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Page 150 GO IT ALONE!
The founder, Joe Strahl, in fact, takes this one step further: “We always succeeded when we expanded [on the basis of] customer requests. Our mistakes typically happened when we expanded [on the basis of] our own ideas of what we thought we could do.” These interactions also serve as the best possible radar system for indicating if something is amiss in a firm’s operations. Unfortunately, most customers don’t tell business owners they are unhappy: They just move their business elsewhere. By doing everything possible to monitor customer satisfaction, these entrepreneurs work to ensure that their customers don’t unexpectedly disappear.
PLAN FOR AND EXPECT EVOLUTION Extreme outsourcing is a constantly evolving process. As businesses grow, new tasks and responsibilities naturally evolve. To allow the time to focus, expanding businesses must continuously look for opportunities to increase leverage by outsourcing additional activities. At the outset of the business, it may not make be feasible to outsource a variety of activities for several reasons. There may be functions that you don’t understand well enough to outsource at the start. You have to experience and work with them before you can create a system that can be followed by others. At the launch of a business, the volume of a specific activity may also be too small to warrant outsourcing it. However, as the business grows, this situation is likely to change. What’s important here is to have a plan from the outset for how and where specific activities will be outsourced once they reach sufficient volume. In its basic form, the idea of the experience curve, developed by the Boston Consulting Group, provides an added explanation
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GO IT ALONE! Copyright 2004 by Bruce Judson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
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