How to Outsource Virtually Everything

How to Outsource Marketing

Echo Promotions knows all about marketing. The Edmonton company provides promotional supplies its clients use in their own marketing efforts. But Echo’s own marketing efforts are almost completely outsourced to Incite Solutions Inc., a company that goes beyond the usual services of an advertising or communications agency to tackle marketing functions traditionally kept in-house. Incite’s 25-person team includes specialists in communications, public relations, advertising, search optimization, and print as well as online graphic design, offering “an integrated approach to marketing,” explains Incite’s Jared Smith.

Incite’s business model taps into the financial and personnel limitations of most SMEs. “When SMEs think about a way to execute their marketing programs, they identify what they want – we need a good website, we need a good online program, we need a targeted marketing program – and then they say, ‘We need to hire someone to do that for us,’” says Smith. “But the challenge with that is that if you have a comprehensive marketing program, it’s highly unlikely you will find one individual with that complete skill set. You may end up hiring, and then outsourcing parts of it anyway.”

Incite’s marketers are not contractors you call to whip up a brochure for you over the weekend. The company’s ideal clients, says Smith, are companies that are serious and sophisticated about their marketing, have an individual in-house who will manage the Incite relationship, commit to a year-long contract and spend about $250,000 a year on marketing. Most of Incite’s clients spend $5,000 to $10,000 a month on their contracts. Think that’s too much? In the Alberta market today, that’s unlikely to get you one seasoned marketing professional on a full-time basis.

How to Outsource Finance

BRT Construction is a 50-person Calgary construction company that’s always “running about five people short,” says co-founder Brian Mack. It needs the extra bodies to do the day-to-day heavy lifting of company contracts. There’s no room for a chief financial officer on the payroll. (Nor really a CEO; Mack and his brother-partner eschew such titles for the more modest moniker of owner-manager.)

Five years ago, BRT landed a major, multimillion-dollar, multi-year contract with the City of Calgary. At the same time, it lost its regular accounting firm. While casting about for a replacement, Mack came across Stawowski McGill & Partners. “We just wanted them to do our regular CA [Chartered Accountant] work,” Mack says. “And then suddenly we stumbled onto the fact that we were in growth mode, and that they could do so much more for us.”

Stan Stawowski, SM&P’s founder and senior partner, prides himself on providing “a helicopter’s-eye view” of a company’s business. Its day-to-day financials are just the starting point. “We provide CFO services to clients, but over and above that we try to put a plan together that ties in to where owners want to take the company, where they personally want to go in the next one to five years,” Stawowski explains. It’s the forward-looking nature of their work that differentiates what SM&P does from conventional third-party accounting and audit services.

“CAs are focused on the historical growth of a company,” explains Stawowski. “Here’s your year-end financial statements; see you next year.” Stawowski used that approach himself in the past. But experience is a good teacher. “We found historical information is just about useless in helping a client look forward in their business,” he continues. “We realized that if we wanted to help clients move forward, we had to put a process in place to help them to do so. Instead of looking at the company through the rearview mirror, we needed to develop processes so that we were all looking forward through the windshield.” And shoulder-checking as needed.

Now, this isn’t outsourcing the way a manufacturing company might understand it. “It’s more like a mentoring thing,” says Mack. “At the beginning of the relationship, we used to do seminars with them to help us get organized and lay out the blueprint for the future of the company. Now, it’s different still, more like a partnership. They’ll tell you what you should do, what you could do. But they don’t tell you you have to do it.” That’s up to Mack and BRT. As is the execution.

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