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Join for freePosted: Wed 7th Oct 2026
This webinar explores how to build and scale a team without letting staffing and infrastructure costs erode your margins.
Learn when to hire, outsource or extend your team, and how to use global talent cost-effectively while maintaining control, accountability and GDPR compliance.
Understand the real cost of growing a team – and how staffing and infrastructure costs can affect margins as the business grows
Learn when to hire, outsource or extend your existing team – and how to decide which capabilities should stay core to the business
Build a cost-effective extended team, including using global talent while maintaining control, accountability and GDPR-compliant working practices
Vanisree Byrepalli is an operations consultant at PromptTech Global with over 18 years of experience in project management, business analysis and technical coordination.
She supports UK SMEs in finding practical, cost-effective ways to build and scale their teams while managing operational costs.
Her work focuses on helping businesses identify the capabilities they need, decide what should remain core, and where extended teams and global talent can add capacity while maintaining control, accountability and GDPR-compliant working practices.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Beth: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I’ll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I’m very pleased to introduce Vanisree Byrepalli, who is a business operations consultant. In this session, Vanisree will explore the real cost of growing a team and how staffing and infrastructure costs can affect margins as the business grows.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat or the Q&A, and we’ll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. As always, today’s webinar is being recorded, and we will send the recording along with some follow-up resources later today. Over to you, Vanisree.
Vanisree: Hi, Beth. Thank you so much for that, and good afternoon, everyone. I’m Vanisree, and I’m happy to be called Vani.
I’m delighted to be here with PromptTech Global, Google and Enterprise Nation. Today, we’re going to discuss a challenge many growing enterprises face: is the cost of building your team eating into your growth? I’ve made a couple of slides, so I hope you’re able to see the presentation.
Let’s start off with a relatable problem. I’m sure many of us in the audience have reached a point where we have more work than our current team can handle. That’s when we start thinking about when the right time is to build the team.
We can categorise this into three things: your real demand, enough work and an affordable role. First, do you have real demand, with customers consistently coming to you? Then, if you want to hire, can you afford the role, and is it a clear job with a sustainable budget?
This is something small and growing enterprises always face: when is the right time to build your team? Whatever bottleneck you’re facing in your business, there are three things you might consider.
The first is the right skill. Your business might have different flavours, but what is the one skill you want to address first? Define the one role that will have an immediate effect on your business, and define the cost for that particular problem – whether it comes with a set of costs, or it’s software, or it’s management.
If growth slows unexpectedly, businesses can find themselves locked into fixed costs. That is why cost and planning are so important for businesses.
Next, how do you define success and set your boundaries? You might be a single business owner, or you might already have a team with you, but either way, you’re the business owner handling everything. Defining success comes when you have an agreed output, you’ve set a deadline for yourself, and you measure the quality of the work.
So always set boundaries. Define your work, set your boundaries, make your decisions, and then think about whether it’s something you can handle completely, something you can delegate, or something to do down the line rather than right now.
Then there’s the weekly review. If you’re a single business owner, go back to your notes and look at your checkpoints: how much you’ve progressed and whether you were able to achieve what you set out to. Is it something that needs to take a back seat, or is it a priority you have to solve first?
When it comes to business growth, having a business idea in your mind is easy. But to run your business successfully, there are certain parameters we follow as boundaries.
Let’s take an everyday example. Say you want to go and eat something, but you have so many dishes on your mind that you can’t decide. So you choose a buffet or a place that sells a platter, because a platter makes it easy to pick what you want.
I feel the same approach applies to business. When you have different things on your mind and different skills to be handled in your business, how about thinking about whether you can build up or scale your business at zero infrastructure cost? It’s not necessary for a business to be in an office – COVID proved that remote working is as efficient as working in an office.
The natural solution of hiring many people comes with a cost. It is very easy to hire, but hiring often comes with hidden costs such as recruitment, training, equipment, office space, HR and management overheads, and employee benefits.
So give it a thought: you just need a trusted agency that can give you everything in one place, like a platter. That is the main idea behind why PromptTech Global was built and what PromptTech Global offers.
How does this dedicated employee model work? We have developed an app called PromptTech Connect, which is free to download from the Play Store. PromptTech Connect connects SMEs with whatever their business needs are – you define your gaps and what you want, and we provide it throughout your journey.
It’s not just one service. We are there from the start to the end of your journey, through the planning, pre-implementation and post-implementation phases.
PromptTech Connect helps in different ways, but as this webinar is about how to reduce costs while you grow your business, I’d like to focus on operations. Having worked in operations for 18 years, I always feel that operations takes a back seat in today’s business.
AI is a very hot topic of today’s era, and many business owners say they don’t think they need human intelligence because AI gives them everything. But I always consider AI to be the brain of the human body, while operations is the heart.
Just as a human body needs a brain and a heart to function, a business needs both. That’s why I always see operations as the heart of the business.
You might have your business idea, you might have set your boundaries, you might be successful, and you might be outsourcing through AI. But if your operations aren’t defined and planned, it leads to cost overflow. You lose momentum, and you end up frustrated, lost in your ideas and wondering how to get back on track.
So I always suggest business owners have their operations streamlined. With PromptTech Connect, that is one of our major services: helping businesses grow and scale up along with us.
So what do we actually do? Let’s say you’re a business owner handling everything single-handedly. Think for a second about what you want to outsource – do you want somebody to manage your schedule, your inventory or your customer calls?
With PromptTech Connect, you don’t have to put in the cost for your infrastructure. We source the talent for you, because India is one of the top nations for highly skilled people.
We conduct the interviews for you, based on your time zone – whether you’re in the UK, the US or anywhere else in the world. You set the timelines and the job descriptions, and we coordinate that for you.
If you feel the interview is successful, we handle the employment. We onboard the person, run the payroll, and manage the HR and infrastructure.
Imagine you’re sitting in one corner of the globe, and you have one trusted agency that handles everything for you. Just let us know the job description, and you have an extra hand for your business. That is where your operations become effective.
You select the candidate, set the daily priorities, work hours and KPIs, and we handle the rest. Through PromptTech Connect, the work is always managed by a dedicated relationship manager. They’re with you daily, understanding your needs and concerns and communicating with you, which is very necessary for business owners as you go up the business ladder.
If you want to know where to start, define one role this week. Write down three recurring tasks that are really slowing your business down.
It might be anything. Say you’re a restaurant owner: you have the premises, you have the idea, and you know what to do. But you want to understand the crowd: what age group is there, and what people need in the current environment or season.
Just write down where you think your business is going. It’s not necessarily just one employee that you have to hire. As I said, PromptTech Connect gives you what your business needs as and when you need it – you don’t have to take a package.
So write down three tasks that are slowing your business down, and then imagine which one you want to address first. Priority always takes the upper hand in any business, so prioritise and see which one you would like to outsource.
Then measure it: is it going to be a weekly, monthly or quarterly target? Once that’s defined, compare the total cost of doing it through a freelancer, an in-house team or an outsourced model.
Globalisation is very popular in today’s era. We are no longer in the old model of working within an office building or only hiring local talent. Businesses can be remote, and working remotely gives you much more flexibility than working within a defined scope.
That’s what PromptTech Global believes in, and we’re always happy to help our customers’ businesses grow with their everyday needs and achieve the growth they need. That’s a very brief overview of PromptTech Connect.
I don’t want to spend too much time on the sales pitch, but I’m happy to discuss one-on-one with you, learn more about your business and understand where exactly you need help to scale. I’m happy to offer a free consultation, suggest what can be improved and extend our services to grow your business.
So what is it that’s stopping you from delegating? Why do you think you have to handle everything? Delegation is not a risk – delegation helps businesses scale up more easily, grow faster, meet deadlines and not miss important factors.
So think about what’s stopping you. Is it cost? As I said, globalisation has given businesses access to more cost-effective services.
If it’s trust, PromptTech Global is a trusted agency. We don’t follow the freelancing model, so you have a relationship manager working with you, connected through our PromptTech Connect app.
If it’s skills, PromptTech Connect has a centre of excellence. We have the people, the manpower and the skills – and it’s not just AI or digital.
We have a diversity of skills, from something as simple as your website to employer of record services, as well as accountants and HR. Whatever your business needs at any stage of your growth, we have the talent pool.
As for supervision, as I said, we define KPIs when we onboard with you. Through our everyday conversations and meetings, you’ll have a clear picture of what the resource is doing for you and how your business is progressing.
I’m sure there are more factors that stop people from delegating, but these are the most common. I’m with Enterprise Nation, and anytime you want, we can connect and discuss more.
This topic isn’t something to talk about from just one angle, so I’d like to make it more interactive and hear from you – what your business wants right now and which cost factors you want to eliminate. I’m happy to take any questions you have or share some of my experiences.
Beth: Thank you for that, Vanisree. Let’s go to questions. How can businesses grow their capacity without increasing fixed costs too quickly?
Vanisree: Thanks for that question. That’s exactly one of the main parameters we’ve been talking about in today’s webinar. Fixed costs definitely come with a business, the main one being your infrastructure cost.
As I said, outsourcing or delegating to a trusted agency can definitely cut down your costs. Imagine you have someone working for you remotely eight hours a day, five days a week, keeping to your working hours. You don’t have any infrastructure, HR or maintenance costs.
PromptTech Connect gives you that – we have the resource for you. All you need to do is give us your job descriptions and the work you want done, and that will definitely reduce your operational costs.
Beth: Great. What are the warning signs that it’s time to make a permanent hire?
Vanisree: As I said, think about the priority for your business. You’re ready to hire, but do you have the right skills? Are you ready to expand, and do you have the budget?
If your business needs that fixed person in your office and you’re ready to give that budget, go for it. But not all businesses work on the same model.
Globalisation and remote working are key in today’s business era, where you can get the service you need delivered. A permanent hire will definitely add to your fixed costs.
Beth: That makes sense. Vanisree, what are the biggest advantages of using global talent for a growing business?
Vanisree: That’s lovely. With global talent, one advantage is flexibility, because your business isn’t limited to one geographical location. When you hire globally, you have a business presence in another country as well, without having to invest in physical costs or travel costs.
It’s also very easy to put a tag on your business: I’m working in the United Kingdom, but I have business in another country, like India. That’s the beauty of globalisation. Your business starts in one location, but when you extend your team to another geographical location, you have that flexibility.
Beth: And how can a founder work out whether they actually need to hire or simply need more capacity?
Vanisree: Like we ran through in the slides, the business owner is the person who decides whether it’s time to hire. But one parameter that helps them decide is skill – does your business really need that person?
Let me put it through an example. Say you run a restaurant business: you definitely have to hire a delivery person, because that particular skill cannot be outsourced or delegated.
But when you’re taking orders, you don’t need a customer representative in your building. You can outsource that, because you just need a person taking customer orders and passing them on to you.
I would say the best example for us in the United Kingdom is Thames Water. I’m sure many of us are customers of Thames Water – it’s our water supplier. How many of us know that Thames Water successfully runs its customer contact centre through outsourcing?
They have representatives sitting across the globe. We’re making a call from the UK, but the customer representative who’s answering and helping us isn’t physically in the UK.
Thames Water is a big, successful business, and we are everyday users of it. That’s the same concept we believe in and are extending to the UK market through PromptTech Connect.
Beth: Thank you. I think that’s the end of the questions, but if anyone has any more, we’ve got a bit of time if you want to put them in the chat now. Vanisree, I wanted to ask you what key things you’d want our audience to take away from this webinar.
Vanisree: One of the key takeaways I would say is that growth isn’t just about hiring more people. Understand the full cost of recruitment and team expansion. Consider flexible workforce models, which we strongly believe in, and use technology and automation wherever appropriate.
That’s the AI I was talking about – AI is your brain, so use it whenever you want. But when you want the business to run successfully, concentrate more on your operations, because operational inefficiency is a cost. If you build a team structure that can scale with the business, using delegation and flexibility, I’m sure your business will grow.
Beth: Thank you, Vanisree. There are some really great takeaways there. I’ve shared Vanisree’s Enterprise Nation profile and LinkedIn in the chat, so please do connect with her afterwards.
Thank you for joining us today, Vanisree, and for your session. I know you’ve had a busy morning, so I appreciate you jumping on. Thank you, everyone. Enjoy the rest of your day, and we’ll see you in the next one.
Vanisree: Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Have a good day.
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