Posted by Kevin.

With all due respect to our colleagues on the subcontinent, you don’t have to go to India to save money on overhead. Just head to Main Street in lovely Frisco, Texas, and come knock on our door. We’ll be waiting for you. Where the kisses are hers and hers and…oh, sorry. Got stuck in a “Three’s Company” moment there.

In today’s climate of lean, mean corporate machines, many companies don’t want to staff a full-fledged marketing department. And who can blame them? Hire a marketing director, a manager or two, maybe a designer or a web developer and you’re already looking at what, $35,000/month in salaries? Not counting benefits, payroll taxes, office space, equipment, etc.? And that’s just for a small department.

Instead, it’s much more economical to outsource these marketing functions. And it’s much more economical and smart to outsource them to us. Which is exactly what many of our clients do.

Take Enkitec, for example. This tech services firm specializes in installation and support of Oracle database systems. They’re great at it. Are they great at marketing? No. And they don’t really want to be.

So they contract with us to provide those services. For a set fee each month, we provide them with a set number of hours - from any role/discipline. When we reach the allotted hours for a month, they can either pay for additional time, or have us wait until the next month to continue work.

If they ever want to interject a new initiative into the mix, they can. If they want to remove a project, they can. They control the priorities, the activities, the delivery timeline and the budget. They pay for the time they need (and can afford). Period.

But outsourcing isn’t just for those companies who have no marketing folks on staff. One of our clients, Current Energy, has a marketing department. And with multiple products, services and other offerings being promulgated under the Current Energy banner, these people stay pretty busy.

So they still outsource a good chunk of their marketing functions to Farstar. Sure, they also aim to keep overhead low and not become a bloated organization, just like Enkitec's aim. And they also like having our half-insider-half-outsider perspective on what they are - or should be - doing. And they end up with work like this as a result.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what a client needs - new business cards or a whole campaign - we can do it. Nor does it matter if they have a budget for 80 or (please, somebody!) 800 hours a month - we can give them more marketing muscle for less money than they’d otherwise have to spend.

And who doesn’t love that?

kl