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!

It sounds easy but the reality is that getting paid for work you do itself takes work. I looked at our situation and the days accounts payable (debtor days in the UK) for clients that we invoice after we’ve done the work is about 50. Meaning that it takes about 50 days on average from when we invoice our clients to when we get the check.

But we often do work at the beginning of the month and only bill for it at the end, so that could add another 30 days, but let’s say an average of 15. And then there are large projects that might run for a few months. Factor all this in and it goes to about 100 days – that’s over three months of waiting until you get paid for the work you’ve done.

And all this happens once you actually have work. My friend had contacts and thought he might be able to start work in about a month or two and we reckoned that if he could bill monthly for his work he should be fine. He’s still deciding what to do.

I should say that most of our clients pay promptly and are great, and a good number even pay in advance, which helps enormously. Still, over the years we’ve got a few scars. Back in about 2000 IBM stopped paying us for over 12 months as they upgraded their payments system (that was when we were starting out and we got through that with a loan). A couple of years ago we wrote the business plan for new beverage - Fyxx Water - that got funding and launched in the US, although they didn’t pay our invoice (they stopped answering our emails and calls and we wrote it off). And recently Nokia had difficulties paying us as they moved their accounts payable to somewhere in Eastern Europe (we eventually got it, about 6 months late and in the meanwhile currency movements had erased about 20% of its $ value).

But sometimes you get lucky. Just over a year ago I got an email from Lehman Brothers that wanted help with some aspects of their research. After a few conference calls I visited them at their London offices in late August. We’d signed an NDA, reviewed rates and we were headed for a trial when the proverbial hit the fan. The world’s financial system shook, trillions of dollars of value was lost and we entered a brutal global recession. And me, I felt like we’d missed a bullet.

But sometimes people join that have a very specific skill set or ideas for additional services they want to offer, and by working together – blending that individual’s skills and experience with the wider Business360 network and processes – we can often do much more and much faster.

Here’s a good case in point: Harold, a friend I met way back at the business school HEC in Paris, started working with us a couple of years back. You can read his ClickNwork profile here.

Harold’s focus is finance, particularly special situations such as distressed debt or raising capital through private placements. In light of recent financial dislocations (you may have read about it. The banks hit a rough patch and have been downsizing like someone on a salmonella diet), many banks, hedge funds, boutique operators and others are trying to cope with higher and often more complicated workloads just at the time when headcount is down. To make it worse, revenue streams (assets under management, deal flow, trading volume…) are down too, creating continuing pressure to reduce costs.

After working with us, Harold realized that leveraging our network could be a valuable tool for many financial operators struggling to cope with workloads, and, with our teams in lower-cost locations, there was the chance they could save money too.

So we’ve been talking to some of our hedge fund/banking/buy-out clients about these additional services we can now offer. Where established clients know us through other work it’s usually an easy next step. Click on the image to read more about these financial services:

First there’s ongoing tracking work – as the downturn got going a few clients asked to keep tabs on specific issues such as the actions of competitor companies, core sector news etc, so on a daily and weekly basis we’ve been:

- Capturing and distributing articles that look at competitor response to the recession (price movements, packaging changes, cost-cutting drives, marketing campaigns and so on)

- Preparing newsletters that contain summaries of the more significant developments. Most of these are sector specific, so, for instance, one looks at how all the large consumer goods companies are responding

- Writing monthly and quarterly sector reviews that largely summarize the findings of the above two

- Preparing monthly economic reviews that pull together historic and forecast economic data, sometimes with summaries of competitor actions

And then we have a bunch of ad hoc work that roughly groups under these themes:

- Lesson capture – looking at past downturns and pulling out insights that can be applied today – Do companies do better when they acquire during downturns or upswings? Is it better to cut deeply and early or hold out for smaller later cuts? Do innovation and new products pay off better in recessions? What role can messaging alone play as consumers pull back on spending? There’s lots of it, and coming from many angles.

- Impact studies – trying to gauge the changes underway, where they may head and how profound they will be. We’ve done these for a range of sectors – real estate, homebuilders, banking, personal care and food – but they almost always point back to consumer demand and changing consumer attitudes.

- Bankruptcy studies –  looking at different sectors to identify weak players and likely bankruptcy candidates, which we do using things like asset impairment rates, debt maturities,  cash flow analysis, Altman Z-scores, leverage and coverage ratios, bankruptcy ratios, going concern metrics etc.

- Trend analysis – trying to get a sense of how things are evolving, how fast and in what direction. Trends are capricious things and this work is more art than science, so we often back it up with site visits and interviews (for example, we’ve been doing a lot of looking at Japan lately, most recently seeing how companies communicate to consumers fatigued from its lost decade).

- Future views – thinking about how the commercial landscape will change, how attitudes will diverge from previous trends, assessing what consumers will be looking for, judging which players will fold, which will conquer, and so on. It’s sort of reality-based navel gazing.

And here’s a funny thing – the first recession-based work we were given happened over a year ago, in January 2008. Things were fine then (consumer confidence was high, GDP growth strong, unemployment low and so on), but some of our clients were seeing weakness in parts of their business and, interestingly, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) dated the onset of this recession to December 2007, although they didn’t announce it until December 2008. Here’s betting that in the next couple of months we’ll get our first assignment looking at ways of how to profit from an upturn that comes on the heels of a sharp contraction. And that will be a good thing.

Sure, we’ve had some disappointments. Some clients have pulled right back (especially banks and hedge funds), some have asked us to lower rates (sometimes we can, often we can’t), some have reduced the amount of work they send us, but most clients are giving us much the same or more, and at the same time new clients have come to us (ad agencies, professional service companies, large corporations…), and these new clients have generally given us a lot of work. Go figure!

I think part of the story rests in clients cutting back on their own payroll and needing vendors to help out, but I think a more significant explanation is that companies are really reluctant to cut back on research. I’m afraid I can’t claim this insight as my own; the light bulb went on last night when I read an article in the April 20, 2009 edition of the New Yorker, by James Surowiecki in his column, The Financial Page, called Hanging Tough.

Surowiecki points out that

“…numerous studies have shown that companies that keep spending on acquisition, advertising, and R. & D. during recessions do significantly better than those which make big cuts.

In 1927, the economist Roland Vaile found that firms that kept ad spending stable or increased it during the recession of 1921-22 saw their sales hold up significantly better than those which didn’t. A study of advertising during the 1981-82 recession found that sales at firms that increased advertising or held steady grew precipitously in the next three years, compared with only slight increases at firms that had slashed their budgets. And a McKinsey study of the 1990-91 recession found that companies that remained market leaders or became serious challengers during the downturn had increased their acquisition, R. & D., and ad budgets, while companies at the bottom of the pile had reduced them.”

Of course, advertising is a little different from R&D, but a lot of our work comes from consumer goods companies conducting market research, or trying to get consumer and brand insights, or from ad agencies wanting a better story for a new business pitch, and good research is an essential part of all of these.

If Surowiecki is right then the companies that will emerge from this downturn strongest will be those that continue to invest, looking for better ways to help their consumers - using research and analysis to identify opportunities, and marketing and advertising to communicate them.

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.

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.

It feels like 2001 again, only worse. Clients are very cost conscious and looking to make savings wherever they can. Budgets are being cut and people are being laid off in large numbers. For researchers and analysts that are not absolutely essential to securing revenue, this can be a precarious time, and already we are seeing more applications from people recently retrenched.

But as we see it (and I really don’t wish to sound callous), this is a great time to be in a freelance-based business because we can really help clients solve major problems. Here’s a case in point - in the last few months we’ve been working with a couple of large companies (an advertising conglomerate and a specialized consulting company) to see how we can save them money. They both value research and the work of analysts but times are tough and they need to make savings. What can we do?

Well, we can do two things straight off:

1. We can be there in reserve for them after they have made layoffs, picking up any work their reduced team can’t manage. So if the economy suddenly picks up or they land a large contract, they will still be able to get the research and analysis done. This gives them the confidence to make deep cuts and capture savings as fast as they can.
2. We can help clients move a lot of their costs from fixed to variable (we don’t require clients to pay for FTEs or commit to a minimum level of work, which gives us an advantage over pretty much all other offshore providers). This is a major benefit to clients. It means they don’t have to carry a large research overhead and need only pay for research and analysis work when they actually need it.

Costs per hour for external vendors can look much higher than the average hourly rate of employees, but this is a flawed way to make the comparison. Contractors are only paid for each hour of work they actually do, so a fairer comparison would put employees and contractors on the same measure, like this:

Employee costs Vs. Contractor costs

A dated (2002) National Federation of Independent Business review that looked at marketing specialists (we do a lot of work in marketing too) came to the same result:

The following example compares the actual yearly cost for hiring an in-house marketing specialist, as opposed to outsourcing marketing needs to a freelancer.

Say that the rate for a freelance public relations/ad writer is $75/hr. That hourly rate may seem high when compared with the $20 you might expect to pay for an in-house employee handling PR duties. But if the freelancer were contracted for 10 hours of work per week, over a year the actual cost would be: $75 x 10 hours per week x 50 weeks = $37,500. There are, of course, no benefits or company overhead to consider for a freelancer.

The salary of an in-house PR person at $20 per hour would be $20 x 40 hours per week x 52 weeks (assuming two weeks of paid vacation) = $41,600. Not much different from $37,500 for the freelancer, right? But to calculate the actual cost of the in-house employee, you need at add benefits (which usually total about 30-40% of salary) and in-house overhead (usually about 35-50% of salary). This brings the actual cost of an in-house employee up to $41,600 salary + $12,480 for benefits + $14,560 overhead = $68,640. And that’s on the low side. Benefits and overhead percentages frequently go much higher.

Using these calculations, you’d save more than $30,000 by outsourcing your marketing needs, even at a rate of $75/hr for a skilled freelancer. However, when your company’s need for marketing increases, you may end up using the freelancer for 25 hours or more per week. At this level, it begins to make sense to hire a full-time in-house employee.

A final point worth making is that all these calculations assume using a locally-based contractor, which is costly option. With time and planning we can save clients much more money on their knowledge-based work by building teams of individuals that combine individuals in low-cost countries with some in the client’s home country.

So back to those two companies. It’s early days but things are going ok. One company laid-off 12 researchers the other laid-off three and in both cases we are now doing a lot more ad hoc work for them, but more importantly, we have taken over some ongoing projects -analyzing quarterly earnings and competitor profiles, and writing some newsletters - all of which is saving the companies money but at the same time freeing in-house analysts to focus on higher-value work. This downturn will be grim, by any measure, but it has already started to create opportunities for companies that can help companies save money at the same time as improving their operations, and that has to be a good thing.

Against this backdrop I think we’ve done pretty well – our revenues will be up just over 20% on 2007 which is good, but nothing compared with our 5-year CAGR to 2007 which approached 60%. And I think 2009 will be much harder than 2008: discretionary budgets will be lower and clients will focus on cutting costs where they can. Cost cutting is never fun but it is something we can do. Our business model means we can help clients move costs from fixed to variable as well as lower hourly rates, even compared to other offshoring and outsourcing options.

One welcome trend is that our work has been moving from ad hoc and occasional assignments to regular and planned work. We still do a lot of work as and when clients ask, but over recent years its gone from close to 100% ad hoc to about 50% regular. As they get to know us it’s an easy shift for clients to make – they get used to us through occasional assignments and then typically ask us to take on functions completed in-house or by other outsourcers. Clients seem to value being able to delegate away chunks of their business so they can focus on higher value tasks. This might mean we write newsletters, do daily or weekly searches to monitor issues, prepare competitor profiles, track earnings releases etc, leaving them free to do more talking, analysis and thinking.

I’m heading back to my Christmas slumbers but will back soon with a look forward to 2009…

New contenders are emerging to challenge the Bric (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries’ dominance of the offshoring market.

While India was the “undisputed leader” followed by China in the list of the top 30 offshoring destinations, as compiled by analysts Gartner, this year’s list showed Mexico, Poland and Vietnam pushing their way up to take them on.

Ian Marriott, research vice president at Gartner, said these countries would be seeking to take advantage of the credit crisis to capitalise on organisations’ drive to save costs

You can see Gartner’s list here and some commentary here.

Around the same time the UK’s Computer Weekly came out with its Top five outsourcing destinations to watch for IT services and outsourcing. IT outsourcing is very different than BPO, but where IT leads, BPO often follows. Computer Weekly’s top five are:

1. Argentina

2. Bulgaria

3. China

4. Egypt

5. The Philippines

I was intrigued by the inclusion of The Philippines, a country where we already complete a fair amount of work - the time zone is great for overnight processing, the education system is good and, we find, people are keen to learn and ready to listen to feedback - important things when you need manage quality from many time zones distant.