FlexWork Case Study: Operational Efficiency and Cost Savings with Offshore Hiring
Executive Summary
This product is the fastest way for resellers to sell more of their products. They've built an AI-powered platform to help automate the inventory and product listing process to drastically reduce the time it takes for resellers to manage their listings.
Part of the listing process requires human intervention for verifying data points and cross-posting listings across multiple platforms. Before FlexWork, this was handled primarily by the founders, which was incredibly time-consuming and took them away from the core part of their business - making their product better and easier to use.
With FlexWork, they were able to minimize the founders’ time spent on data and admin work, so they could repurpose their time to focus on product development, fundraising, and strategy.
Client Background
This is an early-stage startup based out of San Francisco, CA. They’re building a listing automation platform allowing eCommerce resellers to improve the operational efficiency of their business.
Business Challenges
The primary challenge that they were facing was the increasing demand of customers who requested product listings to be created. Each customer they onboarded meant an increased weekly workload of product listings, which took up at least 20+ hours a week to help on average fulfill. It was incredibly time-consuming for the founders to take on this work themselves.
They’ve hired offshore talent in the past but didn’t have much success as they struggled to find someone that can maintain a high quality of work and reliability to ensure they were meeting their customer SLAs.
Our Solution
Given these challenges, we had successfully sourced, screened, and placed a virtual assistant who had experience working in their specific industry and handling high-volume data entry for online products.
After a week of onboarding and training on their custom software, the virtual assistant was able to take on the majority of the inbound work, alleviating 20+ hours a week on average of the founders’ time.
This allowed the founding team to focus on other higher-value tasks, such as improving their product, developing new features, and fundraising.
Implementation
- The first step of the process was understanding the company's needs and pain points in a discovery call. We dove deep into their business model and understood what type of work this team member would be expected to do on a daily basis.
- After that, we were able to align on a scope of work and determine what skills would be necessary for this team member to be successful.
- Once this was solidified, our recruiting team spent a week sourcing and screening qualified candidates who would be a potential fit for what we needed.
- We then presented them two qualified candidates before they made a decision on moving forward with one of them.
Results
1. Significant Time Savings
By leveraging FlexWork, the founding team was able to save an average of 20 hours per week working on redundant, administrative tasks.
2. Scalability and Flexibility
FlexWork was able to scale up and down based on the client’s needs, which depended on their own customers’ listing requests through the product.
3. Quality Talent Acquisition
We were able to place talent that already had experience with the online product listing process and platforms, which helped reduce onboarding time significantly.
Client Testimonial
“The onboarding process with FlexWork was super simple and clear. Our team got a lot of time back to focus on product strategy, development, and fundraising, which were critical to keep growing our business.”
- Neek, Co-founder at Stealth Startup
Lessons Learned
One key takeaway for us and the startup was that setting up clear process documentation and onboarding was critical for the success of their new team member, Mary. Not only did this help improve the effectiveness of Mary early on, but it’s also an investment for future hires that will take on a similar scope of responsibility.
Future Collaboration
The startup is planning to continue partnering with FlexWork to hire additional team members offshore in 2024 to help scale their operations and keep their overhead low.
About FlexWork
FlexWork is your company’s cost-effective solution to scaling your team. We help companies place the top 5% offshore talent across sales, customer support, and admin work.
