This is the age of outsourcing.
Companies outsource website design,
homeowners outsource patching the roof,
and throughout the economy independent
contractors wrestle with issues of
branding, warding off bigger
competition, and trying to grow good
ideas into big businesses.
Suddenly, contingent, on demand,
flexible workforces – contract labor
that is available to solve urgent issues
– is what cost-conscious organizations
crave. One irony: many contracting jobs
now are among the best because, simply
put, cleaning up a flooded basement
cannot be subcontracted to Bangalore,
India. That said, however, significant
profits continue to be made by cleverly
riding the offshoring wave, where work
shifts to lower-wage labor markets and
companies unafraid of distance cut
costs, sometimes with no lessening of
work quality.
The reality is that in today’s economy,
just what and who is involved in
contracting is fast morphing but the
good news for entrepreneurs is that
there are potentially big profits to be
had by thinking far ahead.
Cases in point:
Again and Again
Is a 60 year-old chemist washed up? Day
in, day out, Indianapolis-based
YourEncore.com proves the
absurdity of that. On one hand,
YourEncore CEO Brad Lawson has lined up
a blue-chip roster of client companies –
Procter & Gamble, Eli Lilly, and Boeing
among them – and on the other hand he
has located close to 4000 retired
technical professionals (chemists,
engineers, computer scientists) and the
building block idea is that these
retirees do not want fulltime
employment, but would they be turned on
with the chance to join a high-energy
team helping a major company solve a key
problem? You bet they would be, and
since October, 2003, YourEncore –
founded with prompting by P & G and Eli
Lilly, says Lawson – has taken on
hundreds of assignments, often on short
notice. For instance, when Hurricane
Katrina knocked out a major coffee plant
and nobody had a template for getting
back into production, YourEncore pulled
together a team that – inside 48 hours –
was on the ground in Louisiana. “We had
six, sometimes eight people who worked
three months down there,” says Lawson.
YourEncore’s sweet spot is retirees who
are in their late fifties into their
late sixties – “but we have some who are
well into their eighties,” interjects
Lawson – and the attraction goes beyond
the money they are paid. For many, it’s
about doing important, interesting work
but doing it on their own terms (perhaps
four hour days, or maybe it is working
three days a week). “At any given time
we have around 300 individuals working
on assignments,” says Lawson, who says
that the companies that use YourEncore
are particularly drawn to the depth of
longitudinal knowledge of these
retirees. They not only know what is new
in, say, polymer chemistry but they
remember when this was a newer field
and, sometimes, that in-depth insight is
exactly what is needed to solve a knotty
problem that, so far, has stymied the
regular work force. “Our people want to
contribute at a high level and that is
exactly what the assignments we take on
let them do,” says Lawson.
