First of all, I took five of my colleagues with me to a big conference in San Diego, California towards the end of January. In truth, the conference was almost incidental, the real purpose for our trip was for us to clearly iterate, in considerable detail, our plans for the business for the rest of this year and it worked like a dream. (There is, in itself, a big lesson in there, i.e. getting yourself out of the day-today with the people that work with you is hugely useful in getting everybody on side and understanding where you’re going, what you want to achieve and how you can make it happen. You don’t, obviously, have to go to the west coast of America) but that’s what we did and we had a very detailed agenda for the trip.
Now, don’t underestimate the impact of me having people like Mark Creaser, Helen Sharkey, Tom Smith, Phil Wintermantle and Mike Thomas all focused 100% for six whole days on our business. Sure, we grabbed a few hours’ sleep every night, but apart from that, we were “on it” every single minute of the time. And the outcomes have been fantastic.
It all started on the flight over to LA.
(To be clear, we don’t all sit at the back of the plane so this isn’t a cheap trip) and we worked really hard for 9 of the 11 hours of the flight. The main piece that we cracked whilst in the air was to map out our Organisation Design – in other words, what people and roles will we need in order to support the very ambitious growth plans that we have for EC this year?
We went through every part of the business in detail, step-by-step.
Helen Sharkey took all the notes and, being the true accountant that she is (!) she logged everything into an Excel spreadsheet.
At the end of the day, what we knew was that we had identified 93 roles in the business that would be needed by the end of the summer, compared to only 48 staff that we had at that point.
This would bring a doubling of our salary bill, but I was very comfortable with the work that we’d done because of the rigour that had gone into producing it.
However, I wanted it as a picture. I’m a very visual person and whilst I knew all the information was on the spreadsheet, I wanted to see it laid out in front of me.
So, when we got to our hotel, I put a quick posting up on Elance (www.elance.com), it took me about five minutes and the job I posted was asking for someone to create a beautiful organisation chart with roughly 100 jobs on it taking the detail off an Excel spreadsheet.
Within half an hour, five people had already responded and, keen to get moving, I chose the guy that I thought was right for this. We agreed a price (it cost me $120 – that’s about £80!) and within four hours I had the most fantastic organisation chart sat in my inbox.
Now, most people would have taken it upon themselves to produce that chart – and there’s no way they’d have got it done in a morning whilst they were at a conference in California. But Elance allows you to do that and that’s why I want to flag it up with you again this month. Because not enough members are using smart outsourcing like this to get more stuff done and accelerate their progress.
Another example for you…
– we are planning to market our new Club + offering to accountants. We have more accountants in the Entrepreneurs’ Circle than any other business type and I’d really like to get 300 of them on the Club + package.
So, we had a little browse online and we find several websites that list all the details of accountants whether it’s those that are members of particular organisations or those that use particular products or offer certain services.
We go onto Elance and we find a lovely supplier, this time in the Philippines, who, for less than £25 (yes, that’s not a typo that is TWENTY FIVE POUNDS) and in less than 36 hours, is able to produce me a detailed Excel spreadsheet with all the details of the accountancy firms on there from their names, mailing addresses, email addresses, etc. Hey presto, we’ve acquired our very own database.
And for no money and hardly any effort.
[Warning: having a database like this is not the same as building your own list. Obviously, we have no relationship with that list, so we tread very carefully when first making contact. We test with just a small portion of it but one of the lists we’ve got has proved to be remarkably responsive with over 700 accountants (from just over 1,500 emails sent), opening our message and of those, almost half have “opted in” for the particular thing that we offered. It’s brought our cost per lead plummeting down to less than 2p each, which is extraordinary – another reason why you really should be doing this.]
So, if you’ve not used Elance before OR, if you haven’t used it recently, I want to urge you to go and spend a little bit of time on there this month because you will, for definite, have things going on in your business (or things that could be going on in your business!) that Elance can help you get done more quickly for hardly any cost.
It’s a brilliant, brilliant tool and I commend it to you.
