.
- A single decision-maker and one builder — the PM is pure overhead.
- Regulated or contractual delivery milestones — get a PM.
- A small business that wants a good website — talk to the builder.
What I do instead
You get my email address and my calendar. You tell me things once, in your own words, and the person who hears them is the person who types. When something’s unclear I ask you directly rather than guessing, because I’m allowed to — there’s nobody in between whose job it is to protect my focus.
That only works because I keep the number of live projects small. That part I wrote about separately.