I recently recorded a video on ‘Don’t outsource the fat cat’. Take a look at the video and also my Business Growth YouTube channel, where there are many more videos are like this.

Transcript for Business Growth : Don’t outsource the fat cat

Hi there and welcome to this latest business growth video.

Today I’m going to talk to you about making sure you don’t outsource the fat cat.

Bit of a strange saying you’re probably thinking if you have never heard it before.

Well let me explain what it is all about.

I first heard this saying when I was doing some work with some guys talking about launching their business.

They said we don’t outsource the fat cat. I had to get them to explain what I meant but I’ve got a great example for you that came up in discussions with a company that I was with this week.

When I sat down with that company I found the managing director had grown the company massively but one of the things he was doing was he managing his own google AdWords.

He was spending around £80,000 a year on google AdWords and got it going reasonable well and was delivering some great results.

Actually, though when we sat down and talked about where he was in his business it was actually taking him quite a significant amount of his time. Now we talked about outsourcing the fat cat to an agency it’s not something I’m a specialist in and it’s not something I would profess or recommend that people manage on their own.

Now he has grown that over a number of years and grown his own expertise but when we talked about outsourcing it we knew, if we outsourced it we would be, what I would term outsourcing the thin cat, we wouldn’t be giving total carte blanche to an agency or a specialist in managing Ad Words and trust them about what the right returns from the work they were doing and trust them that the work that they were undertaking in the way that they were managing the accounts was the right thing to do because the managing director had got loads of experience and he built the accounts and understood how driven results and response already.

Because I’ve done quite a bit of ad words work when I was working in marketing agencies as well, we knew we could challenge an agency to drive down the cost of acquisition and to deliver significantly better results, that means we were outsourcing the thin cat.

We weren’t just giving them carte blanche what we were saying was we want you to manage our AdWords account and we know what good management looks like so we are going to be all over this and we will be making sure you’re delivering results and the management that you’re doing is robust and driving the right sort of improvements that we are looking for.

So, my question to you is are you working with people and are you outsourcing the fat cat when actually you should be outsourcing the thin cat, if you do have to outsource the fat cat maybe you need someone sat on your side of the table just to make sure the people that are working with you are doing a great job.

I certainly know from my experience when we went to one of the major insurance companies and audited their AdWords account for them we actually found that out of five or six million pounds that they were spending there four or five hundred thousand pounds of that, that wasn’t being spent particularly effectively, the savings were massive. It was only 10% but that 10% meant a lot of money when we looked at it.

Now the guy who was working internally didn’t know what a good job looks like, if you don’t know what a good job looks like how can you manage somebody to undertake that job for you.

So, my message to you today is make sure you don’t outsource the fat cat just outsource the thin cat. See you next time.