The Effectiveness Company specialises in delivering sustainable operational performance improvement and optimisation, through an execution model which focuses on developing strategic partnerships with customers based on outsourcing/insourcing service level agreements.
At The Effectiveness Company, the priority is to develop and apply unique and proven outsourcing and insourcing solutions for businesses, that can provide the vital link between corporate goals and their successful implementation. Effectiveness also provides consulting services aimed at helping customers identify and analyse problems and opportunities, and can assist with payroll and joint labour relations. “Effectiveness Company was established initially in 1997 as IBCF, before being rebranded as Beyond Outsourcing, and then again as Effectiveness Company – as an entity however we have existed for almost 20 years now,” newly appointed CEO Clayton Williams explains.
The company’s experienced consultants are positioned to help identify and quickly solve workflow and management problems, while focussing on identifying ways in which performance throughout the company may be improved. It is equipped to provide full labour management services, from recruitment to training and deployment, to streamline workflow and allow staff to fulfil core business functions. Williams goes on to delineate exactly what it is the company sets out to achieve: “We are really an execution company that operates in the business transformational outsourcing space,” he says. “The easiest way to explain what we do is the comparison which often arises between ourselves and banks or investors. They will typically supply financial capital to businesses, and either get a monthly return via interest or through equity.
“We do exactly the same – whereas labour brokers might advise as to how many people are needed and then source this personnel and hand them over, we supply the totality of required business processes. Everything from management operating systems, the role profiles, the accountabilities and responsibilities, which we then manage. Essentially what we provide is managed human capital with a focus on delivering guaranteed results which we can quickly underwrite to our clients.” Through the provision of business transformation outsourcing and insourcing services, the Effectiveness Company takes on the client’s entire operation in order to improve the processes and then runs and manages these on an outsourced or insourced basis.
In broad terms, outsourcing refers to a transfer of certain business functions to an outside contractor. It can also be more specifically defined as a strategy by which an organisation contracts out major business functions to specialised and efficient service providers, who then as a result become valued business partners. “We serve any industry,” explains Williams. “Although we steer clear of involvement in very low-touch business, and, equally, those on the scale of nuclear reactors or similar, we deal with anything in between these scales of industry. One of our customers, for example, is a funeral house, and from the moment you walk in to their premises it is instantly known that this is their brand. It is filled with our people, from the mortician right up to the regional managers. We manage that on their behalf, while we also have a number of Telco stores where the story is the same – it is made up entirely of our sales consultants, our area manager, and our regional managers who oversee those stores in exactly the same way.
“We turn our hand to anything that can be reduced to a business process and managed using an effective management operating system, which is really in business of scale,” concludes Williams.
There is a central focus for Effectiveness at present on growth and expansion, in the hope of restoring the company to its former glory. “A key reason behind my appointment was the aim of taking the business from the 400 employee mark, where we stand today, back to the 2000 mark and we’re certainly on the uptick at present. We’re making obscene investments in growth – in terms of developing new IT platforms and all of the technology enablers that we require to keep pushing things forward.” Williams goes on to lay out how some of Effectiveness Company’s key challenges also represent its biggest opportunities. “Coming back into South Africa it is clear the country has an execution gap, due to the skills gap. Within the culture, execution is largely absent which is a massive opportunity for us, but it’s also our biggest challenge in that we need to bring in people who are not used to a culture of execution.”
The investments Williams describes represent some of Effectiveness Company’s primary expansion plans at the present time. “Our major developments are in IT enablers, to make sure that our platforms can support the management operating systems. Equally, we’re making huge investments in getting the right staff on board, and we’re working closely with some sizeable partners on join ventures. We are fanatical about employing the correct staff – there is a very specific role profile with accountabilities and responsibilities for every single staff member, right down to the administrator. Without that we wouldn’t be able to do what we do.”
Businesses in today’s climates need to implement new business ideas in short time frames and at minimal costs, and part of what has contributed to Effectiveness Company’s success to date is its uniqueness in the market. “There is no competition – there are a number of companies who do number one labour brokering with whom we are often confused, a misconception which poses something of a challenge, but these other companies simply do not have the processes and the level of detail and integration, both vertical and horizontal, that we have. They don’t have the overall high level management operating systems we can employ to close loops in businesses. Not one of the companies who occupy the same space will go into a client and underwrite results like us, where we either promise a certain lift in performance or reduction in costs or we won’t claim a management fee. No one else does that.”
All of which brings us to discuss the immediate future of The Effectiveness Company. “At the end of the next three years we should be looking seriously at listing on the main board on the JSE, in terms of revenue growth and profitability,” states Williams. “We’re happy with our margins so if we can maintain those margins of increased growth then it will be a real success.” This is almost secondary in priority, however, as Williams also speaks of the more personal side of the company’s development, in impassioned tones. “It is common to hear fancy buzzwords like ‘empowerment’ bandied around in the industry, but what we do really does empower both people and companies. In South Africa we have a lot of hype surrounding the promotion of small and medium sized businesses, with little though as to why we’re doing this or the type of business we should be promoting.
“What we’re doing, though, is really making a difference, in terms of upskilling people. We find the right person, and in that respect we can take on someone with very little experience or qualifications, and with the support of our processes and management operating systems they learn and are coached almost on a daily basis in how to deliver effectively. That’s very powerful in our economy where economic growth is desperately needed, and we feel that we can make a big impact in this regard through our approach to business.”