Ross Hunter

Ross founded Copylab in 2005 and is now leading the team in the UK and leading the company’s charge into new markets.
More articles from Ross Hunter“Outsourcing is expensive. Your rate is too high. It’s cheaper to hire someone.”
You may have heard one of these objections before in regard to outsourcing . We get it. Many of us have felt the same way. On the face of it, rates may seem high. But you might be surprised what you find when you dig a little deeper.
In fact, we believe that outsourcing investment writing, especially your fund commentary, provides tremendous value for the money versus employing additional permanent staff. (And that’s before you even consider the added benefits of a flexible workforce with multiple specialities…but more to come on that.)
We know – that’s a big claim. Here are the facts and logic to back that up.
Comparing hourly rates with employee salaries is like comparing apples and oranges. Many people would simply divide the base salary by the number of days worked. We’ve seen it before in our discussions with firms.
But is that all that’s involved in an employee’s compensation? What about: bonus, retirement, health insurance, holiday pay, sick pay, real estate & office space costs, admin costs (IT, mail, security, cleaning etc), the time cost of the employee’s manager, tuition reimbursement…you get the point.
So that employee making $80,000 base salary can actually cost $110,000 or more! And in some cases, this may mean you’re paying for more than you’re getting. Try it out for yourself – this is a good calculator.
Unfortunately, the story gets much worse. Every investment writer has to be competent at the so-called three Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic. But every CMO should be mindful of another three Rs – recruitment, replacement and redundancy.
14 of the world’s 20 largest asset managers – and more than 60 asset managers globally – rely on Copylab’s expertise, experience and investment sophistication to produce high-volume, high-quality content. So what’s stopping you?
Want us to prove we can make your investment writing team more efficient?