Almost every week I read a little newsletter by someone called Guy Singh Watson.
Guy is the gentleman who set up Riverford organic farming and is an inspiration in the organic farming world and beyond.
His blog that he writes and publishes and sends with his vegetable boxes is one of the things that I look for every week to read, and Alison always leaves it on the side for us both to share.
I've learnt a lot from Guy about business and about how to treat your staff and about how to look after your customers and about how to build a tribe, but this weeks was an astonishing one about outsourcing, which reminded me about something that I learned years ago that has just stuck with me and ran with me through my business.
In the early days of organic farming, Guy Watson used to have to meet people in a lay-by to hand over cauliflowers to trucks in order to get them to market, such was the difficulty in distribution of minority foods of low value.
That was until he met a guy who owned a haulage firm who decided to work exclusively with Riverford because he liked them as a business and liked their ideals and they have worked side by side for many years now, building an extraordinary network and business.
Recently, though, his friend and colleague decided it was time to retire, and so they had a decision to make.
They decided to bring the haulage firm into Riverford and make everyone co-owners in the already co-owner structure that they have in Riverford as a company because controlling distribution is so fundamentally important and making sure your customers get their products on time is absolutely critical.
He wrote in his blog about how many modern companies now don't actually do anything apart from retain intellectual property, branding and finance and everybody else sources and manufacturers, and delivers without them even seeing a product.
I'm struck by the business model of Wattbike, who are a huge favourite of British cyclists and many cyclists around the world and are based at the top of my rode in a tiny industrial unit.
I often wondered how they could possibly manage to sell enough Wattbikes from that little space, only realising that they never really see a Wattbike in that space at all and everything just passes from contractors.
The problem with contractors is you enter into a world of trying to drive down price and everything is short term contracts for the lowest value, and everything gets screwed down, including your brand.
This reminded me of an instinctive move that we strategically made at the very early stages in our little bungalow of bringing people ‘in-house’.
We currently have four people who work in our marketing department (in a dental practice!) and this will almost certainly grow.
We have our own compliance manager and our own general manager, and we do all our own HR with very limited external advice.
Almost all of our marketing is internally driven, and we now do our own BLS training and are moving towards doing our own ILS training.
We did have our own laboratory set up but found that really hard to work but the reason we'd set up in the first place was exactly the same reason as Guy had brought the haulage company into his business.
The more you can control the quality yourself, the more you can control your brand.
I watch many industries spring up around dentistry, encouraging us all to outsource everything that we have, from our marketing to our lab work to our compliance, we can even run our dental teams from agency, not really having to worry about HR for dental teams and just pulling people in as we need.
But in the end, there is no loyalty, and, in the end, there is no one in your business who understands the story that you're trying to tell.
There is a place for outsourcing, but it has to be carefully considered, and the quality has to be checked and controlled.
Just cutting costs by giving it to someone else to do is never the way to best serve the people you seek to serve.
Blog Post Number - 3389
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