Communication key to working in the low cost arena

A friend of mine, Amber, with a micro business was looking to get a new website built on a teeny tiny budget. She contacted a mutual acquaintance who was keen to help and the two of them worked out an arrangement to keep costs low.

The two friends agreed that Amber would do the website “grunt” work herself and then she would pass the almost complete project over to the maestro, Belinda, who would then just do the special bits that needed her expertise.

The project included selecting pictures and writing copy for the website. Amber said she would do both these parts.

All seemed to be going well. Amber delivered the pictures and copy to Belinda and Belinda incorporated them into the website as instructed. The draft website was now ready for reviewing so Belinda sent Amber the link and, well that’s when things started to fall apart.

Amber was terribly disappointed with the website. It simply didn’t have the look and feel that she was hoping to achieve. On a detailed level she was horrified to see that the pictures she’d sent through were of poor quality and the copy – well it just looked all sort of wrong on the page.

Amber was the first to call me, she felt very let down by Belinda and “couldn’t believe she had done such a poor job”. The following day I bumped into Belinda who told me what a nightmare she was having working with Amber, saying, “She wanted to do the work herself to keep costs low but you should have seen the rubbish she sent through to me to work with”.

The website eventually got finished with much to-ing and fro-ing between Amber and Belinda. Both ladies felt short-changed, Belinda because she had to put so many unpaid hours into the project and Amber because she had to do so much work herself.

Providing a cheap service, or using a cheap service, is certainly not an easy option but it’s one that many of us choose. Stories like this are very common so here are some tips if you are thinking of going down that path.

If you want to buy low cost service you have to:

• Be prepared to take directions from the service provider.
• Put in a solid amount of work yourself.
• Re-do the work that you do yourself until it is of the right standard.
• Be very clear with your instructions and leave no ambiguities.
• Understand that the low cost means only low cash outlay to the service provider, there may be a high internal time cost.

If you want to sell low cost service you have to:

• Detail exactly what is included and excluded from the service.
• Be very clear with your instructions and leave no ambiguities.
• Have a ‘boilerplate” process that you don’t waiver from.
• Be bold enough to return poor work to the client for them to re-do.

Communication is the key to working in the low cost arena. I hear many stories of successes and failures of people outsourcing work through low cost internet based services such as eLance. An ex-Nay officer friend gets the best results I’ve seen through eLance and I have no doubt that it is because she is a straight talking, highly disciplined, take-no-nonsense communicator. She’s had good training.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses:Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).