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GO IT ALONE!

Krisan Marotta, has developed an expertise in providing this type of complex reporting. Krisan’s clients are quick to point out that it would cost them far more to hire and train a full-time reporting person—and to do so repeatedly because of high turnover, which would reduce the all-important time they can put into working with clients.
Krisan’s BackOffice has about 20 clients located in 16 U.S. states. Marotta says that working from her homeoffice, she makes “quite a good living. People will pay a lot for a job they know will be done well without supervision.” Her flexible work hours mesh well with her other very important job as a mom.

A full analysis of the different functions involved in the unbundling of the investment management business can be found in the book David Drucker wrote with Joel Bruckenstein, Virtual-Office Tools for a High-Margin Practice, and their newsletter Virtual Office News (www.virtualofficetools.net). It seems likely that this industry is unbundling faster than others because of the very distinct job functions and skills involved in what was formerly a single business. Each person can build a business around his or her particular skill and work as part of a chain, without needing physical proximity to the other members of the chain. Marotta, for example, has worked with clients for over a decade whom she has never met face-to-face. In essence, the decreased interaction costs (to borrow the terminology of Hagel and Singer) brought about by the use of low-cost Internet-based tools and communications make it more effective for these specialists to operate on their own.

Case Study: Spinning for Success

A second example of how specialization and unbundling are changing the shape of business involves one of 2004’s hottest

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