You may be wondering what does cloning have to do with running a process service business. What does cloning have to do with any business at all other than the world of ... well ... making organisms in test tubes and petri dishes?
Well, I assure once you get started in the process serving industry, and then you start growing even a small book of regular clients, you will become intimately involved in the process of cloning. And it won't be about trying to figure out how to make viable, living, breathing little sheep, either. No, the creature you will be cloning will be "you".
Here's how it all happens. You start blowing and going with the business. You're serving papers, making clients happy, they refer more clients, you're serving more papers, they refer even more clients, until suddenly you find yourself -- little ol' you -- out there night and day dropping paper because you are doing a great job. Your clients love you and they are referring more and more clients to you, until the book of clients has grown so large that it turns into a chaotic maelstrom of activity with you are the center of it all.
At first, it's great. You're busy, you're making money, and everyone is happy. But over time, you start to find that you have no downtime. So forget the family or the vacations, or Monday Night Football. Then you also start to find that despite your best efforts at organizing and planning your day and the route you will take that your level of performance and the speed at which you typically can work starts to slow. It isn't just because you are becoming mentally and physically drained (you are), but there is simply too much volume for you to serve the papers as quickly as you first did when starting out. It's a good problem to have, but if you don't resolve it, the problem will linger, fester, and then it will re-solve itself in a negative way through the loss of clients.
That's where cloning comes in. If you want to keep up with demand, continue to grow, and keep from burning out, then you must begin the painful process of cloning yourself -- as in hire or subcontract some of the work out to others.
Now, there are a number of objections to doing this. I have heard them all, and most from myself. But in the end if you want to grow while maintaining your sanity, cloning is essential. Now you could do it by hiring other servers, and paying them a percentage of the unit cost for the service done, or you could hire other people to do other types of business functions within the business while you continue doing all the serving yourself. After all, when you run a process serving business, you still have to balance the books, market and advertise for new clients, pay the bills, file the affidavits of service, run to this law firm and that court house, etc.
So, make a choice and/or do all of the above. Start bringing on an extra server to take overflown. I don't mean give him the assignment and also all the money for doing the assignment for one of your clients. No way. After all, you put in the sweat equity to obtain that precious client. So, find an extra server who will do the assignment the way you would like it done, pay him/her a percentage and keep enough to be profitable. And, oh, by the way, you be the point of contact on those assignments with the client, not the extra server (that alleviates the objection from those who would argue that once you start giving overflow work that your extra server might try to take your client away from you).
The other thing you can do as an alternative is to contract out all those ancillary, supporting tasks that are required to run a business. Find someone who can just sit there and do the paperwork to get an assignment generated and ready to go out to be served. It doesn't have to be a full-time employee, either, especially if you don't need one full-time. Find a temp or someone who is willing to work on a freelance basis. Contract out the accounting, and the courier runs to the court house and the law firms. Contract out the skip trace/relocate work to someone who specializes in that sort of thing. There are plenty of skip tracers who can offer affordable rates to take that out of your hair if you are getting too busy to do it yourself.
But no one can do all of these things as perfect as me. That is the biggest objection to cloning (it was certainly one of mine). And that may be true. Perhaps you are a super-being incapable of making mistakes and able to bend the laws of physics and twist the space-time continuum to your own ends. But if you could do that, you certainly wouldn't need to be running a process service company, would you? Sure, other people that you might hire or subcontract to do various tasks might not do things the way you like them, they might not do them perfectly, and they might even make mistakes (heaven forbid). But that is just part of being human. Mistakes and imperfection exist and they become exponential in their prevalence the more clones you have, but it is certainly better to have a few problems here and there, while your business grows, than to have multiple problems and a lot of disappointed clients because you couldn't let go. In fact, you might find your clones may be better at certain tasks then you could ever imagine to be yourself, despite the occasional hiccup.
In the end, and I have experienced this in my own business, what you will find is that the turnaround time on your assignments increases to probably even faster than what you were able to do in the beginning on your own, your downtime is greater, allowing you to be tanned and rested, there is more free time for you to do more marketing, and more advertising, and then the revenue of the company grows exponentially thereby allowing you to have enough funds available to pay for the extra server, the freelance book keeper, the subcontracted courier, and the full time office clerk to keep the paperwork flowing properly through your business.
Sure, it may not be perfect. Nothing is. Clones are merely carbon copies of you. But which would you prefer, ten different people doing a hundred different things all at once, or just one person (you) doing a hundred things one thing at a time?
Coming Soon! "The Business End of Process Serving" by Bob Hill. Soon to be available on Amazon.com and Kindle.
