Africa PEO services — Expanding to a new country is exciting! It opens up so many possibilities for success.
As executives, we all want our respective businesses to succeed, right? But, the complexities involved in global expansion may dampen such excitement. However, this shouldn’t stop your plans; you can still expand your business to an international scale with minimal hassles.
Business executives across different geographical entities agree they have to try out different ideas before deciding the most efficient way to grow in that new country, market or region.
Now, a quick question: “Do you really have the energy, time and resources to try out different expansion strategies before deciding on your best foot?” Well, that’s one question that you need to evaluate thoroughly and answer.
As an entrepreneur who wants a global business that expands across Africa, we highly recommend that you consider using the services of an Africa PEO service provider to expand rapidly across borders. Here’s why…
Recent research shows that the annual returns on investment (cost savings alone) from using a PEO partner is 27.2%. Simply put, with respect to the continent, the right Africa PEO partner provides an efficient, cost-effective and fast way to expand. When you engage the services of an Africa PEO provider, you can easily monitor and outsource your non-core business functions to competent hands.
Before you get started with a professional employer organisation (PEO), there are four critical questions you need to answer. These questions would help you to grow your business in these foreign markets successfully. They are:
- What should I outsource to PEO partners?
- Who should I outsource to?
- When should I outsource?
- How do I track success?
Services PEOs offer varies from vendor to vendor. Some vendors offer HR and payroll services only, while others like Workforce Africa could include a blend of immigration, work permit, visa services, and so on.
Frankly, the services that your PEO provider covers go a long way to determine the growth and pace of your business. That’s why we wrote this article to assist you in deciding on what PEO services to outsource and the type of contractual agreement to sign with your PEO partners.
Let’s dive into it:
What Should I Outsource to an Africa PEO Services Provider?
Searching for an Africa PEO service provider should not be your first step; Yes, it’s a vital step, but it’s not the first. Don’t put the cart before the horse.
Your first step should be to figure out the aspects of your business that would immensely increase your efficiency, productivity and scale when you leverage help from outside professionals. These are the tasks or activities to include in your Africa PEO services partnership.
Remember, just because you can outsource an operation doesn’t mean you should. You need to identify the core competencies, capabilities and focus of your organisation. Outsourcing any of these tasks may hurt business growth.
For example, a business that focuses on product development should not outsource anything related to product processes, internal design strategies etc. But they can outsource tangential operations like payroll services, customer care, digital marketing and so on.
As a rule, it is best to outsource tasks that fall into three major categories;
A. Highly Skilled or Expertise
Evaluate the skills of your existing workforce. What are the crucial tasks that they may not have adequate skills, training or resources to perform? Consider outsourcing those tasks to an Africa PEO partner. For example, your international HR team may not have access to a large talent pool or know country-specific information that you need to attract and retain the best talent. But a local HR partner would know where and how to get top talent for your business.
When you outsource these tasks to a competent partner, you can leverage their expertise to make the best business decision, adapt to the country’s realities, hire top talent and give your business more room to grow.
B. Highly Repetitive Tasks
You should consider PEO partnership for activities that follow similar processes and procedures such as flight reservation, hotel bookings, payroll administration, data entry, shipping inventory, vendor selection and management.
Highly repetitive tasks bug your workforce down and prevent them from focusing on key growth areas.
C. Specialised Knowledge
Expanding to a new country requires information – not just any data, – it requires accurate information.
Yes, you have highly competent individuals on your international team, but, how well do they know the internal realities of the country you are expanding to? Sometimes – such as when expanding to Africa – what happens in the country may be quite different from the data you got through research, and you need the right data to create the right market entry strategies.
With the right PEO services, you get accurate data and insights. This helps you to gain real-time knowledge, test market-entry strategies and create accurate descriptions about your target audience. You can also ask questions that require specialised knowledge on the country’s regulations, tax processes, Government policies, etc.
Therefore, finding and engaging the right Africa PEO service partners is critical to business success, and that brings us to the next point.
Who Should I Outsource To?
After successfully identifying what you want to outsource, the next step is to decide on who your Africa PEO partner should be.
While a simple google search can give you a long list of potential PEO partners, you need a critical evaluation strategy and an effective selection process before deciding on who to engage.
It would be best to evaluate your Africa PEO providers across the following areas:
Your Goals — In any partnership, all parties need to understand the aim and objectives for that partnership. The same applies to this PEO services partnership. You need to make sure that your proposed PEO partners have the same drive, understanding and aspirations for your business growth.
Selecting the right vendors who understand your end goal and are working with you towards success is the bedrock of a sustainable business.
Operational Skills — Apart from understanding your business, you need to check if your PEO partners have the operational skills required to perform the function. Can they really do what they say? So, it is essential to read past clients’ reviews, assess track record and verify the expertise of your proposed partners before signing that agreement.
Managerial Abilities — Your PEO services providers can influence the work culture of your international teams: from timely payment of salaries to determining welfare packages and interfacing with your employees, you need to consider the managerial skills of your PEO partners carefully. Can they manage your international employees in a way that would positively impact employee motivation and work culture? Your employees interact with your clients and add value to the overall business, so make sure PEO partners adequately manage them with the right people skills.
Strategic Thinking — From the start, it is important to think about your organisation on a long term. You need to lay the right foundation that ensures that your business is still operating in international markets many years down the line. And that begins with your PEO vendor.
Asides managing your current business realities, how equipped are your partners to advise and help you adapt to future realities? Do they display strategic thinking capabilities? How well do they leverage technology and automation in creating simplified processes? Are they able to understand outside influences? Are they knowledgeable about best practices? Would they be able to apply their knowledge and help you react to opportunities and minimise threats to your business or employees?
There’s a lot of fine detail to look out for when hunting for the right PEO services, and we’ve got this fully covered in our guide on the top questions to ask and ways to evaluate your PEO partners.
When to Outsource?
There’s no “perfect time” to outsource. The right time is totally different for every organisation. Whether you are just setting up your international expansion or you are an established global entity, you can choose to outsource any of your functions at any given time.
Here are a few pointers to help you decide on when to outsource. Once you start feeling like you are in a constant race to get through your admin tasks or you need to reduce your operational activities, or you simply want to focus more on strategic duties. You can hand over the responsibility of essential yet mundane tasks to your PEO partners. This frees up more time to focus on growing your business.
How Do I Track Success?
There’s no way to grow if you don’t track results. So after you’ve found a PEO services provider and decided on what to outsource, your work isn’t over yet – there’s one more thing to do. You need to carefully create a specific contract that outlines their performance and your expectation. This is referred to as your Sales Level Agreement (SLA).
Your Sales Level Agreement should clearly explain the services you expect, duties and responsibilities of both parties, the penalties for breach, how you would measure success and other necessary details. Drafting the right SLA forms the basis for tracking and measuring success.
It’s easy to lose track when thinking about, discussing, or starting with international expansion; therefore you need to properly document your projected growth measures and other metrics to help you track and optimise your global development.
As soon as you get out of the “employer business,” you need to track the result, such as the time and resources freed up for you to re-invest in the business itself. Also, track your ability to focus more exclusively on revenue-generating activities and improve the overall business strategy and performance.
The more resources you can invest in growing your business, the better the returns from your efforts. Therefore, you need to continually review your results and work with your PEO services providers to maximise your time and resources – and that’s why PEO clients can boast of significant ROI, better growth and higher success rates.
Summing it all up
Whether you want to attract and retain the best talents in a global market or you want to free up time to focus on business expansion, the services PEO offers can be a great way to hack business growth and get the right support.
But, it isn’t something to be taken lightly or left to chance; therefore, you need to design a PEO services strategy for your Africa-focused business expansion carefully.
Leverage Workforce Africa, an established international Africa PEO partner, to help you expand your business across the continent. Reach out to us today, schedule a consultation, and we’ll help you succeed.