"Why the social web’s good for financial advisers" [New Traditionalist] discusses how, over the past three years, Richard Allum’s outsourced paraplanning service business, ParaPlanPlus, has used Basecamp to help grow its volume of new business, increase annual revenues, and raise profitability by 25 percent while reducing headcount.
“Three years ago the variety of processes we used meant that work felt like a chore. We were running servers for e-mail and files that needed regular maintenance and replacement. Client records could comprise a combination of things – Post It notes, spreadsheets and e-mails. It was pretty messy.
“I just knew that there had to be a better way of doing things and I wanted to find it. I spent a long time on Google researching what might be available and then I discovered Basecamp”...
Like all really good ideas, the idea behind Basecamp is simple: If you give your team and their clients the ability to gather together and pool their resources at a single point online, then they will be able to collaboratively set tasks, agree project schedules, track progress and – generally – get things done.
Even better, if you can host all the items associated with a client case – like e-mails, documents, presentations, images and spreadsheets – on the web, then your team and clients have the ability to access what they want, when they want, wherever they are in the world.
There are two critical insights here which led Richard Allum to adopt Basecamp in the first place and – coincidentally – make his business more profitable: Web-hosted applications like Basecamp are colloquially described as being in the ‘cloud’; in other words, the servers that hold all your data are hosted elsewhere in the world and not on your premises.
In Richard’s own words: “The data issue was very important. Basecamp provides secure, encrypted, storage that is probably as good as the UK’s banks and meets data protection rules.
“The back-up and maintenance of the servers for Basecamp were far better than anything that we could have afforded ourselves, and it meant we didn’t need the space for a server in our own offices any more. That meant we could almost entirely cut out IT hardware and maintenance costs and actually gain more reliable technology. We’ve probably saved as much as £15,000 over the past three years as a result.”
The second insight demonstrates the reduced administrative pressure on small businesses that social web tools like Basecamp can provide. Richard explains: “Because we allow clients to access the cases that we are working on in Basecamp, they have the ability to track progress of their case and keep informed whenever they want.”
The net effect of this accessibility is fewer e-mails and phone-calls from clients chasing the status of their cases. The reduced to-ing and fro-ing led to far less administrative demand, which enabled Richard to reduce the requirement for administrative support from 60 hours a week to just 20 hours – a saving of approximately £30,000 per year in employment costs.
