How I outsourced 80% of my business while retaining the bulk of the profits (Case Study 1)

This post is for the Case-Study freaks among you. Whenever I make any claims, there will always be a ready group of individuals who will want to know, “Have you actually done it yourself?” and “Are there any case-studies to prove what you have just said?”

I’m running a sports coaching company which caters to the needs of the Ministry of Education schools in Singapore.

The site address is at www.SagaCoachingSingapore.com

How we started together as a team

While I was a teacher in a primary school, I was assigned as head in charge of the Track and Field School Team. Every Monday, Wednesday and some Fridays, I would come into constant contact with the coaches contracted by the school t o train the school team.

All 3 of them were Filipinos, one was the ex-coach of the Phillipines National Team, and the other, head coach of Phillipines Royal Navy.

Importance of retaining top talents


As fate would have it, we soon partnered up and I became their new employers, much to the disdain of their previous employers( Not to anyone’s fault though, because in business, you need to know how to not only attract, but to engage and retain top talents. Should I one day fail to do what I espouse, I know I will be losing these talents too)

There are certain identifiable aspects to running a coaching company. Firstly, I need to create enough business to pay these coaches and keep them happy in my organisation.

Secondly, I would need to upkeep the consistent branding of my coaching company which is : Performing Coaches who can still demonstrate both theory and practical aspects of athletics training.

Thirdly, I need to win new business and retain existing business from current won contracts.

What and how did i Outsource?


1)I instructed a Romanian freelancer online to scrape the emails of all the Head of Departments for CCAs and sports development of schools in Singapore. He was to enter these emails as well as the phone numbers and names of each HOD.

2)He entered these in an excel format, and sent me those in an email, and i paid him on an e-scrow basis.

3) I then hired a local student to call all these numbers and speak with each HOD, offering them a free 2 sessions of coaching with my coaches. ( I knew that if they viewed first-hand my coaches abilities, they would sign up the very same day!)

4)The student was also asked to do follow up calls and send direct mail to the schools, just in case they wanted something more document-like to showt o the decision-makers(School Principals etc)

In fact, 100% of the marketing efforts were undertaken by someone else. All i did was manage them and tell them what to do. It was automated.

When i needed to do some more marketing, all i did was wash, rinse and repeat the process again.

To this date, we have more requests for coaching than there are enough coaches.

Of course, the service has to be impeccable itself. My coaches are really GOOD. In a recent invitational, we participated in 9 events

Of that we got 6 Gold Medals and 4 Silver medals, a great achievement by any standards. It helped that we were sponsored by an oil and chemicals company which sponsored all our kits. Each runner had the words Saga Coaching Singapore on their backs.

After the medal awarding ceremony, word was buzzing around about who these new kids on the block “Saga Coaching” were.

My coaches also had offers to work with the Singapore Sports School! But as  i mentioned earlier in this post, you need to constantly work at retaining your top talents because there will always be eagle-eyed employers out there waiting to swoop and snatch your talents away.

For those of you who wish to read up more about retaining top talents, I highly recommend this book- Carrot Principles by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton which you can find in local bookstores or at Amazon.com

The take away lesson from this post is this- You should learn to outsource what needs to be outsourced. Your time is better spent elsewhere rather than scraping emails off websites, doing cold calling and sending direct mail.

The most important thing to do prior to outsourcing is to brainstorm exactly what processes you want to outsource. You cannot approach a freelancer and say “Hey, I want you to do anything that would increase my profits”

You need to be more specific” Hey, call this person for me, draw up this presentation of JPG format for me, crunch these numbers using Excel spreadsheet for me and so on”

Only then can outsourcing be an indispensable weapon in your marketing arsenal. Hopefully this post helps give you a better perspective at using your time better and achieving the type of lifestyle design you dream of.

If you need help learning how to outsource and delegate tasks, feel free to attend our Free MasterMind Session conducted on site each week!