In this blog, we’ve already written a few posts about the merits of outsourcing – after all, SEO Pencil is a firm that has been built entirely on work outsourced from medium and large SEO Consultants from around the world! If you are not sure about how outsourcing works in SEO, you can read this post here – http://seopencil.com/blog/?p=17
After we wrote that post, there have been a lot of comments that came our way, and one of them is the root for this article. There was an SEO Consultant who mentioned that as a consultant’s business grows, it probably makes sense to shift onto a model where he works with employees and not outsource his business. While there is merit in the thought, when it is converted into language we all understand – of economics – it really does not add up.
Consider this – even if you are in a low-wage country like India or China, starting an office will cost you money – buying computers, getting the infrastructure ready, training your staff, working out the overheads, and so on. Even if you consider that as a one-time investment, till you have a lot of business flowing through the team you have put in place, the costs will remain high. It is all a volume game as you know. If you have a capacity of 100 articles per day and if you only have 50 article orders coming in each day, your cost is double – really basic common sense, right?
While most people only look at the convenience of outsourcing an entire business process to a company like SEO Pencil, what they usually overlook is the intangible benefit of saving huge $$$ on costs, as irrespective of volume, you pay the company a flat fee. A classic example here would be that of a hotel ordering food raw materials and semi-processed stuff from a vendor on a rate contract. While it would seem a better idea to have their own farms and processing units, hardly any hotel does that! They are not farmers or processing professionals – they are hoteliers and that is what they should focus on. Similarly, you are good at sales, and starting a team to handle your SEO work will only take time away from what you do best – sales! A hotel gets into a rate contract precisely because they make more money when the volumes are high.
When you contract with a company like SEO Pencil, you know what you will be paying us at the end of each assignment. So your costs are entirely fixed! Add to that a marketing cost of say 20%, and the rest of the invoice price is your profit. Makes life really simple!
So what is the answer to the perennial question of whether you should build and train your own team or outsource it all and reap the benefits? Actually, we won’t know what works for you, but one nice case study would be a consultant we work with, who has a small team of people working to support the work we do for him. Since a lot of customers prefer to speak to a live person before ordering, and since that cannot be outsourced to us too, he has a team in place who handle client orders, support requests, and act as a liaison with our project manager here. If there is an urgent request a client makes, his team can finish making the changes right away without waiting for us to wake up the next morning and deliver!
That seems like the best of both worlds, right? You can ask us for a quote to see how much you can reduce on your monthly operations billing, and then decide whether the change is a positive move.