There’s no better time than now to assess the learnings of recent months and begin proactively planning strategy for the coming financial year. Business owners, both big and small, are witnessing an unprecedented opportunity to recapture revenue and re-engage waylaid customer bases, surging back into profitability.

Taking the business bull by the horns doesn’t require impulsive decision-making though. Proactivity and impulsivity are two very different things. The key remains in forecasting and strategising, in collaboration with the expert partner businesses that provide the services that allow your business to flourish. This has always been, and remains, a key hammerjack point of difference as experts in offshore outsourcing within Australia. Our service provides so much more than a set-and-forget outsourced staffing solution – we’re as invested in your success as you are, and thus make ourselves available and accountable when assisting clients in planning for the future.

Timing is everything when strategizing a return to full operability. It’s a delicate balance. It could be that now is the perfect moment to take advantage and staff up with additional resources in preparation for growth. As such, let’s explore a few key areas that will establish a clear pathway forwards for your staff and business.

Is Your Team Prioritising The Right Work?

Forward planning for your business requires a clear sense of how your existing team members are currently able to balance spontaneous, immediate, unforeseen tasks with the longer-term, macro items on their agenda. Creating the best possible environment for both your business and team to succeed is predicated upon allowing them the time and resources to be able to accomplish everything on their plate. Should they not be able to, perhaps a dedicated offshore roleplayer, such as an expert outsourced personal Virtual Assistant, may allow them the breathing room to tick off their big-ticket items, by diverting some of the more menial, administrative tasks away from them.

There are a few key indicators to look for to ensure that your existing team, both domestic and offshore, are synchronised and cohesive:

What Is The Team Feedback?

Sometimes, knowing whether or not any given team member feels as if they can adequately accomplish their central goals is simply a matter of asking them. It is always prudent for a business owner and management to regularly check in with their core team members to ensure that they feel well-supported and resourced.

Some management and ownership teams don’t always recognise that correctly implementing a BPO program isn’t a means of replacing the existing team, but actually a means of supporting them. Additional offshore staff infrastructure within accounts, bookkeeping, finance, administration, and back-office operations have the immediate potential to free up crucial workload time and brain space for existing team members. These support structures empower them to truly focus on the high-priority, long-term, transformative projects for your business, that they may otherwise not have had the energy or enthusiasm for.

Coordinating with an expert partner outsourcing company, such as hammerjack, allows you to identify areas within which core team members could use some additional low-cost offshore resources in order for your in-house staff to accomplish their role to their fullest potential.

Are Deadlines Being Met?

When you as a business owner or any of your staff, are trying to balance too many separate agenda items it will become natural, gradually apparent over time, even despite the best efforts and enthusiasm of everyone involved. Small details can occasionally be missed, little items can often fall through the cracks. A key indicator of potentially needing greater support resources for your onshore team can be an observance of how efficiently different tasks are completed, how much oversight is required, and whether or not deadlines were maintained. It could be that it’s time to redefine some roles and responsibilities.

Should your team be producing fantastic work, just not within the timeframe you desire, then clearly they have the skills for the job, they just might need some additional infrastructure in order to help them thrive – one of the key benefits of outsourcing. We often are able to assist client businesses in identifying areas an offshore team member can add value that they might not even have considered, such as financial services. The objective is perfect synergy between team members so that no item gets missed, no detail gets left out, and everyone is on the same page.

Is The Business Moving Forwards?

There is a difference between maintaining a level of corporate self-sufficiency and really, deliberately ensuring that a business is actually moving forwards in terms of its growth ambitions, product development, and customer satisfaction. Whilst treading water is surviving at the very least, we want to see your business and staff members truly thrive whilst maintaining appropriate work-life balance, with the benefit of some tailored advice and forward planning.

Existing core business team members should have the space, both in terms of their mental capacity and workload, to be able to design and implement improvements to both your product and operations that might transform the way that you do business, even within established large companies. Everyone should have an eye as to what the outfit has the potential to look like moving forwards, and how they might be able to most contribute to this process.

Should you feel as if you’re wanting more in terms of creativity and forward-thinking strategy from your core team members, then perhaps now is the moment to provide them with that additional administrative support that offshore expert roleplayers provide, to give them the space and breathing room to dedicate their full attention towards improving the state of the business.

Once you’ve identified the areas where your team could best make use of the expert offshore support that we provide, the questions that follow naturally involve timing. As so many of our clients have asked…

When Is The Right Time To Staff Up?

Now is the moment to assess all of your available staffing resources – in preparation for the new, incoming financial year. A simple discussion with an experienced service provider, such as hammerjack, may help identify areas in need of support that you might not have even considered, where additional resources could transform your workflow and operations.

Knowing when to push the staff resupply button is sometimes a tricky thing to do, however for the Australian small business owner we want to try and avoid indecision, in favour of proactivity. The hesitation is understandable though. Go too early, and your overheads may become more difficult to manage. Too late, and your existing team may have more work than they know what to do with. There are a few key areas that we can assist you in identifying for your business, that will make the decision-making process for offshore services so much easier to break down and analyse, so as to plan how to achieve the best result.

How Do My Revenue Numbers Look?

When discussing revenue with a partner client, it’s important for Australian firms to look at performance over more than an individual time period, say a week or month, in isolation. Whilst your business may have exceeded revenue performance expectations last month, the key is ensuring consistency or growth in that revenue over an extended period of time in order to plan ahead. This allows us to forecast with a far greater degree of certainty. Thankfully, within Australia at the moment, overarching prospects and revenue forecasts for SMEs appear very positive.

Fluctuations from month to month may mean that efforts need to be doubled to ensure that as many clients as possible become ‘regulars’. In recent months it’s been so heartening to see customer bases for Australian companies surge back to the businesses that they know and love, providing revenue stability and opportunities for growth.

If this revenue performance remains consistent, or improves, over the space of a few consecutive time periods, say three months, then that is absolutely a positive indicator that you may be in a well-placed position to expand your staff with one (or more) qualified, expert, offshore team members.

Are My Costs Manageable?

Knowing when to staff up with outsourcing services also involves ensuring that you have a clear vision with regards to what your overhead costs are, and how that potentially stands to change in the future. An example of proactive action might be checking how long the lease runs on any shop fronts or workspaces, and whether that stands to change any time soon. For many astute business owners, the expiry of a workspace lease may present an opportunity to reduce their overhead spending, transitioning to a lower-cost space that better reflects their business in 2022, especially as everyone digests recent inflation figures.

This opportunity to reduce workspace, utility, and wage costs is heightened further as you engage with a well-crafted business process outsourcing (BPO) program, engaging with offshore, lower-cost, high-quality professionals that take some of that excess cost pressure off your shoulders whilst ensuring delivery of your product is maintained. Implementing offshore team members alongside existing staff may actually, in and of itself, improve profitability overnight, just by virtue of these potential cost savings.

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Before a business can reach its full potential, it needs to analyse its operations with clear eyes and an uncluttered mind. A business owner needs to be able to assess their staff performance, and financial position, in order to be able to truly recognise where improvements can be made, and additional team members can be implemented. The time is now for business owners around the country to staff up, in order to be fully onboarded and implemented in preparation for the coming financial year.

At hammerjack, we specialise in finding the right team member, for the right business, at the right time. As leading BPO service providers, we help identify the crucial areas where our expert offshore staff in the Philippines can add value and support to ensure that you reach your fullest potential.