Tenders are often done in high-stress situations, with never enough time in a working day, and deadline squeeze is typical. The kind of commitment you need to get a winning tender in the submission box on time - and on a continuous basis - I don't think you're likely to find in a nine-to-five waged or salaried person.
So we have a contractor model with people working from their own place. It means they're rewarded handsomely for their commitment and can work at a time and in a style that suits them.
Once our people are fully up to speed, they have a huge degree of autonomy, but unlike being a solo contractor or starting up a business by yourself I think there are some major benefits.
So, for example, they have a bunch of colleagues to help and guide them when the going gets tough, ongoing training and the ability to take a break because there are others to cover their work while they're away.
How do make this system work for your business?
We aim to maximise the billable time of each person, so that usually means they're working on two, three or more projects at once. There are often lulls in a project during the timeline, while others are reviewing or preparing material, and it's good to fill those lulls with billable work from another project.
We also generally work in small teams - two or three is typical. This mitigates the likelihood of the proverbial hitting the fan at the last minute - and we all have to work simultaneously on different sections of the document, to get it done on time. To do this effectively, we need to have very tight common standards for our writing and formatting style.
Also, we need to have a pretty rigid way of managing these fast-paced projects, so that handovers are smooth and there's no double-up. This means we have strict standards to be learned for every consultant on our team, which is more like an employment model.
What are some of the ways you get your independent contractors working together as a team?
We coordinate the week's activities with a conference call every Monday and a document that captures everyone's availability over the coming weeks, so we know who we can call on if we're stuck, and who may need help to meet a deadline.
We also ask everyone to commit to around three team days each year, which we use for training, team building and planning across the whole team. Plus we have social events from time to time - generally for the Auckland crowd, a bit hard for others in Christchurch, Nelson, Wellington and Northland to make it to those, but they do if they can.
What benefits have you seen in terms of retention in the business by using this model?
There's a hurdle to coming on board and getting up to speed, but in general since we started building the company seriously around seven years ago, we've had an exceptionally high retention rate.
Our model has been really successful for those people who have tried starting their own business but have found the other tasks involved with making a business work are difficult - things like chasing money, setting up websites and finding ongoing work. It's also worked particularly well for people who want to escape the corporate world and replace it with something that's interesting, fits around their families and lifestyles, but is challenging and still lucrative.
What role does the recruitment process play in making this model work?
Recruiting is hard. It's partly because just about everybody thinks they can write tenders; a lot of people fail to understand the depth of business acumen, group facilitation, team and project management, and communication skills that's needed alongside writing skills.
So we need to go all-out to get the right people from the start. Our process involves phone interviews, responding in writing to questions, face-to-face interviews, providing samples of their work, and doing an exercise of writing a proposal to our standards.
If they get through all that, there's a trial period - usually of two to four weeks - during which we coach them intensively and give them a mixture of billable work with some learning. They come to grips with our manual and prove it by writing a quiz on a section of the manual. At the end of a few weeks, we generally have a good idea if it will suit us all.
What's a key piece of advice you would have for other business owners wanting to find and keep good staff?
Think laterally about the type of people that will be successful in your business, then consider a range of possible working styles and see what you can offer. More and more people don't want to spend hours commuting and they want freedom to work around family commitments, or to button back in retirement, or to do other things as well. But it doesn't mean they won't contribute amazingly to your business.
Coming up in Your Business: Trade shows are part of the marketing mix for many businesses. So what are some of the strategies companies use to get the most out of their investment in attending these kinds of events? If you've got some experiences to share, drop me a note: nzhsmallbusiness@gmail.com
