IBA, as the premier business brokerage firm in the Pacific Northwest, is firmly established as a respected professional service firm in the legal, accounting, banking, mergers & acquisitions, real estate, and financial planning communities. Periodically, we will post guest blogs from professionals with knowledge to share for the good of owners of privately held companies & family owned businesses. The following blog article has been provided by Rodney Laws of Ecommerce Platforms (https://ecommerceplatforms.io/):
How Can Remote Employees Help Scale A Business
Did you know that around 55% of businesses now offer some kind of remote working setup? If you’re a business owner, simply being willing to assemble a fully-remote or hybrid team can have a major impact on how you scale your business.
You may be reluctant, even now, but think about it. Do you really need people to work in your office? Consider how much we’ve all learned about remote operation since the early days of 2020. By now, it’s abundantly clear that productivity doesn’t suffer when you go remote. It can actually improve, with employees being happier and more autonomous.
And going remote doesn’t just mean letting your existing employees work from home. It also means opening up to international employees. If you can accept the prospect of hiring people who live overseas, you can create an operation with exceptional diversity — the kind that makes you money and raises the value of your company.
Not convinced? Well, stick around. In this post, we’re going to set out a few key ways in which remote employees can help you scale your business. Let’s get started.
They Can Provide Hard-To-Find Skills
The more you grow your business, the more you’ll need people with specific skills for your chosen niche. Generalists are only useful up to a certain point, after all. But when you reach the point of needing someone with a hyper-targeted set of skills, you may struggle to find the right person if you limit your search to candidates within commuting distance.
By considering people elsewhere in the country (or even abroad, as we’ll touch upon later), you can vastly increase your chances of finding exactly the skills you need. Yes, expanding your search will require you to up your game when it comes to employee compensation, but that’s all part of a good investment. Finding good hires warrants the expense.
Remember that you’ll always have the option of inviting new hires to commute on occasion. Remote employees can still benefit greatly from attending in-person meetings from time to time, and then there’s the social aspect. In truth, the future likely lies in hybrid working (facilitated by companies such as FLYDESK), with employees given great freedom to decide how and when they’ll work from the office.
They Can Help You Expand Overseas
Scaling a business inevitably starts with local growth, but it rarely ends there. If you really want to ramp things up, you’ll need to take your operation across national borders: maybe you want to establish an office in Canada, for instance, or think you could put together a compelling value proposition for the Spanish market.
If you want to move into a fresh market, though, you first need to come up with a comprehensive plan. After all, that value proposition isn’t the only factor: you also need to think carefully about everything from cultural knowledge to language barriers. Different countries conduct business differently. Fail to acknowledge this, and you’ll simply fail.
By onboarding employees who live in your target markets, though, you can pick up invaluable insight in addition to their core skills. It might seem overly challenging to hire such people due to legal complications, but these days it’s possible to bypass them through using an employer of record service. An EOR provider (Remote, for instance) can deal with everything from payroll to HR, leaving you to treat those employees just like all your others.
And once you’ve brought in the new employees, they can help you hone your strategies, converse with overseas contacts, and even set up new offices. It may take time to fully launch in another country, but having someone there early will smooth things out.
They Can Deliver Around-The-Clock Service
When companies scale, they need to add revenue faster than their costs rise — but how? Well, this largely relies on efficiency, and customer retention may be the most significant factor there. Loyal customers spend more, provide recommendations, and require less money spent on marketing. When your budget is stretched, they’ll keep you going. But if you’re going to keep them loyal, you need to be keenly responsive.
If a loyal customer asks you a question, they’ll expect their loyalty to be rewarded with a speedy answer — so facing silence will push them away, even if you’re just out of office hours. This is why there’s great value in having employees based in other countries (or simply working different hours). By assembling a diverse team, you can have someone available to help customers at all hours of the day (and night).
For the reasons we’ve mentioned here plus many more, remote employees provide invaluable benefits. With a workforce that spans beyond your office (and could extend around the world), you’ll be in a great position to achieve exceptional growth.
If you have questions relating to the content of this article, Rodney Laws would welcome the opportunity to answer them. Mr. Laws can be reached via email at rodney@ecommerceplatforms.io.
IBA, the Pacific Northwest’s premier business brokerage firm since 1975, is available as an information resource to the media, business brokerage, mergers & acquisitions, and real estate communities on subjects relevant to the purchase & sale of privately held companies and family owned businesses. IBA is recognized as one of the best business brokerage firms in the nation based on its long track record of successfully negotiating “win-win” business sale transactions in environments of full disclosure employing “best practices”.