You’re finally landed some big clients or projects and you’ve got some good problems, like needing more staff to help manage the workload.

Congratulations, this is an exciting time for your business.

Good for the brand image and even better for your pockets.

However, one thing to remember is business overheads (like larger office rent and wages) are some of the biggest overheads you can commit to, for your growing business. So, plan wisely.

As the saying goes “Create a fortune but don’t spend a fortune”

A little clumsy but you’ll understand as you keep reading.

If you’ve been considering adding more desks in your office and growing your team, pause for a moment.  It’s time to work smarter not harder at this point in your business’s growth.

The times are moving so quickly and the office itself and the way we do business has changed tremendously. For one, lesser people still work in a commercial office space and more people are working remotely/virtually.

Think about it. The big internet office sharks like Slack are 100% remote.

Yes. The app that helps you to manage your tasks, meetings and overall productivity doesn’t do offices.

But they are ridiculously successful and we heard their employees like working there too.

If you’d like to keep the office that you currently have, that’s fine too. But let’s discuss how you can grow your team and businesses productivity like some of the most successful big businesses (you can read about them in our previous blog here) who have implemented a working smarter not harder strategy.  They leveraged a virtual team

What’s A Virtual Team?

A virtual team is basically your employees but just not in the office with you. Sometimes this arrangement means that they are working with you from different countries, cultures and time zones.

Both small and large businesses take up this way of doing business for a mixed bag of reasons but a common one is cutting costs.

Not that many people completely understand the benefits of working with a virtual team. Saving money is a great reason, but it’s not the most important one.

During the outsourcing ‘mania’ in the 90s found that doing it too much can be a bigger problem to their business branding.  It gave outsourcing a bit of a bad name because key customer-facing functions were pushed into a generic large call centre where communication breakdowns and lack of product knowledge meant customer questions went unanswered or the service delivery did not meet the clients’ expectations.  This meant a lot of big businesses actually pulled some of their functions back onshore.

However, a virtual workforce is different, it is specialized, client-focused and built specifically around the needs of your business, to integrate seamlessly.  Customer service is at the forefront of the experience and you manage the team as you would in-house staff, so there is much more visibility over the productivity and service delivery.

Want to know more on why a Virtual Workforce is a “Smarter” strategy for your growing business? Read on.

The Awesome Benefits You’ll Get:

Controlled Capital Costs

Remember the point is to ‘make a fortune, not spend it.’

Cutting costs may not be the prime reason you should get a virtual team but it definitely helps.

Giving some of your work to a virtual team turns ‘fixed’ costs into flexible ones. It also frees up capital that can be used elsewhere in your business.

And since we’re on the subject of keeping your office as it is, going virtual helps you to avoid large expenditures too early in your business. If you didn’t know this already, investors ADORE firms that can directly pump capital into activities that create revenue. This happens to be a key feature of having a virtual team.

Lower squad costs

Hiring short term talent (freelancers, consultants) for a short time or specific projects quickly adds up and can be expensive. It’s also a huge bummer when those employees don’t live up to the expectations that you set for them.

A virtual team helps you to focus your resources on the parts of your business that really need them.

Start new campaigns faster

Before getting your Dream Virtual Team, you’ll need to select an agency that has the capacity to start on your projects instantly.

You could be thinking, “Nah, I’ll get my HR to hire a couple of people.”

Brilliant idea if your project can wait a couple of weeks or months.

Think about it.

You’ll need time to get the right hires, train them and give them support as they settle in. It gets even more hectic if the project requires a lot of capital to kickstart it.

The right virtual agency just needs to know what and whom you need, then the magic starts. A great virtual team will hit the ground running and should save you so much time in training them for the part because they come fully qualified and market-ready. Best part? YOU are the one that gets positive feedback from your client.

Improved performance

Does your business do everything by itself? From marketing, research, distributions and development? If your response is yes, chances are your expenses are high and they flow over to your customer’s bill. The cost structure of a virtual agency can give your business an attractive competitive advantage as well as quality improvements as everything is quality controlled, measured and managed by the agency.

Reduced risk

Virtual agencies are built to assume risk and manage it for your business. Competition, markets, government regulations, the economy and technology all change quickly. Of course, all businesses generally carry some amount of risk, right? Yes, but the whole point of engaging a virtual agency is to mitigate hiccups before it hits your business.

A perfect example of an inconvenience that was excellently managed by virtual agencies is the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies that would’ve sunk and shut down managed to stay afloat because they had virtual teams managing their core functions.

Our Virtual team was perfectly positioned during the pandemic, keeping businesses online and customers satisfied! Nothing really changed during this time, it was business as usual. You’ll find many a report on the businesses that did well during the lockdowns and pandemic were those that were able to move their workforce to a virtual workplace.

Levelling the playing field

You’ve just started handling the big fish but you may not be able to manage demands at the same level as a large business. That’s a skill that time awards you…UNLESS.

Unless you plug your business functions into a virtual agency that makes you look and ‘perform’ like a big firm. This is through giving you access to the same advantages of size, productivity, and mastery that large companies enjoy.

Focus on priority functions

At this point, things are only going to get busier and more exhausting. Small businesses are notoriously known for multi-tasking, which works for a while but is not sustainable long term. The additional pressure piles up, the manager’s attention to detail drops and generally, you’ll see this with a drop in service delivery or a client complaint.

Making sure everything is well oiled in the marketing department, accounting, deliveries and customer support is not a one-person job. Virtual teams can take on any functions that you’d rather not add to your existing teams growing “To-do-Lists”. This allows your in-house team to function in their zone of genius with less additional pressure.

At the end of the day, you’ll have employees that love their jobs and do what they’re skilled at with lesser burnouts!

HOW do you get the best virtual team and agency?