How Modern Climate Kept the Same Mexico Team for 4+ Years

The company

Modern Climate is a Minneapolis marketing agency.

The problem this engagement solves

Agency production capacity has an awkward shape. The work is continuous enough that project-by-project freelancers mean re-explaining the brand, the codebase and the standard every engagement, and specialized enough that a generalist will not do. It also goes out under the agency's own name, to the agency's own clients, which sets a floor on quality that the cheapest answer does not clear.

What that shape needs is a small number of specific people who stay.

What CodersLink did

Modern Climate engaged CodersLink for Staff Augmentation: three senior professionals, vetted to the Top 1% Standard, working inside the agency's own production process on a per-professional contract.

The scope was defined as three named roles rather than a headcount: a QA engineer, a front-end developer and a UI/UX designer. Sourcing ran from CodersLink's warm community pipeline and every profile went through five-layer vetting against a 75-point gate, with Modern Climate interviewing and deciding on each role itself.

Results

Roles supported

QA Engineer · Front End Developer · UI/UX Designer

In the client's words

"Thanks to CodersLink's work, we've saved money. Their developers are amazing and very efficient — Their work exceeds expectations."

Kris Fitzpatrick, President, Modern Climate

Can a small team use staff augmentation, or is it only for scale?

It works at three people, and the shape of the engagement changes when it is that small. A three-person embedded team has no bench and no rotation. There is nowhere to average out a weak hire, and each of the three is individually visible in a way a member of a twenty-person pod is not.

That makes a small engagement harder to get right than a large one, not easier. It is the reason we scope three roles as three named roles with their own criteria rather than as a block of capacity.

How every CodersLink Staff Augmentation engagement works

The same terms apply to this engagement and to every other.

• Who holds the contract. CodersLink holds the engineer's contract in Mexico, and the classification decision is ours to make and ours to carry.
• Who directs the work. The client. The client sets priorities and accepts the work; the engineer works to the client's roadmap and delivery standards.
• Who owns the output. Everything the engineer creates for the client's project is assigned to the client by present assignment, worldwide and perpetual, signed inside the engineer's service agreement before day one. Every engineer signs an NDA before starting.
• Vetting. Five layers against a 75-point gate (communication, soft skills, a live technical screen, background verification and references), applied the same way every time. Verification and references are completed and archived before contract signing, and the findings are shared with the client.
• Hours. 7–8 hours of daily overlap with US business hours.
• Replacements. Unlimited, free, for the life of the engagement: no cap, no tenure window, no fee. Sourcing restarts within one business day of your request, and three vetted profiles reach you within five business days for a standard role. We would rather tell you how it runs than let "unlimited" imply "instant."
• Pricing. A fixed monthly rate per engineer. We show you what sits inside that rate before you sign, and we never take a cut of the engineer's pay.

Need three specific people rather than a team? Book a call. We will scope the roles individually and tell you which are standard and which are scarce before there is a contract.