As the founder of DO Applied Learning, my mission has always been to provide exceptional educational resources to my customers. However, the competitive landscape posed significant challenges, especially in managing marketing costs while fostering growth. With rising competition and increasing local hiring expenses, controlling customer acquisition costs became crucial.
Faced with these hurdles, I realized that traditional methods wouldn’t suffice, and a more innovative approach was necessary. By leveraging global talent, we found a way to not only survive but thrive. We reinvested our savings into enhancing the quality of educational materials for our students and teachers—the people who mattered most to us.
My Struggles
In the early days of our struggle, traditional hiring and vendor management presented several hurdles:
- High Hiring Costs: Local talent was expensive, and finding the right fit within our budget was a struggle.
- Uncommitted Vendors: Many vendors seemed more interested in quick profits than aligning with our goals, resulting in subpar outcomes.
- Project Vendor Scams: Some vendors pushed unnecessary services, leading to wasted resources and frustration, even leveraging government funding as a selling point.
These challenges highlighted the need for a reliable, dedicated team that truly understood our mission.
The Shift to Remote Work
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I was hesitant to use remote workers, preferring to have all my team members in the office every day. However, the pandemic forced a shift in perspective, and I soon realized that many roles could be done entirely remotely. This shift led me to explore the world as my talent pool, recognising that remote roles could be efficiently managed while achieving great results for my firm.
Starting with just one skilled staff member, I gradually scaled up as our needs grew. This approach allowed us to significantly reduce recruitment costs and speed up the hiring process. By employing talent from the Philippines, we remained lean and price-competitive in the marketplace.
More importantly, remote sourcing granted us access to specialised skills that were either scarce or costly locally. Our remote team members became integral to our success as they aligned with our objectives and committed to our mission.
With our enhanced remote team, we implemented strategies that improved our brand positioning and developed a comprehensive content publication plan. Over two years, we were able to lower the costs of targeting and securing customers from $258 per customer to $151 per customer – mostly due to remote sourcing and increased scale that enabled this reduction. The cost savings were reinvested into enriching our educational resources, leading to the publication and sale of our materials at the country’s biggest bookstore chain and international book sites.
Key Takeaways
Remote sourcing has been a game-changer for DO Applied Learning, enabling significant cost reductions and propelling our growth. By leveraging global talent, particularly from the Philippines, we transformed challenges into opportunities and achieved substantial growth. This success story with remote sourcing was why I decided to join the leadership team of Best Outsourcing Services and Solutions (BOSS Solutions).
BOSS Solutions’ mission is to support business owners facing similar challenges and help them grow by reducing costs, improving efficiency, and enabling significant growth through access to global talent. Just as we scaled and succeeded at DO Applied Learning, I believe other businesses can achieve similar success with the right support and use of global talent.