Get offshore leverage

Watching your team do $5/hr Tasks is like watching someone reshuffle deck chairs on the Titanic… painful.

Here is what we’ll cover this week:

1. Centralized Support for $5/hr Task vs. $500/hr Value Creation.
2. Virtual Assistants are hitting a soft spot and need for founders.
3. Iceberg ahead.  Speedboats that trim down expenses will win.

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Centralized Support Benchmark your $5/hr Task vs. $500/hr Value Creation

We have a customer that developed an effective way to look at calculating their offshore talent requirements.  

We have the Operating Leverage Benchmark that was purposely built for organization that know their specific roles/functions they want to benchmark:

• Social Media Manager
• Customer Support 
• Business Development Rep

This tool allows you to objectively map the opportunity cost of Replace, Replicate (offshore), etc. 

But there is another way…

Our customer centralized all of their existing employees Tasks into two categories:

$5/hr Tasks

vs. 

$500/hr Value Creation

Now the customer can calculate the total human capital impact to both:

• Relieve their team of these tasks
• Buy back their time

And clearly see the opportunity cost of freeing their team to work on more strategic initiatives.

By next week we’ll have a downloadable free resource for you on this.  Here is how you can mentally start the processing:

Step 1 – Map all the teammates by role/function you want to benchmark

Step 2 – Have each teammate separate all their Day-to-Day activities into two groupings – $5/hr Tasks vs. $500/hr Value Creation.

Step 3 – Calculate the monthly time associated with each $5/hr Task to estimate the number of full-time / fractional offshore teammates would be needed to tackle these initiatives.

As an example, you might conclude that you need 1 full-time and 1 part-time offshore teammate, and you will have exponentially changed the workload of your onshore team FOREVER!

Virtual Assistants are hitting a soft spot and need for founders

Last week I wrote an article about the importance of a Virtual Assistant (VA), specifically for Founder-led sales organizations.  This means that us founders are playing “hero-ball” with all the sales opportunities:

• Find the opportunity
• Pitch the opportunity
• Win the opportunity

Immediately after publishing that article, I got calls from 3-4 CEOs seeking Recruitment & Enablement on the topic.  What they have unpacked in their own businesses is that they are the Rainmakers, and they need more capacity to prospect/win opportunities – otherwise they are the bottleneck.

It’s interesting, I’ve come to appreciate that VA’s are part of the GTM team in SMB companies.  While their tasks/initiatives are operational in nature, they are a form of sales support by better managing your time.

Here are suggested $5/hr tasks that your future Virtual Assistant can manage for you:

1. Your email Inbox
2. Your calendar
3. Your travel schedule
4. Your internal communication messages
5. The collection of key reports (sales metrics, KPI’s, OKR’s)
6. Basic HR issues
7. AR collection
8. Market research

There are so many more.

Time to get your time back for sales.

Iceberg ahead.  Speedboats that trim down expenses will win

There is a famous business quote:

“In a sea storm, only speedboats and oceanliners survive.  All other boats are washed out of the sea”.

The parallel is that SMB companies are nimble like speedboats, and Enterprise companies are massive like oceanliners, but every other company that is saddled with weight is not fast enough to avoid the storm.

The storm is NOW.

In my company Pipeline Signals, I’m watching customer after customer wipes out their marketing and business development teams.  They created opportunities, but not in a cost-effective manner.  

They have bloat.  If they were boats, they are the cabin cruisers you see washed up on shore after a hurricane.

But you are a founder that wants to keep growing…

Stop chasing TOP LINE at all costs!  I was once addicted to the top line, and it almost sank my boat.

It’s actually the denominator that counts.

$1 saved in a 20% EBITA business is $5 less sales required.

$100,000 saved is $500,000 less revenue you need to chase.  That is a massive burden off your Go-To-Market team.

You can become lean and mean.

Offshore talent helps ensure your CAC:LTV and Payback Periods of your customers in months, not years.  Your Social Media Manager shouldn’t be $5,000/mo, and could be $500/mo offshore.  Your prospecting sales reps (BDR) is costing you $5,000/mo to send emails all day.  A highly trained seller in Bangladesh can do that for you for $500/mo.

Cut the fat.  Become a speedboat!

Don’t Forget – Benchmark your team against offshore talent.

Access it here.

• What is the profit increase you could expect?
• What is the sales relief/reprieve you could expect to generate the same profit?

Get ready to be shocked!