In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Erica Cosminsky was a human resources
professional for a pharmacy chain and a parent to two-year-old Riley.
Working long hours during the day, she traded off child care with Riley’s
father, with Erica taking the weekend shift while he took the weekdays.
When she was unexpectedly laid off, the shock gradually turned to relief—
Erica had been thinking about starting a service company but never had the
time.
The goal was to operate a small transcription service, typing up the
contents of conference calls, interviews, and meetings for other businesses.
Erica first had the idea to provide her service in real time, attending live
conferences, typing on the fly, and delivering the contents before the end of
the day. She was good at the jobs she took under this arrangement, but there
were two problems: Live conference work was scarce, and it interfered with
her child care needs.
Erica was worried about competing as a basic transcription service, since
many other companies already performed that role. Live transcription
wasn’t the best differentiator, but Erica found another: adding basic
formatting and a nice-looking layout to the transcriptions she delivered.
Most competitors refused to do any design whatsoever, making clear that
their job was just to transcribe. Many of Erica’s
clients were solopreneurs or
other very small businesses, and not everyone had access to a graphic
designer or layout person who could take over after receiving a
transcription. The differentiation worked; within three months of reversing
course and putting out the word that she was available, Erica could no
longer keep up and was ready to expand the team.
Then she made another key decision: not to hire employees but only hire
contractors. By building the team on a contract-only basis, she had more
flexibility to increase
or downsize the numbers, depending on market needs.
This was important because of the way the industry works: From November
to May in a recent cycle, she was completely booked up and had to recruit
seventeen transcriptionists serving 180 clients, plus a virtual assistant to
keep everyone on track. But in the summertime, very few businesses need
transcription work, so the team shrinks to four people. (The contractors all
understand that the work is cyclical and future projects aren’t guaranteed.)
These days Erica manages the business without doing any actual
transcription herself. She has created a flexible structure that allows her to
respond to the market without feeling locked in or overloaded by doing it
all herself. The business experienced a testing point in the fall of 2009,
when Erica’s daughter contracted a bad case of the flu, requiring Erica to
spend almost her whole time as a caregiver for three weeks. It was hard to
deal with on a personal level, she says, but fortunately, the team was there
to back her up and most of the business clients didn’t even realize she was
gone. Riley recovered, and Erica went back to work, leaving her delayed on
invoices but thankfully not delayed on actual income. The model of team
building through contractors worked.
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