How Much is Your Blood, Sweat, and Tears Worth? The Cost of Replacing YOU
12/5/2018
Struggling to swallow the cost of moving to a co-manufacturer or outsourcing to a food manufacturing plant? Wondering why it might cost more to outsource manufacturing of your product? You’ve probably been factoring your manufacturing costs without understanding how much value you have added to the process.
You Work Like Ten Men
For example, let’s say you’ve got four people on the line in your food manufacturing plant (or in a commercial kitchen). You’ve probably not factored in how much you also do during the process. You, being emotionally and financially vested, are probably doing the work of two or three people. So really, it’s like you’ve had seven people on the line, not four. However, you’ve only been counting the cost of paying four people on the line.
Your Energy Will Be More Effective Elsewhere
Up until this point you’ve probably been either supervising the manufacturing of product or making it yourself. You are now at the point where it is most cost-effective for you to pay someone else to do this for you so you can spend your time on efforts to brand, promote and sell your product.
This switch in focus will pay off in the end, but at first you may be frustrated that you have to pay three people to do the work you once did. However, if you don’t hand off the manufacturing and focus on selling, your company will only grow to a certain point. You will have become the bottleneck of your own company’s growth, preventing scalability. In the long run, you’ll be glad you did.
Example: Manufacturer of Non-dairy Creamers
One client I worked with manufactured non-dairy creamers. He had his own plant, so he knew his fixed costs: he knew what his rent was, how much he was paying for ingredients, what he was paying his people. He knew how much he could make per month because they were selling everything he could make; he did not have idle time on the lines or any of those sorts of problems.
However, he realized that he could not use his existing process to make more than the amount he was currently making. He had maxed out his production capacity, and yet there was demand for more of his product – MUCH more.
This client of mine had to realize that it was going to cost a lot to replace himself. He was, after all, doing a little of everything. Working the line, supervising, talking to stores, negotiating transport. He was so busy that he could not spend the time he needed to spend selling his product. He also did not have a very good quality control system in place. It costs him a little more to outsource manufacturing, but once he did, he then had the capacity to:
Make enough product to meet the demand
Expand his business and sell to more stores
Protect himself from risk of recalls
You probably are at the point where you need to do the same thing. It’s going to cost money to hire people to replace you, but when you do, it will free you up to break through the ceiling that has been limiting your company’s potential. In the end, that will pay off exponentially.