Category: Outsourcing

Staff absence

Studies have shown that staff absences from sickness or holidays can be very expensive for businesses.

The cost of annual leave

Under UK laws, full time staff are entitled to annual leave of 28 working days. This is more than 1 month!

If we take an example of an employee on £25,000 pa and they are only in the office for approximately 11 months of the year. This lost month will cost a business £2,276 (at 2017 tax rates) in wasted wages.

Moreover, the business may need to hire temporary staff, contractors or pay overtime at a higher rate.

There will also be disruption to the business and temporary replacements may not know how to deal with regular customers or issues.

Sickness

Statutory sickness pay only has to be paid after 3 days of continuous sickness, however many businesses will have more generous sick pay policies.

Again, businesses are paying for lost worker hours.

There could also be urgent problems or deadlines that can’t be dealt with until the worker gets back.

What can be done?

We do believe that staff absence should receive annual leave and sickness pay, but why should your business pay for this in an inefficient manner and suffer disruption?

At MAH, we use teams of people to process your tasks and to get things done. This means that if one of our team will be absent for holidays or sickness, we’ll always have cover ready. This means your business will continue to run smoothly, without disruption and without paying for lost hours.

The robot apocalypse

Robot workers and AI… read the papers or turn on the news and its all doom and gloom for the masses.

Perhaps one day a robot will be able to smile, converse, think and empathise in a way that makes it indistinguishable from a human.

The robot apocalypse is coming, but rather than firing nukes Skynet will be firing staff. Or rather the wealthy elites will be doing the firing, as they’ll be the robot masters.

But what about small and medium businesses?

Well, if a hard working entrepreneur can afford the latest in robots and AI tech, then great. Mega profits lie ahead. The reality, however, is that a small number of large businesses will develop or acquire the latest and best technology and use it to improve their services and drive down prices. They won’t licence the tech and SMEs won’t have the resources or know how to develop their own. The large businesses will be able to expand into new markets, niches and segments at will due to the low costs from their new tech. They will then beat SMEs at their own game and drive them out of their business.

Sounds far fetched?

When the likes of Uber automate their cars, how will independent minicab companies compete?

When KPMG or Xero refine their tech and improve it such that they can offer prices at the same rate as the high street, why would businesses choose smaller accounting firms?

The robot apocalypse won’t just put workers out of jobs, it’ll put many SMEs out of business. But, there’s always a but. Businesses that focus on a level of service that is hard to replace with machines can still prosper, and will be able to offer something that the large businesses can’t.

For example, a personal service and a smile could go a long way. In the near future, advice that relies on instinct and experience and not just an algorithm will also be a winning formula. But in the long term, as machines get more and more data they’ll be able to analyse more and more complex situations and to use their “judgement”.

What can be done

SMEs need to take action now to break down their business into a set of distinct processes and figure out can be replaced by robots or AI in the future. Then focus on the areas that will be hardest to replace, the core features and benefits that will give them the best chance of survival.

The processes that are at threat can then be delegated or outsourced, freeing up the core workers to do what they do best.

Then, when the future arrives and the robots or AI tech is unattainable or prohibitively expensive, SMEs will stand a chance, not just to survive, but also to thrive.

Tech startup outsourcing for operations/admin

Tech startups will invariably have some processes which are not fully automated and require human input at some stage or another. This is where the operations/admin team comes in, especially for pre Series A startups where staff are multifunctional and systems are not yet fully developed. A few examples may include:

• completing orders
• dealing with suppliers and supply chain management
• onboarding, customer support and resolving issues
• analysing data and looking for ways to improving efficiency
• streamlining processes
• fire fighting and fixing a million and one problems affecting the business

The key to operations is that they keep the business going whilst also helping it to grow and get better at delivering their products and services.

The benefits of moving fast

The best lean startups move very fast to beat rivals to corner new markets ripe for disruption.

As soon as they have an MVP platform or app they’ll launch.

But they’re not always fully ready, there’s always a toss up between developing further and adding new features and the delays that this causes.

So what many tech startups have done is to use manual input from human staff as a stopgap solution to perform operations whilst their developers work on algorithms and automating processes.

For example, a well known receipt scanning app used to say “processing” for many hours until an invoice was analysed and coded for accounting purposes. Did their servers really need 5 hours to analyse a simple pdf? No, what they were doing was to use human staff in the background.

They did eventually develop an automated system to do the analysis much quicker. But by launching early they were able to gain traction and test the market. Once they were ready to launch properly they already had a loyal customer base and were able to grow bigger with a marketing push and lower prices due to lower costs.

If they’d waited until their automated process was fully ready they would have missed the boat and a rival would have led the market.

But as a tech startup outsourcing operations they were able to become market leaders.

Lean startups and outsourcing

Tech startups can minimise cash burn and maximise staff effectiveness by hiring a high calibre operations manager or COO inhouse to focus on strategy and heading up operations and then outsource to us.

If manual processes can be somewhat standardised or turned into a process, ie “if X happens, do Y” then much of the work can then be outsourced to an operations team.

Hiring staff in the UK will cost at least £20,000-£30,000 annually per staff member and they’ll also require time off for holidays and sickness.

Outsourcing can slash the cost to something like £9,000 and startups could hire a whole team of 3 for the price of 1 inhouse staff. This also means they don’t have to worry about holidays or sickness.

How can we help?

We are already doing this for several tech and fintech startups using our high calibre team in Bangladesh and have a waiting list of staff who want to join us because they’ve heard about how great our office is.

We can take over any manual, back office or operations processes and help you to launch quicker, save money and focus on growing the business.

Click here for more details about how our tech startup outsourcing works.

 

LeanStaff can save you £10-20k per employee by using the power of the internet to work remotely.