If you manage real estate, property maintenance and construction are a fact of daily life.  Lee Clements, a partner in a real estate investment firm located in Los Angeles, made the decision ten years ago to bring all their maintenance and construction activity in-house rather than use sub-contractors.  In fact, their construction staff did such good work he started to receive outside requests for maintenance and construction services.

It's not surprising how quickly he saw the possibilities.  "I knew there was an unfilled need for professional maintenance, repair and light construction services," says Lee.  "I had the idea… the challenge was making it a reality."

His new company, Handyman On Demand was born in June of 2002.  "I had been toying with the word 'handyman' for some time.  I happened to see something about 'on demand' on television, and 'Handyman on Demand' struck me as the perfect way to describe what we could do."

Lee recalled a blog posting about Elance and that afternoon posted his first project for a company logo.  "I received several bids within a few hours," says Lee, "and later that afternoon I awarded the project to Futuristic Logo (Elance username: FuturisticLOGO).  By six o'clock the next morning I had the perfect logo in my inbox – we still use it today.  In my 'normal' world it would have taken three months and many design review meetings to get a logo I could be satisfied with."

Handyman on Demand Ventures, Inc. has experienced rapid growth: as Chairman, today Lee oversees 100 employees in four Southern California offices serving over 6,000 new customers a year.  He has used Elance providers for brochures, web design, web content, administrative and database systems, and accounting services. 

"Rapid growth put a strain on our administrative systems," says Lee, "so about a year and a half ago we decided we needed better tools to manage all facets of our business.  We put two local companies on the project, invested eight months and thousands of dollars, and had nothing really to show for it."

He turned to Solversa Technologies (Elance username: solversa), a software development company based in Pune, India.  "In 45 days we had developed a proprietary internet-based software application (which we call PowerTools™) that manages order processing, estimating, scheduling, job tracking… in effect our entire operations systems, and for half the money we'd previously wasted."

Scalability is another challenge small businesses face, and it's common for small businesses to quickly run out of space, manpower, and resources. Lee turned to an Elance provider for accounting services. 

"I was on a plane to Hong Kong reading 'The World is Flat' by Thomas Friedman", says Lee, "and realized that even though we were a small company, departmental functions like accounting could be outsourced overseas.  We found Excellence Tech (Elance username: ExcellenceTech) in Calcutta and started transitioning our accounting functions to them."

In less than two months Lee converted to a nearly paperless system.  "Ninety percent of our accounting workload is now managed offshore," says Lee.  "They help us do things we couldn't have afforded otherwise – in fact, they save us more than they cost."

"Virtual outsourcing through Elance has become the great equalizer for small businesses," says Lee.  "Customers today have very high expectations and the line of perception that once divided small and big business has become blurred.  We also must compete with service standards set by the best companies, not just our competitors.   Elance makes available to us a fully scalable, affordable, global workforce; a talent pool that was once the domain of bigger companies.   This gives us a significant competitive edge that allows us to sense and quickly respond to opportunities while still meeting our customer's expectations."