Why do 56% of small businesses fail?
Very often the explanation is underfunding. They don’t have the funding or cash flow necessary to continue the work long enough to have a consistent income greater than outgo plus reserves. Reserves are very often the business owners personal credit cards or their home equity line. There are numerous nightmares of business owners using their home equity to finance their payroll.
Still more numerous are the one man shows that never scale because hiring the right people is just not in the budget. Overworked and often underpaid the business owner loses hope and closes up shop or files for bankruptcy.
While not all of these businesses could be saved, there certainly are quite a few that can. Very often, freeing up the owner’s time by off-shoring bookkeeping, marketing, follow-up or by supporting the owner with executive assistance can make the difference between business life or death and can certainly improve the quality of life for the owner.
Many small business owners are what businessman, investor and educator, Robert Kiyosaki in his Cashflow Quadrant calls the S-type or “Self-Employed” type. We know we can do it better than anyone and we often don’t feel there is any point in hiring and training staff. Yet, as business grows we get stretched thinner and thinner and quality or our health suffers or both. We become the bottleneck of our own businesses!
It can get pretty grim. As a business owner and manager I have fallen into this trap more than once and I’ve never been a believer in debt for payroll or any other business expense if it can be avoided. I had to find a solution to off-load certain hats so I could focus on the things that would build my businesses and it had to be within budget.
This is how I discovered micro off-shoring. I found I could hire an off-shore bookkeeper for less than minimum wage in U.S. for 5-10 hours weekly and save time and energy while improving the quality of my bookkeeping. Later, I found an Executive Assistant and was able to get tons of support with HR, quarterly filings, compilations of manuals and a myriad of other operational tasks. I’ve also had micro off-shore solutions for social media management, SEO and digital marketing management which worked great and may have cost me up to $3000 per month had I tried to get the same service within the usual framework.
While Bank of America, T-Mobile and other large U.S. corporations like Hewlett-Packard can afford to establish their own off-shore divisions on a large scale with hundreds or thousands of employees, small business owners have not had a reliable way to access foreign talent with security.
That’s why I teamed up with Prateek Manchanda and created Expansion Desk.
We provide off-shore talent at a scale that fits small to medium sized businesses and at a price that is within budget. Book a meeting with us to find out more.
by Jennifer Kelley Maas
Co-Founder Expansion Desk
Partner Chimney Clean Company