Our Nightmare Outsourcing Stories
What you can learn from our pain
Last week, I mentioned how we're scaling our firm by finding great people to take on work.
We're moving away from asking ourselves "How?" and moving instead to asking ourselves "who?"
As in, "Who can figure out how to do this? Who can execute on it?"
This question has taken down the rabbit hole of outsourcing lots of work in our firm.
This ranges from accounting and bookkeeping, to sales and marketing, running critical business processes, and more.
The key has been to do this in a smart way.
In this post, I want to write about what NOT to do.
A nightmare of outsourced IT
Many ages back, we outsourced IT support to a vendor. They were local and they allegedly had lots of law firms as clients.
They were expensive, but we were told that their work is top notch. Except that it wasn't.
Their pace just didn't match ours.
We are a remote first firm. Our team works async. Our team members often travel extensively. They don't like being disrupted in the middle of their day. We don't have any on-premises servers. Everything we do exists in the cloud with smart policies.
We needed smart support, policies and strategies that recognized that. Instead, we got a clunky experience that was costing us a fortune.
We would be promised answers with the same time range as a cable technician (“we will call between 8 am to 5 pm so you can get reset with your login”). In other words, completely unhelpful.
We wrote to them to eventually express our frustration and forge a path ahead that made more sense. We put forth a few options and wanted to know if it made sense to move forward with these alternatives.
Instead, we got this gem of a message from their CEO who was not happy about us questioning their ways:
No phone calls, no explanations beyond this.
Just a simple: Our way or the highway!
Our Bookkeeping Experience
Many of you reached out last week to talk about accounting as a source of continued frustration. You wanted to know how we built this out as a small firm with an internatioal clientelle with fairly complex accounting requirements (as compared to a typical local firm).
We started the firm knowing that we didn’t have it in us to do it all. So right from the get-go, we outsourced bookkeeping to our accounting firm (at the time).
One thing we did not anticipate was the sheer turnover we would see. You really need to know the ins and outs of a company to know how to handle transactions routinely. This starts to fall apart unless you have excellent documentation or if you have longevity.
With our accounting firm, we had little of either. As complexities grew, they never bothered to create any documentation to make things easier as their personelle changes started to happen.
Transactions started getting miscategorized and we found ourselves fixing them. Their communication became scarcer.
They told us to invest in tools like Dext, which should theoretically make life much simpler for them in dealing with payables. Except that a bookkeeping company never invested in building any automations from these tools.
It boggles my mind how an accounting firm that recommended us certain tools never actually figured out how to use those tools, but here we were.
The bills started to accumulate, and the work kept sliding behind. Inaccuries kept piling up which we were fixing manually.
It wasn’t until we took things over ourselves that things stabilized. Bringing it in-house was no better. We had to find the right blend of talent + culture fit. We tried hiring full time local bookkeepers, but they just felt overwhelmed by the work and could not adapt to the situation.
What we learned from outsourcing badely.
Low Ego
We learned that the #1 thing we’re looking for is someone with low ego. If they’re too arrogant, they won’t adapt to our situation.
We want to learn best practices, but we also have questions and want to understand things ourselves.
When we encounter someone who isn’t willing to entertain that, we will fail. We now screen for this when we talk with outsourcing partners.
Longevity
We want to build relationships that will last. That is why we prefer to work with individual freelancers vs. big monolith companies (unless of course they are helping us source an individual freelancer who will work with us over the long run).
Personelle changes can ruin the work otherwise.
If this isn’t present, we look for partners who have a high documentation culture so we know that the work will transition over well.
Adaptability
We need someone who can present novel solutions and ideas to us. We don’t need people to just do work by rote.
We now have an excellent outsourced part time bookkeeper who manages our work. She gets more done in her part time hours then we got done having full time people on board.
She recommended changes and helped us understand them first. Through these tech changes, we reduced a lot of extraneous work. She knew her tools inside out and it helps us do more as well.
She was also curious to learn more about working with law firms. After a year of working with us, she’s learned plenty. (Aside: if you need a good bookkeeper, do message me).
What are your outsourcing nightmare stories? What are you hoping to outsources? Please continue to share your stories by leaving a comment below or replying to this email so I can account for it in the rest of these series.