In the good old days of the dot-com boom, CyberBritian.com, my holding company, had twenty staff in a luxury office block in the West End of London. We shared space with twenty or so other start-ups at the incubation company Cube8.
We were the last to move out of the offices, which once housed two hundred staff operating some of Britain's leading internet firms.
When we moved out, together with my co-CEO, I was forced to make the whole of the team redundant and slowly but surely outsource all of the services that they previously provided. The aim was to create a truly virtual company, where I could find business and then get other companies to actually do the work for us in our name.
I have previously written about call-answering, where I use a British-based company, Anserve, to manage my incoming calls in my company's name. However, there is much more that the internet can offer, reducing the need for staffing and associated costs.
Outsourcing sales
For a start, I decided to outsource the sales activities of the businesses.
One of the problems with employing sales staff is that you have to pay them even if they don't come up with any leads or sign any deals. I decided, after many a meeting, to opt for a friendly company called EDM Media, who are based in the same office building as my father's law firm (always handy for a visit and a free lunch).
EDM, a Dutch company with offices all over Europe, sell the data that my websites collect. They take their commission off the sale price, so they only get paid when they make a sale. This is a huge incentive to actually make sales.
Software programmers in Britain are expensive. The downside of employing one full-time is that you have to pay him or her regardless of your current need for programming skills.
You can employ someone on a per-project basis, paying a fixed price for a program and not paying an hourly rate. There are scores of websites that offer company owners the opportunity to post a project and then receive bids from programmers to complete the work. In the past I have used sites such as Scriptlance.com as and CgiLance.com.
There is a negative side to using these websites, the vast majority of the bidders will have a poor grasp of English. So you must make your project specification as simple to understand as possible.
You don't, however, have to accept the lowest bidder. Indeed it is often best to chose someone who bids a realistic amount as you can probably be more certain that they'll actually complete the work.
