The secret to scaling up and down seamlessly: a three-team strategy

But these aren’t just heads. These are people – and because you’re a good manager, you care about them. You’ll have spent time helping them develop their careers, improving their technical and other skills; and you’ll have got to know them as individuals and maybe socialised with them, their partners and families.

When the scale-down happens, in the first instance you may need to put a lot of roles at risk, creating widespread uncertainty as people worry about their livelihoods. Then you may have to lose some outstanding colleagues whom you’ve nurtured over the years and may count as friends.

It’s really, really hard.

What’s more, you may get away with this once by explaining it’s a one-off situation that won’t happen again. But what if it’s not? Rarely will you be able to go through a similar process again without risking the best of your team quitting and leaving behind a demoralised group with whom you’ve destroyed all trust and the great working relationships you once fostered.

I’ve been there myself several times. So, over the years, I’ve developed a highly effective strategy for avoiding this kind of problem, that allows you to scale up and down quickly and painlessly. It involves a three-pronged resourcing strategy: your own on-shore team, a partner near-shore team, and your own near-shore team.

Rather like the way in which we all use cloud-based services to expand and contract the tech resources we need as and when required – and only pay for what we use – this strategy enables you to grow and reduce your team in a flexible way while optimising costs.

The difference, of course, is that we’re talking about people here – humans who have feelings, livelihoods and dependents – meaning the stakes are so much higher than when we’re dealing with tin and wire.

So, here’s my advice on how to make this strategy work to everyone’s advantage.

1. Establish your core on-shore team

This is the obvious place to start. This team will tend to be comprised of people who may have been with your organisation for some time. They are likely to have deep domain knowledge and a lot of the technical skills and understanding required to build and maintain your products.

2. Work with a partner to integrate a near-shore team

Here at Damilah, we call this ‘partner-shoring’. This means leveraging the cost benefits of near-shoring by partnering with a firm that can provide a high-quality team capable of collaborating with your own in a seamless fashion.

The costs won’t be as low as with your own near-shore team (see below), as the partner firm will need to take a margin. But the advantages of using a third-party to help you navigate the challenges of near-shoring are many.

First and foremost, it allows you to scale up rapidly with people who are known entities and ready to go from day one. And you don’t need to worry about aspects like recruitment, HR, career development and so on, as the partner firm will deal with those. You’ll just need to manage the projects.

It also gives you the flexible bandwidth to handle the peaks and troughs of workloads in a cost-effective way, as you can bring people on- and off-line as required. As well as giving you the mechanism to scale up quickly, it protects you from the risk of having to scale down in the future, as this is the first team you can cut, and with the least amount of pain. In general, their jobs are more likely to be safe as they can be deployed on other accounts within their company as it seeks new clients.

Additionally, it enables you to build an understanding of the different culture, legal frameworks and myriad other challenges of running a team in an off-shore location – which leads onto the final step…

3. Build your own near-shore team

This may be less expensive than working with a near-shore partner, but it’s far harder to do.

The big advantage, beyond cost, is that it can give you access to the kinds of talented people that are more challenging to find in your own country. For example, it may be easier to recruit a team that is younger, with a better gender balance, and with technical skills that are harder to hire back home.

This kind of team can add a huge dose of energy and enthusiasm to your home team – and a smart blend of mature, on-shore experience with youthful, off-shore passion and determination can be powerful.

Building up a strong near-shore capability can be time-consuming – think nine to 12 months minimum to become established. But once you get there, it can add a lot of value to your business.

Making it work

The key to success is to ensure all three teams blend effectively. And the way to do that is to foster a culture of transparency and collaboration, where autonomous teams with the same goals and mindset will work closely together to deliver outstanding outcomes aligned to your business requirements.

It’s therefore important not only to look for compatibilities in ways of working, but also in ways of problem-solving.

Face-to-face contact is always helpful here – both in the office and outside. If two people have shared a beer in the past, when there’s a challenge it’s always easier for them to pick up the phone and thrash it out than if they’ve only ever communicated by email or Slack.

Put simply, your near-shore teams should feel like extensions of your home team.

We can help you learn more about the best ways to plan, implement and maximise value from this three-team strategy. To find out more, get in touch now.

And the following articles in this series will help you build a greater understanding of the challenges of near-shoring and how to create maximum value by doing it:

• The future of near-shoring: ‘partner-shoring’

• The challenges of setting up a near-shore team

• How to select the right near-shore partner

• How ‘partner-shoring’ can support a scale-up

Iain Bishop, founder and CEO, Damilah