Life sciences is rife with very experienced, high value people who, perhaps at the 10 or 20 year mark, decide they don’t want to continue as a full time employee. They embark on independent consulting but don’t particularly like contracting, invoicing and other business administration minutiae. Traditionally they have 2 choices: hire someone or bite the bullet and grind through it.
The former is expensive for any small business, especially someone just starting out. Junior admins are too inexperienced, very savvy, experienced contracts and operations people can command lawyer-like billable hours.
As for grinding through it- this is unpleasant, but doable, especially if one can afford lawyer-like billable hour support. The safest course of action is to use a lawyer for just about everything. Safe, sure. Affordable? No.
Introducing a new option: The LifeSciHub Business Administration Support Model. Taking a cue from the gig and sharing economies, LifeSciHub “shares” it’s business administration tools and expertise with small businesses. Included is contracting, invoicing, payment processing, SOW QA, free time tracking software, budget management and reporting, project governance tools, and coaching.
For the Subject Matter Expert small business in life sciences, business administration is not value-add, nor is it a competitive differentiator. It can be a huge, unpleasant, business-growth impediment, by distracting the SME away from practicing the SME craft and delivering value. This is particularly true for SME small businesses who want to grow, and perhaps add additional expertise and resources to the practice.
“In addition to being an independent small business SME myself, I’ve collaborated with countless other SMEs. Some staunchly individual, others that expand by bringing on other independent SMEs, sometimes even formal full time employees. Anecdotally speaking, it seems to be relatively easy to subcontract one or two other SMEs. But there’s a precipitous cliff at around the 3+ mark that the SME begins to spend a lot less time on project work and more on profit & loss administration.” Sheila Mahoney, MBA, Current LifeSciHub Administrator.
LifeSciHub has created these tools and processes for its own operations, and makes it available to other SME small businesses as a service. LifeSciHub is also exploring “white labeling” the platform for SMEs who want fit-for-purpose software, not ongoing services.
For more information: sheila@lifescihub.com