SOI Case Study

How we’ve helped businesses grow

Your Corner Group

Don’t waste the talents of your $80-$100k/yr staff

Matthew Brown is the Managing Director of Your Corner Group – a Sydney & Gold Coast based boutique financial services company.  The business encompasses all things financial including financial planning advice, accountancy advice, debt advice, legal, property investment and property education all under the one roof.

In short, it’s a ‘family CFO’ service that teaches its clients how to make money.

“So what’s been one of your greatest business challenges Matthew?”

There are three main challenges when it comes to running a business;

  1. Time management
  2. Staff resourcing
  3. Allocation of capital (or money if you like).

I’ve been running Your Corner Group for nearly 15 years, and around four years ago, we were facing challenges in two of the three.

I was pretty fed up with hiring low skilled people to just answer the phone. That role had a high turnover rate because typically people in those roles in small business bounce around. It was doing my head in. I just needed to have a system in place where all of our phones got answered, all the time – regardless of holidays, sick days, lunch or anything else that might get in the way. I really also wanted the ability to be able to shut things down for an hour or three so that everyone could be involved in important tasks or meetings without interruption.

I’m a big believer in outsourcing so I thought why not outsource answering the phone?

When it happens a lot, you’re essentially paying your $80-100K a year staff members their salaries just to answer the phone and take messages.  

It’s a huge waste of resource and talent.

 

“Was there a final catalyst or did it gradually evolve?”

There was one day where we were just really short staffed and I thought “right, that’s it – enough.” I’d heard of SOI’s services, called them and Roland fixed us up with a virtual receptionist in record time. It was that easy.

“How long ago was that?”

Three years!

 “What’s been the biggest benefit of working with SOI?”

In our business, we do what I call “deep work” where we’re working on the analysis of a lot of financial information. Our senior staff calculate people’s financial well-being or their debt servicing ratios. That’s really focussed work that they can’t be interrupted in the middle of and especially not to just answer the phone to explain something as basic as why they chose to reconcile something a particular way or an interest rate change.

Every time you get distracted, it takes you out of that deep work.

When it happens a lot, you’re essentially paying your $80-100K a year staff members their salaries just to answer the phone and take messages.

It’s a huge waste of resource and talent.

Especially if, you’ve got high call volumes being taken by your higher skilled workers, you don’t get any revenue generation work done.

“So how does it work now that SOI answer all your calls?”

Now we group or bulk those phone and admin tasks together.

SOI will take messages for two hours whilst revenue generation work – deep work or meetings – happen.

Then, at the end of a ‘deep work’ block, that staff member might have five e-mails from SOI regarding calls that have come in or tasks that require actioning they need to attend to. The staff member is then able to get that done in a 30 minute block then go back into a deep work scenario.

There are no more issues of stop, lose focus, start again, stop, lose focus, start again.

“What does that mean for your business?”

Much higher productivity for all of our staff. And that translates into better returns on the financial investment in our staff.  And that’s much better for the business.

Plus on a personal note – as a business owner, it’s freed up a lot of my personal time to be doing more, higher value tasks – especially around revenue generation or strategy – and not having to worry about staff turnover in lower level admin roles.

“Any other outcomes you weren’t expecting?”

Yes, actually it allowed us the time to properly train our admin team members and get them doing the admin work. When you’re caught on the fly, you just think it’s going to be easier to do it all yourself. So you do. So then you’re paying your admin staff and you’re doing the admin work anyway. That’s just madness. Allowing SOI to take our calls means we can figure out who’s best to handle the work and we can say “I’ll get so and so to get that to you”.

It’s not that we don’t want to talk to our clients. It’s just that it works so much better from a productivity point of view when you have a list of who you’re going to talk to, you’re prepared for the call and you can just batch everything up together. There’s no stop, start, less anxiety. And the most appropriate person is doing what needs to be done.

“Are there any other benefits SOI can provide a business?”

SOI can definitely make a solopreneur look like a large well-established business – regardless if you’re just starting up or you’ve been in business a while. They’ll give you full-time receptionists, access to meeting rooms in the CBD and you can have post office addresses in multiple different locations so they can definitely make a small business look a lot larger than what it is.

They can also make a small-medium sized business not have to focus on their lower skilled staff. That means you can put more time and attention into hiring and nurturing the A-grade players on your team.

“So summing up?”

At the end of the day, it’s about cost-benefit analysis. Look at the cost benefit analysis of employing a $45K/yr receptionist compared to a $100-$200 a month package, depending on your call volume. All your calls are answered, every day, without fail and no more admin staffing headaches!

When you put it like that, it’s an easy decision.

Your Corner Group uses SOI’s Virtual Receptionist service and its CBD offices in addition to their Manly office.

Contact us today to tailor a solution for your business.