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Three Ways to Leverage Subcontractors

By crooky | May 29, 2008

In the past, I’ve discussed the relative merits and challenges of growing your consulting business beyond a sole proprietorship. Since February, my business has grown in leaps and bounds, as I was confident it would and I’ve had to hire help. In my case, I’ve employed the services of two very different kinds of sub-contractors and I’m using some electronic tools to keep my overhead low while getting lots of work done effectively.

Here’s three ways I leverage subcontractors to make my life easier:

1. Help Young Sub-contractors Gain Experience

One of the subcontractors I’m currently using - Melissa Chungfat - is young, talented and works for a very reasonable rate. I’ve known her for several years and she’s a recent graduate from my Alma Mata Simon Fraser University. She’s currently helping me with a research project where the outcomes are unknown and there’s lots of digging through publicly available information involved. It’s not the most exciting assignment in the world but for someone who hasn’t done it before, it’s not dead easy nor boring.

The tradeoff is that she’s only in her early 20s and while talents and very experienced for her age, she hasn’t been kicked in the teeth enough to have any war wounds. This means that I have to do more mentoring and coaching with her than a sub-contractor that’s been around the block a few times. I’m fine with that. I can throw Melissa on projects that more experienced sub-contractors won’t touch because they’ve done them too many times.

It’s a win-win relationship for both of us. I’m helping Melissa gain some resume-padding skills and experience while providing her with a very reasonable wage. I’m getting a motivated, sincere research assistant who works hard and is willing to try new things. I know that I won’t be able to use her in this capacity for long. Within a year, she will have outgrown her need for my patronage and she’ll move on to bigger and better things. In the meantime, it’s a professional relationship that works for both of us.

2. Use Subcontractors with Very Specialized Skills

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a generalist. This means I’m reasonably capable at a lot of things but not a genius at any one thing. One of the areas where I fall down is in coordination and organizing. My desk looks like a grenade went off on it and I’ve been known to forget about appointments on occasion. I’ve got a sizeable project I’m completing for Terasen Gas at the moment - one that has me interviewing 50 individuals in six weeks on top of my normal workload.

I realized that I could never do 50 interviews in six weeks without some serious organizational assistance. That’s why I hired Cristina Ambrosi from Ripple Effect Business Solutions. She used to be the Executive Assistant to the President of a major Crown Corporation here in Vancouver. If you’ve never met a high-level EA before, you have no idea what an honour it is to be able to retain her services for my humble business.

Cristina knows how to get shit done. I put her on the task of booking all 50 appointments for me. Some of them are face-to-face meetings. Some of them are telephone interviews. All of them are with busy people. She’s amazing at pursuading people to talk to me. My calendar fills up faster than I can keep pace with sometimes. While she’s the more expensive of the two sub-contractors that I’m using right now, she’s worth every penny because I don’t have to supervise her work. I just let her know what needs to be done, set the budget and off she goes.

The benefit to my customers is that the work is getting done on schedule and on budget. If I had to book all of these appointments myself - I doubt that the project would meet its targets. There are other areas where it makes sense to hire a subject matter expert as a sub-contractor. I know a little HTML so I could have technically made my own website given enough time. It didn’t make sense for me to do that so I hired a web designer to do it for me. It’s that simple.

3. Google Apps

I just started using Google Apps as a shared work environment for myself and the three other people who currently help me with my business. If you haven’t seen Google Apps, it’s like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs on steroids for your business where you can send mail from your own domain name and share documents/schedules with your closest associates (whom you can also assign e-mail addresses from your domain name).

In the case of the Terasen job, I have Cristina adding the appointments to a shared calendar in Google Apps which I have synced to my MS Outlook account (which syncs to my Windows Mobile 6 Phone) so that I know within 10 minutes when I have a new appointment booked. It’s a very slick system. I’ve also assigned Cristina a friuch.com e-mail address so that when she contacts interviewees electronically, it looks like she’s an employee, not a virtual assistant.

I can also share and edit documents that read like Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents with all of my sub-contractors. This lets me work with them primarily over the phone and via e-mail. This cuts down on the number of meetings we have to have and keeps costs lower for my clients.

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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Topics: Business of Consulting, Research Methodologies |

One Response to “Three Ways to Leverage Subcontractors”

  1. Shanti Says:
    June 6th, 2008 at 7:39 am

    Google Apps is really great. Worked well for me too, only I haven’t had to use it to its full capacity, personally. However, I’ve had to organize a whole festival with the help of google apps, calendar and docs. The festival was a success :).

    Ah, not to mention that you don’t have to sift through your email to remember which version of the document it is that you need - though keeping more than 1 version of document can be beneficial.

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