LeadingFocus.com
Executive Decisions That Make A Difference
This website is an online collection of quarterly newsletters drawn from real-world experience, sharing the stories of executive decision and the results.
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Sean@LeadingFocus.com
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LeadingFocus · Executive Experience That Makes A Difference
LeadingFocus 
Really like the website. This is top notch!
Curious to learn about what Sean thinks about companies that outsource their non-core competency functions – i.e purchasing.
Wow Jenn, that’s uncanny!
I write the quarterly posts on this blog ahead of time, and the next one up is a quotation from Peter Drucker, when he discussed in 1995, projecting that within 10-15 years, more people working at some corporations might be employees of an outsourcing contractor and not of the actual employer…
I find that especially when growing a company’s market share, the best business plan is to outsource non-core competencies. I ran a marketing company. When consulting with large clients, our role was to launch new projects, which contractor corps can do without adding overhead and decision from client companies. When working for mid-size and small companies, we often performed functions they could have added in-house, but not as cheaply.
In short, I’m a big fan of hiring a professional to do any work where I’m not a superstar: pay a stylist to cut your hair, a lawn care company to landscape your property, and accountants to handle your taxes. Sure, they can charge something, but the time, effort and energy you save goes directly into what you are the best at, growing your top-line revenue!
Agreed. As a Business Development Director of a BPO model — outsourced print procurement group – companies are all taking a good hard look as to how they are making and managing their purchasing decisions — in this case print. I have some front line examples of what a company thinks, considers when talking to a BPO – what their pains are, fears are etc when calling in experts to manage. It can be an interesting psychological play – the response when an outsource model comes in– clients need to understand that, its not about removing people from the mix – but in my case, supplementing their team with tools – plethora of solid data that assists them – enabling to buy better. Once companies get the personal sometimes, ego out of the way – BPO is a perfect tool.
This quarter’s focus is on outsourcing, and the benefits of targeting parts of a business that can be performed more effectively once ego is out of the equation and teams can make leaps forward by playing to their strengths. Thanks Jenn for raising this truly important point!