You Don’t Need Another Employee. You Need Access to the Right People.
There comes a point in a growing business when you know you need help.
The to-do list is ridiculous. Things are slipping. You’re doing work you absolutely should not still be doing and there are projects you’d love to move forward but nobody has the capacity.
So naturally, you start thinking:
Do I need to employ someone?
Maybe.
But before you start writing a job description, I’d ask a different question:
What do you actually need somebody to DO?
Because when we ask that question with clients, the answer is rarely one neat job.
They need someone to keep the CRM tidy.
Someone to create an email campaign.
Someone to update the website.
Someone to organise an event.
Someone to chase outstanding information.
Someone to manage a project.
Someone to create social content.
Someone to look at a process that clearly isn’t working and figure out a better way of doing it.
Oh, and while they’re at it, could they understand MailerLite, Canva, Trello, Squarespace, bookkeeping, spreadsheets and whatever random piece of software the business bought three years ago?
Good luck getting all of that into one job description. 😂
One salary doesn't magically create ten skillsets
This is where I think smaller organisations need to look differently at resourcing.
You might recruit an excellent administrator. But it would be completely unreasonable to expect that person to simultaneously be a marketing specialist, website editor, bookkeeper, CRM expert, event manager, project manager and strategic sounding board.
Yet businesses often try to recruit exactly that person.
And even if you find them, you're committing to a salary, Employer National Insurance, pension contributions, holiday, equipment, software, management time and all the other costs and responsibilities that come with employing somebody.
There is absolutely a place for employees. I am certainly not anti-employment.
But employment isn't automatically the right answer to every capacity problem.
Fractional support changes the equation
Fractional business support means accessing the expertise you need, in the amount you need it, without necessarily employing all of those skills internally.
That's essentially what we've built at Ducks In A Row.
Rather than one person trying to be brilliant at everything, we have a multi-skilled team.
If something needs bookkeeping expertise, it goes to the person with that skill.
If it's marketing, we use marketing expertise.
If it's systems, events, administration, CRM, email marketing or project support, we can match the work accordingly.
And if the problem needs stepping back and looking at the bigger picture first, that's where strategy comes in.
You're not buying one person's eight hours.
You're accessing a team.
Stop comparing hours
This is the bit I really want SMEs to understand.
If an employee takes five hours to complete something and an experienced specialist takes two, comparing their hourly cost tells you very little.
What did it cost to achieve the outcome?
How good was the result?
How much management did it require?
How quickly did it happen?
What did it allow everybody else to get on with?
Those are much more useful questions.
Don't buy hours because they look cheap. Buy the right capability to achieve the outcome you need.
Sometimes that means employing somebody.
Sometimes it means outsourcing.
And sometimes the smartest structure is a combination of both.
