How To Reduce Business Costs By 90%

Written by Jeff Bullas - View Comments
Categories: Crowdsourcing


I attended an inspiring forum recently, sponsored by Deloitte and  the Insight Exchange and facilitated by Ross Dawson of Advanced Human Strategies on the Topic

“Getting Results From How To Reduce Your Company Costs By 90% Through Crowdsourcing Crowdsourcing”.

It was a chance to meet some inspiring people who you would put in the innovators and first movers category that provide ideas that you can apply to your own business.

“Crowdsourcing” is the name used to describe how companies access resources from large groups of people around the planet. There are many platforms and approaches to tap the power of the crowd, including

  • Services marketplaces
  • Competition sites
  • Idea platforms
  • Crowdfunding

Every business today needs to understand how accessing experts and resources outside the organisation can help them to grow faster and create more professional results. However it is not always easy to make it work.

There were two speakers who caught my interest, Yvonne Adele the CEO of Ideas Culture and Matt Barrie the CEO of Freelancer.com.

Yvonne has just  launched a new service which is titled “Ideas While You Sleep” and this is how it works.

If you have a business challenge and you would like the global community to help you find some ideas (brainstorming) to help you answer that challenge then you do the following

  • Submit your business challenge at 4pm your time
  • You receive around 100 ideas at 10am the following morning

The tools for communicating and enabling this mobilization are  Twitter and Google Docs and what you obtain is a large range of inspiring ideas to answer your business challenge.

Some of the challenges solved recently were

  • How do I attract the right franchisees? – Funky Photo Booth
  • How do we dramatically increase vistors to realestate.com.au in 1 month? – Realestate.com.au
  • How do we attract more single males to community project events? – m.a.d woman

For more challenges read more here

Ideas While You Sleep now has clients in 12 different countries and over 400 Ideas Agents ranging in age from 16-82 in 8 countries.

Matt’s company Freelancer.com is  the world’s largest micro-outsourcing website with over 1 million registered professionals from 234 countries & regions of the world. Through Freelancer.com, small businesses can quickly and cost effectively hire just about any skill set – on demand 24×7×365.

Matt’s Key points

  • 80% of the worlds population is about to join the Internet
  • More people in the world have capacity to provide labour than sell goods
  • You can outsource Website design, IT & software, content writing, blogging, graphic design in fact almost anything you can think of
  • Typically these services can be provided at one tenth the cost that you are paying today

Takeaway: “If I had unlimited labour at one tenth cost, what would I outsource, and what difference would that make to my business?”

Note: View a powerpoint presentation by Matt on slideshare below.

SME Tech Summit Matt Barrie Freelancer Presentation
View more presentations from Beth Etling.

So if you had access to 100 ideas for answering your business challenges within 24 hours and you could access unlimited outsourced labour at one tenth the cost what would that do for your business?



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  • http://www.ryanhealy.com Ryan Healy

    Excellent article. You’ve definitely prompted me to think even more about outsourcing. It’s something I’m currently doing right now — but would like to do more of. Thanks.

    Ryan

  • modelsupplies

    It’s easy to get caught up in trying to do every little aspect of your business. It’s challenging for me to let go and contract work out. Thank you for making the point that it is more cost effective in the end. Great article as always, Jeff~!

    And congratulations on all of your awards~!!! I can always pick a winner~!!

    Anita @ModelSupplies

  • http://tonyhollingsworth.wordpress.com/about Tony Hollingsworth

    Great summary Jeff, I too found Yvonne’s “freshly squeezed brilliance” business a fascinating example of crowdsourcing in action. Matt’s point about the untapped opportunity that abounds for us all is still keeping me awake at night – these are exciting times.

    It was great to meet you at the event and I look forward to keeping in touch with what you are doing.

    Best regards,
    Tony Hollingsworth

  • http://nicerose.wordpress.com nicerose

    The best way is running an online store such as shoestimes.

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