Scale or Break? What Would Happen If Your Food Equipment Service Business Got Flooded With Extra Service Requests Overnight?

Here’s a thought experiment that should be fun if you’re running a Food Equipment Service business.

If you snapped your fingers and received an extraservice requests every month:

? Besides technicians, which roles would you need to “clone” to fulfil that new demand

? Which roles would be needed to create that demand in the first place?

In general terms (again, except technicians) any role that you’d need to “clone” to fulfil a spike in demand is a good candidate for having it remotely.

Whereas roles that create that demand tend to be more strategic, and fewer in number, and best handled in-house.

So, let’s break these down.

Roles that create demand

Starting from the last question, roles that create demand are usually:

? Key account managers that win new accounts, and suddenly add 50 new grocery stores to the book of business.

? Executives that negotiate a partnership with a manufacturer that adds 500 new installations per year.

? District managers that handle services in an area so well that they reduce customer churn and keep 1000s of service requests per month.

These roles are creative, strategic, high-touch, and few in number.

We could add team leaders and middle managers in this group as well, as people who manage the teams that fulfil on that new demand.

These are the core competencies, and needle-movers in a Food Equipment Service business, and these make absolute sense to keep locally and in-house.

Once that new demand is generated, and there are team leads in place, I will argue that almost every role that fulfills that demand can (even should) be handled remotely — except for technicians, of course.

Multiplying fulfillment

If you have a spike of work orders, and granted that you had the technicians to service them, you would need to multiply things like:

? Sending estimates

? Picking up the phones

? Managing portal requests

? Ordering parts

? Sending invoices

? Following up on invoices

? Collecting past due dollars

? etc, etc.

ALL of these are procedural, fairly non-creative tasks that could be handled by anyone with access to the right tools and having the right SOPs.

If handled locally and in-house, these roles tend to slow down scalability because you’d need to match the spike in demand with:

? More office space

? More desks

? More hardware

? Even more HR just to get the extra people in

Instead, having a remote team put together and co-managed by a company like Origo, allows you to scale that back-office fulfillment almost as fast as demand comes.

You don’t need more office, more desk, more hardware, or even more HR.

Just one phone call to your client success manager, and consider it done.

Breaking Down Roles Into Tasks

Another source of clarity when deciding which roles to have remotely can come from splitting roles into tasks.

If you take any role in your back office, and divide it into tasks…

? Which tasks play against the employee’s zone of genius?

If a role has 10 tasks, and most of the in-house people do tasks 1-through-7 expertly and with high motivation, but dread the last 3 tasks which drain all their energy…

Then that’s also a good indication that those tasks could (should!) be handled remotely.

I can assure you that there’s remote workers that will LOVE to do those last 3 tasks that the in-house staff loathes.

? Which tasks break the ideal workflow?

Following the example above, what tools are needed to perform those 10 tasks?

If tasks 1-through-7 can be done within the same tool, but then tasks 8, 9, and 10 require each a separate platform, a different kind of files, a completely different process…

Then maybe those tasks could be batched and taken care of overnight by a remote team that takes care of it and clears the queue for the day shift.

In both of the cases above, the in-house workers get to work more efficiently, be more productive, have less errors, and have a better employee experience.

Replacing Juniors And Temp-Hires

Before I get any backlash, I’m not saying to NOT give juniors a chance.

If you are hiring juniors and interns to groom them into full-time employees, then develop their careers as managers etc, then by all means they must be local and in-house.

But if there are tasks that are considered low-value enough, and require low expertise so that a junior or intern can do them, and you resort to hiring juniors as a cost-saving strategy...

Then I guarantee you there’s someone remotely who can do that job expertly AND at an even lower cost than a junior.

The same goes for temporary summer hires and such…

All of these are great indicators that those tasks would be done:

? At a much higher quality

? At the same or lower cost

? And without having to manage the employee turnover

Conclusion

If you’re:

? In a growth phase, needing to scale fulfillment

? Or want to make your local staff more productive and happy

? Or find yourself hiring temporary staff, juniors and interns mainly as a cost-saving strategy…

Then leveraging remote teams will remove most of the headaches that come with all of these, and allow you to keep quality high, and develop your core competencies.

So, if you want to discuss how remote teams can give you a competitive advantage — the same advantage that some of the TOP players in the Food Equipment Service industry already enjoy…

Then send me a message and I’ll help you put together the best strategy to get started.

In your corner,

Scott McGrath