For all the reports of doom and disaster Hurricane Irene proved pretty manageable. It was certainly noisy in the night and we had a few leaks to contend with but it wasn’t the destruction forecast.

It highlighted for me an advantage of working from home and having a network approach to business – we had no issues with transport or closed offices and with the hurricane so well signposted it was easy for us to shift work from those on the East Coast to others not affected so our clients wouldn’t have seen any disruption.

And on a lighter note, I can’t help but think of that Dexy’s Midnight Runners classic that was going to be the theme to our Come On Irene Hurricane Party…

It looks like there’s another coworker that is ready to meet me – must be my lucky day!

This time it’s Anne, one of our researchers who has been working with us since about 2004 and is truly a great information professional. You can read a little about her here on our sister site, ClickNwork, and also at our ClickNwork blog where she wrote an interesting entry about her new book.

Anne lives not too far from where I’ll be spending some of my holiday and the hope is that we can coordinate schedules to meet up.

In many ways Anne epitomizes what’s good about remote working – she has valuable skills that can be applied at-distance and uses the flexibility of virtual work to make time for something she’s passionate about.  I look forward to meeting her.

Today I booked a trip to the Ukraine – my first appointment to devirtualize my workplace. I’m going to meet someone that I’ve never met (or even spoken to) but have been working with for years.

In a few weeks I fly to Kiev then take a 6 hour train to Kharov which is right on the Russian border and where I will meet Yurii. We’ll spend a day trying to work (I say trying as we’re not actually sure we’ll be able to communicate face to face – so far we’ve just managed email and text).

(My fall back plan, should we completely be unable to understand each other, is to find a corner, log into Skype and text like we always do!)

Then I’ll turn around and head home.

In a few days I’ll show you some of the things we’ve been working on.

I’ve been a virtual worker for over a decade and I still find it somewhat mystifying. At a personal level I’m motivated by the quality of life it gives me – closeness to my family mainly, and the chance to manage my time over the day. I expect that’s the same for many people and that’s no surprise.

What I do find surprising is how stable, robust and effective it seems to be. Orthodoxy tells you that we need face-time and daily communication to build cohesive, functional teams – without it people get off message, do the wrong thing, waste time and generally are not that effective.

I can imagine that for many types of work this is indeed true. But for a lot of what we do it doesn’t apply. We seem to have stable and effective teams without the face time, without the daily communication. In fact, it’s more surprising than that – most of our team members have never met. Ever. And in many cases, our team members don’t even talk to each other. And more surprising yet, many have never talked to each other. Isn’t that amazing?

And yet they still churn out high quality, professional output that, for example:

• Is circulated at the executive level of Fortune 100 corporations
• Is used by brand managers to guide new development investments
• Is used by consultants in client presentations
• etc.

There is no magic to this – we work hard to find the right people (detail focused, experienced, driven by quality…), ensure high standards (poor performers don’t last) and have managers that rigorously check our work. And we communicate a lot via email and instant messaging and yes, sometimes by phone.

And we benefit from very low churn rates (2-5% at last estimate), which means we don’t need to spend time and money retesting and retraining people. The people we have are motivated to work with us (probably for similar reasons to my own but hopefully also because we pay a fair rate, provide interesting work and they see we are easy and honest to deal with).

For all this, I still find it surprising that year on year and on a weekly basis I work with well over 20 people that I’ve never met or spoken to. Some people I’ve worked with just for a few months and for others it’s a decade.

So I’ve decided to change things a little and get to meet (and talk!) to some of my ‘colleagues’. In coming months (and probably years) I’m going to visit some of the people that I work with to get to know them better. I’m not sure what this will achieve.

Perhaps I’ll get to understand virtual working better and maybe improve how it works. At a minimum, I hopefully won’t screw up something that works! Anyhow, stay tuned…

I’m not a great one for anniversaries but I thought I’d mark the fact that Business360 kicked off ten years ago this month.

It’s been an adventurous time. We started right as the dot-com boom peaked (the market turned in March 2000), sucking away financing options for start-ups, and soon after that 9/11 helped tip the US into recession in 2001. And here we stand today, slowly riding out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. How’s that for timing!

But while we haven’t attained Google-like growth, we’re doing fine: our client base is up, revenues are rising and with new products and services about to launch, I think things look better than ever.

Looking back over a decade you realize how some things have changed and here are a few that strike me:

• We were a crowdsourcing innovator. We didn’t think of it as crowdsourcing at the time (it was 2000 and the term didn’t exist) but it turns out one of the first services we offered relied on an early form of crowdsourcing – we opened team rooms to let people from all over the world compete to answer business questions our clients had, selecting the best material located. It’s something we still use – when you have a tough question you’re researching on the web you often get a better result, and much faster, if you have 10 people searching for it rather than just one – this is true even in these post-Google days.
• Outsourcing research/writing/analysis is now commonplace. Earlier this decade there was a lot of noise about companies outsourcing information and research services. Much of it centered on whether it was wise to outsource and the prevailing view from professional researchers in the US and UK was that it wasn’t, that it would destroy the profession and yield poor quality results. Today, these concerns have largely gone; outsourcing of these functions is now standard practice and large companies that outsource this work are way more common than those that don’t. That’s not to say that it always works – there’s a lot of work that shouldn’t be outsourced and even more that shouldn’t be offshored, but that still leaves an awful lot of work that is best completed externally.
• Outsourcing research trials have gone away. Over the years we’ve been involved in a good number of trials, usually competing against our competitors, although we sometimes didn’t know that until after the fact. The most rigorous by far was run by Goldman Sachs – it lasted longer, took in way more vendors and systematically covered a lot of territory (and I’m pleased to say that we came out top on this one). Other trials that we’ve taken part in were very poorly executed, some entailed just a small number of tasks, some imposed silly restrictions, like preventing vendors from discussing requirements with the requestor, or disqualifying certain sources etc – some of these we won, and some we didn’t. We don’t see many trials these days. Things proceed more organically – companies ring us up and we talk about what we can and can’t do, and the usual course is to gradually get to know each other on a number of projects. Things normally grow from there.
• You don’t always need financing. As a company we never secured formal financing – we had a small amount of seed capital and a family member put in a little too. Instead, we’ve bootstrapped. We watched pennies and grew as our clients started to trust us and gave us more work. And that’s largely how it is today. Most of our work is repeat business and most new clients come from personal recommendations. All of which has meant we’ve learnt to be very flexible and responsive, and that’s been a good thing – giving clients what they want, how they want it, faster, cheaper etc has pushed us forward. On the flip side, lack of capital has meant we let a lot of good ideas slip by.
• Virtual working and working from home are now well-established. When we started, the idea of building a business where all the work is completed remotely, with everyone working from home, was offbeat. More radical was the idea that we could deliver high quality services to top companies with teams of people assembled from around the world that never meet, don’t talk to each other and don’t talk to us or the client. I still find it shocking. To be sure, there is a lot of communication with clients and between a lot of people at Business360 and ClickNwork, the site we built to manage workflow, but for many things we do communication beyond email or IM isn’t needed. So, for example, we have researchers and writers that have been with us for five or more years and that work with us on a daily basis, but who we have never met or spoken to, not even over the phone. But with good online and email based training these people deliver services (research, data gathering, data entry, some document preparation…) to Fortune 100 corporations, banks and hedge funds. That still strikes me as radical. Something I want to do in the couple of years or so is go on a tour to visit a lot of these people and see how it all happens – that would be interesting.

One constant throughout the decade has been rapid change and we’ve had to evolve fast to keep relevant. On that score we’ve been investing a lot in some new ways of doing things and we’ll be pushing some of them out the door soon. In another ten years time I’ll be able to say whether they were a success or a flop. Stay tuned!

That’s what I was asked, by email. Someone read my previous entry and wanted more details on how a company could truly realize savings on their research and related knowledge work, without a loss of quality.

Here’s a case study based on some client experiences – brace yourself as it’s rather lengthy; if you still have questions at the end of it, just let me know.

Context: Mid-sized consulting company with a corporate library of eight: two sector specialists, five generalists and one researcher for quick turnaround requests. The company is headquartered in New York with five researchers; two others work from a Chicago office and the fifth in LA.

Until Q1 2008 the team was running at full stretch with a small network of local freelancers helping out as needed (Business360 was part of the network), but since Q2 demand started to soften and there was a sharp drop in Q4. With practice (non-billable) work the team is still busy but billability is down to about 60% and still falling.

The company has an internal charge rate of $120/hour for its research services and tries to operate as a profit center, although the reality is they are happy to cover costs.

We’ve been working with the company to look at how they can save money and still deliver a quality service, and (roughly) this is how the numbers stack up. Note: we exclude data costs here which can be large but don’t really affect resourcing decisions.

First you have basic salary costs:

Then for each employee there are a series of direct oncosts (insurance, pension, training etc):

Add these and you arrive at a grand total for annual direct costs of $725,513.

But salaries and related costs aren’t the only ones, there are also indirect corporate overheads, which in this case we just limit to office rental costs:

Note: we use 60 square feet here which is a little tight – most estimates call for ~125ft but the company runs a hot desking approach and believes this amount is all it needs.

Put it all together and you get total costs for each employee:

These costs go to establishing the research services of the company that are charged out on an hourly basis, some for billable purposes and some for non-billable. I mentioned above that billable work for the client’s research team has been falling and this matters since many research teams aim to cover their costs internally and the only way to do this is through internal billing. Research teams do work besides billable assignments but billable work is usually better measured, the value of the work is clearer and for many teams the percent of time billable is the key metric that is tracked. Accordingly, this analysis focuses on the most cost-effective way a research team can complete its billable work.

The amount of hours an employee can be available for billable work is crimped by vacation, public holidays, sickness and training needs, with the actual number of hours available for billable work is around 1,864:

Of these 1,864 hours the company hopes to get as many billable hours as possible, and the higher the number of billable hours, the lower the average cost.

There are two ways to look at these costs – just direct costs (i.e., those that would stop as soon as the employee was laid off), and those that include indirect costs (office rental costs and other costs that don’t stop as an employee is laid off but which are avoidable in the longer run). This difference is important since if companies really want to save what they can, they need to think about ways to avoid all possible costs, and this means reducing office space.

At high billable levels (90-100%) we find that average costs come down to about $43-48/billed hour on a direct basis (4th column), and $66-73/billed hour on an indirect basis (last column). Depending on the work we do, Business360 charges $15/hour to $250/hour (sorry for the large range, but if we are doing basic and regular data entry, web search etc it is at the low end, while rates for specialized consultants or financial analysts on urgent projects are much higher). Most of our research work is in the range $40-80/hour, so while we are competitive when a research team is at higher billable levels, the case for giving us lots of work is weak, although it is prudent for them to keep a vendor or two on hand to cope with peaks in demand.  (There are two separate points worth mentioning here – Business360 is a variable cost, not a fixed one, which means our costs only apply as we complete work (there is no charge for idle time, vacation, training etc); and second, our network-based business model means we can often access researchers with greater familiarity with certain subject areas, but I’m leaving both these aside for this analysis.)

The table above shows how we can usually help companies save money against fully accounted internal charges. Cost savings opportunities emerge when billability rates fall: below 90% we can save companies a good chunk against their full (with indirect cost) expenses, and below about 80% we even save money against their direct costs.

A logical company’s approach is to reduce its internal team in size so it runs at as close to 100% billability as possible, although given the choppiness of workflow, 90% is a realistic maximum.

So returning to the example, the company can make savings and get all its billable work done through reducing the size of its team by four, layoffs being the unfortunate reality in today’s climate. We assume reductions are made from the larger and more costly New York team. To complete the picture, we assume that Business360 picks up regular assignments that don’t require in-house knowledge (newsletters, clipping services, data capture, some secondary research), which means we can do them cheaper (~$40/hour), as well as a similar amount of some higher value tasks that can be done remotely (competitor analysis, telephone interviews, some analysis) at, say $60/hour, all of which makes for an average rate of $50/hour.

So where does this leave us? The company is still getting all its billable work completed; the in-house team is running at full tilt (and with its own internal charging, making a profit) and Business360 is picking up the difference. Business360′s work is completed mainly by people based in the US working from home, with the possibility of it being done by our teams in lower-cost countries if the need is there to process work overnight or make even greater savings.

In terms of total costs, the company moves from total direct costs of $725,513 to $359,730 (with the level of work associated with 50% billability for the original team of eight) or $732,530 (with the level of work associated with 100% billability for the original team of eight). With indirect costs the total moves from $1,109,513 to $530,397 (at the 50% billability rate) to $903,197 (at the 100% billability rate). Essentially, the company saves money under any reasonable scenario, possibility up to over $500k annually, and at the same time manages to move much of its costs from fixed to variable, not an insignificant achievement in this difficult climate.

Apologies again for the length of this thing, and if you have any questions please do contact me or leave a comment.

We had a little bit of good news this week – we’ve been asked to take over some outsourced research for one of the world’s largest advertising conglomerates. That makes it sound like a big deal but it’s not, at least not yet – it’s perhaps 0.5-1 full time equivalent, but hey, it’s something, especially in this environment!

The significant thing is that the work is now coming to Business360 instead of an Indian-based supplier that had the contract for a number of years, which means the work will now be completed by US-based researchers working from home. It’s not much, but if every company in the US did the same we wouldn’t be in a recession!

I don’t have the full reasons that the client changed but I gather we’re about the same on price but the advantage of having the work done within the same time zone and by experienced researchers (professional librarians, corporate librarians and the like) made the switch worthwhile.

Over the last five years or so the dominant direction of business process outsourcing has been to India, with other countries like the Philippines and China lagging behind but still taking a fair chunk of work from US and European professionals.

And the biggest reason was the chance to lower costs, mainly on the back of lower wages in these countries. The wage differential remains substantial but the case for pushing ever more work to these countries looks to be weakening.

A December 2008 report from TowerGroup points out that managers at some US companies are discovering that offshoring in India is not the cost-saver they imagined, especially for captive offshore operations, in which the US parent sets up and runs the outsourcing operation, usually employing local workers to staff much of the operation.

Reading this reminded me of a February 11, 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal –
Rethinking the India Back Office; Some Western Firms Weigh Selling Their Units as Costs Rise, Dollar Weakens. The author, Jackie Range, cited a study by McKinsey & Co. and Nasscom, the Indian tech and outsourcing industry group, which found that, on average, company back offices – “captives” – were less efficient than companies run by outsourcing firms that specialize in the business. For some types of back-office work, captives’ costs are 30% higher. The survey also found that the higher costs didn’t lead to lower staff turnover or better-quality work.

More recently, the September issue of McKinsey Quarterly had an article – Time to rethink offshoring? – that showed how shifting cost curves mean the US is becoming a more competitive place to manufacture high-tech products.

“The production of high-tech goods has moved steadily from the United States to Asia over the last decade. The reasons are familiar: lower wages, a stable global economy, and rapidly growing local markets. These factors combined to make nations such as China and Malaysia favored manufacturing locations. In the last two years, however, the favorable economic winds that carried offshoring forward have turned turbulent. The new conditions are undermining some of the factors that made manufacturers of every stripe, including those in high tech, move production offshore” – Ajay Goel, Nazgol Moussavi, and Vats N. Srivatsan, McKinsey Quarterly, Sept 2008

McKinsey’s argument rests mainly on higher wage inflation in offshore locations and transportation costs and here is their summary analysis:

Manufacturing high-tech products is obviously different from knowledge services, but it all goes to show that this change is affecting business across a number of fronts.

Also, since McKinsey complete its analysis the dollar has strengthened, especially against the Indian Rupee, and oil prices have collapsed, so their findings wouldn’t be as compelling today. But these are likely short-term affects that won’t affect the longer-term view.

All up, clients will start to be more discerning when it comes to outsourcing and offshoring. One to watch.

For a business based entirely on the web we are late to the blogging game, but here we are! (We actually started a blog over a year ago but didn’t like the software package and got too busy to change it, so we now have even more time to make up…)

Business360 provides many business services – research, writing, analysis, consulting, placements and more. What makes us different is how we do it. The terms outsourcing and offshoring are commonplace, and that’s what we do, but we use teams of people around the world that work from home to deliver the services. This gives us a different perspective on business process outsourcing, and that is what we’ll write about.

We’ve been in business for about 10 years now and have seen various trends, some ebb and flow and others never leave. This blog will share some of thoughts and opinions and ideas and we hope it will be a useful springboard into the terrain.