If you’re hiring help for your business, the natural instinct is to look for low-cost services to save money.
And I get it. Paying someone $15/hr. sounds a heck of a lot better than paying $25, $30, or $50 an hour.
But is it?
And with all the big corporations outsourcing their customer support and other operations to other lower-cost countries, it seems this tendency might be what makes business sense.
Here’s the thing…
You aren’t a big corporation with hundreds of employees.
You are likely or want to be a solo entrepreneur or partner with a handful of people that work with you on a daily basis. Where a big corporation’s large staff is often disposable, yours is not…so why hire and treat people like they are disposable?
It costs time and money to find new people, train them and all the while, your business suffers. When someone quits on you it leaves a much bigger mark on your business than if someone quits the 250-(wo)man customer service department for a large company.
See what I’m getting at?
Besides that, in our small operations, it’s not what we pay that matters that much…
What matters are the RESULTS from the work we outsource and sometimes those results take time to grow.
When you first hire someone, there is a learning curve for both of you. You need to learn how to communicate exactly what you want, they need to learn the job and they will have a plenty of questions.
As you continue to work together, your communication improves, their skills improve and they have the built-in knowledge to handle previously unknown situations accordingly.
To get that continued work, you need loyalty from your contractors. And how do you get loyalty? By treating them right. And a couple of ways you can treat your contractors right:
– Pay them well enough so they don’t have to take on all kinds of extra work to make ends meet.
– Give them regular raises to show that the experience and resulting improved work for your company is appreciated and valued.
I’ve been working with most of my team members for years now and when I look at our how our business relationship has grown, I’m amazed and know just how blessed I am.
Communication is a snap because we have this history – my team understands me and they know how I work. They knows my business well enough to make their own qualified decisions and make suggestions for improvements. I couldn’t get this if I was hiring assistant after assistant at $10 per hour.
So, do what you’d like with your outsourcing. Keep pinching pennies to keep your costs down…but realize that keeping costs down may be affecting your profitability and your sanity!
