Easy Tricks To Expand Headcount Without Overhead

In a company, you often have a requirement to expand your headcount quickly. You need to add more people so you can develop systems and provide customers with a better quality of service. Adding traditional full-time employees can often bring a lot of baggage and overhead. Many companies wind up paying two and a half to three times the salary of the new employees, just on additional expenses associated with hiring them. This is obviously extremely inefficient, and it would be best if there was a solution. 

Fortunately, there is. Many companies now use various e-centrics to expand headcount without the usual overhead. Here's what they're doing:

Using strategic blueprints

The first thing they're doing is looking at whether they can increase their functional headcounts without actually increasing their real on-the-books payroll headcounts, but how is this done?

A lot of firms are using fractional executives and experts. Strategic leadership is easier to arrange than ever before because of the presence of CMOs, CFOs, and outsourced HR firms. These options charge an hourly rate or a retainer, but they come with zero long-term liability. There's low operational risk because you're not paying the full price of bringing on one of these professionals full time. Instead, all of the deliverables are clearly and structurally defined.

Another approach is to hire freelancers from on-demand networks. These are perfect for project-based tasks like writing and website development. They're a purely variable cost, so you only pay for the outputs you require. The quality is often medium, but freelancers don't require a huge amount of active management.

Business process outsourcing is another option. This is perfect for startups that want to remain lean for as long as possible. For example, you can get business process outsourcing for customer support and data entry. This massively reduces the cost per unit of labour, but the risk can be high if the outsourcing firm isn't properly training staff.

Lastly, there's the option of university and MBA practicums. These facilitate market research, data analysis, and specialised audits. The cost for these is almost zero because the incentive is academic credits. You need to have the right types of tasks available to incentivise students to take them on.

Set up your pipeline for success

Once you know which strategies you're going to use to expand your headcount, the next step is to set up your pipeline for success. Expanding operational capacity without hiring permanent staff requires a certain degree of know-how.

1. Document and isolate the workflows you want to automate. Before you bring in any external help, figure out the standard operating procedure for each task and what you'd like done.

2. Establish clear boundaries with your team of outsourced helpers. Provide them with scopes of work and service level agreements (SLAs), and tell them exactly what you expect from them. Provide them with communication channels they can use if they have any questions.

3. Provide them with the asynchronous tools you need. You don't want your work to be limited to specific Notion pages. Instead, you need tools that they can access independently and openly so that they can operate with the most autonomy possible.

Use inexpensive facilities expansion

If you do have to hire somebody, the best option is to use inexpensive facilities expansion. Trying to cram more people into a claustrophobic office space is not a good idea, even if you think you can shove an extra desk into a small outboard. Don't take this approach because it comes across as cheap, and staff can sometimes feel mistreated. Instead, think carefully about how you are going to expand your headcount without all of the usual overhead.

One of the best ways to do this is with portable cabins. Allow you to add additional office space almost immediately, especially if you use off-the-shelf options. Even if you don't want an off-the-shelf solution, you can commission a portable cabin. Construction and delivery can sometimes be in as little as a month or two.

Use cross-industry talent sharing

You might also want to look into the concept of cross-industry talent sharing. This is where you literally share employees with other business owners.

For example, let's say one company hires the employee full-time and handles the legal side. The other company can then contract out their time for, say, 20 hours a week at an agreed-upon rate. This means that you can use the employee's time more efficiently, and you're not having to deal with the administrative costs of actually employing them.

The employee benefits from this arrangement because they get more full-time stability. Both SMEs access top-tier talent at 50% of the cost.

Use an AI employee buffer

You could also look into the option of using an AI employee bot. This concept is relatively new, and hardly any businesses have figured out how to use it effectively yet. The technology is definitely there. Here's how it works:

1. Isolate the triage work. Identify where your current team spends most of their low-leverage time, like moving data from a web form to a spreadsheet or sorting customer emails.

2. Deploy native webhooks and integration. Connect your tech stack using Make or Zapier to automatically fulfil the task that's currently being done manually.

3. Use an AI agent tool to manage the workflow. For example, you can get them to read incoming text from customers, summarise it, and then draft responses for humans to review. This can massively cut down on the amount of time people spend writing emails. It's also an incredibly cheap option, depending on the AI agents and systems that you use.

Leverage geo-arbitrage

The final strategy we'll introduce here is the concept of leveraging geo-arbitrage. Do you really need to hire somebody locally in a Western country to do a task that somebody in South Asia or South America could do for you for a fraction of the cost? Geo-arbitrage is something that many companies are now using in locations like the Philippines, India, and Argentina. These countries tend to have low wages but high education levels, making them ideal destinations for working with employees overseas.

Image source: Campaign Creators, Vital Gariev and Brooke Cagle via Unsplash.