Dan Morrison, Senior Solutions Consultant at igaming engagement platform specialist Fast Track, shares some valuable insight into how companies can use outsourcing to best effect and outlines some of the factors they need to consider before seeking external partners. 

SBC: What questions should businesses be asking when looking for external solutions?

Dan Morrison: The three most important considerations when looking at a potential partner to use for an external solution are vision, scalability and support.

When you are looking for an external partner, you don’t just buy into what they do right now, you have to consider where they are heading and believe in that vision. The pace of technological innovation right now means if you buy into a solution that is not evolving, you’re going to either get left behind or have to invest in an alternative sooner than you think.

Planning for the future also means choosing solutions that will grow with you. If it won’t make sense when your business is double (or 10 times) the size it is now, then you have to consider that there will come a point when you will either have to move on or get left behind.

Finally, once you are on board with the vision, and you are sure that it’s a long-term solution, you are going to need good support. This can vary hugely depending on the providers you choose, and plays a key role in whether integration and adoption into your business is successful. 

SBC: What are the key considerations when deciding what to outsource or keep in-house?

DM: When you look at whether and what to outsource. Your first consideration should be what is core to your business and what is playing a supporting role. For example, we “outsource” our internal communication by using Slack. It’s important that our teams can communicate with each other, but this in itself is not what our business is about. On the other hand, we would never outsource anything that is a key differentiator of Fast Track, like core platform functionality or the support we provide to our partners.

The second thing to consider is: if there is something you need that requires a heavy investment of resources to do in-house, are you going to be able to do it better than anyone else? When it comes to internal communications we chose Slack because building something ourselves would detract from other focus areas and Slack does a better job in this area than we could do ourselves.

Outsourcing some things also means we can focus our time and energy on continually improving our CRM platform and adding value for our partners.

SBC: What are the benefits of outsourcing certain parts of your business?

DM: The most important result of outsourcing is freeing up resources. Whether you outsource outbound calls to our friends at Enteractive, or your CRM orchestration to a platform like ours, you are banking time and effort that can be spent developing your product or freeing operational staff up for other tasks. 

Time is your most valuable resource. It’s important to spend as much of it as possible on the things that will differentiate your business and give you a competitive edge. With teams unburdened from work that falls outside of their core purpose, you can see greater productivity, drive and job satisfaction. With our own partners, we’ve seen that integrating Fast Track CRM creates time for operational teams to innovate and experiment, freeing them from chasing deadlines.

Within Fast Track, using external tools to centralise information, as well as to streamline and automate parts of workflows, frees up our team to focus on what matters: our platform and partners.

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Dan Morrison – Senior Solutions Consultant @ Fast Track