What is outsourcing 2.0 and how can it help your business?

This week I appeared on the small business segment on Sky News and they asked me about the trend of people outsourcing internationally. I used the term outsourcing 2.0, which I believe is the actual trend that they referring to, but people aren’t aware what it actually is.

Outsourcing is not new. People and businesses have been outsourcing things for many years. When you outsource something, I believe you hand over all responsibility of a task or process to someone else and expect a certain result or product at the end without having to be involved during the process. 

So what do I mean by outsourcing 2.0?

Searching for the best value talent from around the world and bringing them into your business to do a particular role. Modern technology, communications and connectivity have broken down the barriers of physical locations. Rather than only being able to search for a particular skill set wherever you and your business are physically located, you can now search the world for that talent.

This is a huge blessing for Australia as we are in a country which has a very small population, limited skill sets in particular areas, high wages and also grandiose expectations of entitlement.

By believing in this philosophy and opening our eyes to the possibilities and opportunities out there, we have revolutionised our business Wealth Enhancers by recruiting a global team. For the first time we now know that we can do what every entrepreneur wants to do – SCALE

So how did we go about this? 

We initially recruited a graphic designer from Bolivia and a developer from Romania from a recommendation from a friend who had used them before. We had such a great experience with them and achieved amazing results (the website won a best financial website in Australia award) that we decided to try finding other roles that we required through oDesk. We had mixed results, and like any recruitment, we realised there is a particular skill required.

We then came across a new startup called Grow My Team, which has a motto of finding you ridiculously good staff at great prices. We thought we would give it a try and we successfully hired our first Filipino team member, Michelle, who is still with us today. We now “outsource” all of our recruitment and ongoing administration management of international team members to Grow My Team and across all our companies we have made over 30 hires.

All of these hires are fully integrated into our team and we have to manage them just like we do with our Australian staff. We don’t hide them, in fact, we make a point of advertising that we have an international team and introduce them to our members because we are proud of what we have done and know that it has greatly improved our business.

After the experience of Wealth Enhancers we finally had the confidence to launch our new business WE LOVE NUMBERS, which is effectively a combination of outsourcing 1.0 and 2.0. You outsource the worry of your numbers to us and then we utilise outsourcing 2.0 to build an amazing team which can help grow your businesses.

So next time you find yourself complaining about how a particular team member is not performing, or how you can’t find a particular skill set or how much wages are here. Stop! Start thinking global and go leverage all of the amazing people located around the world.

Finn Kelly is the CEO and co-founder of award-winning Gen Y financial advisory firm,Wealth Enhancers, along with the parent company, premier private wealth management firm WE Private.