Small-Business Case: Changing the pay level at eight crossings
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Small-Business Case: Changing the Pay Level at Eight Crossings
Based in Sacramento, California, Eight Crossings provides medical transcription services for physicians and hospitals.
Its employees also answer phones, edit documents, and transcribe legal documents. The company’s 85 employees work either at the service center in Sacramento or in their homes, where they receive audio or text files via the
Internet. In this way, Eight Crossings employees can work in their specialty as needed without tying up a doctor’s or attorney’s office space.
Initially, the ease of sending files electronically was an advantage that enabled Eight Crossings to grow at a tremendous pace. But it has also opened up the company to competition from similar services provided from low-wage locations such as India. In addition, as voice recognition software has improved, automation could take over some of the processes that have been handled by skilled, experienced transcribers.
In that situation, Eight Crossings CEO Patrick Maher felt the pressure when clients began to ask him for a lower rate. Most of the costs of running Eight Crossings are related to labor. Overhead and materials are minimal for this type of work. Consequently, for Maher to offer his clients a better price, he would have to cut what he paid employees or stop earning a profit.
The pay level at Eight Crossings had been about 5 percent about the average for the industry. Maher believed that this pay strategy gave his company an advantage in recruiting and keeping the best transcribers. Pay was calculated per line of text at a rate that varied according to the complexity of the material being transcribed. Depending on how many hours they worked and how complex the jobs they took, each transcriber earned between $20,000 and $70,000 a year.
In looking for ways to trim expenses, Maher considered that part of most documents included sections of boilerplate text. These are generated automatically by transcribers’
Small-Business Case: Changing the Pay Level at Eight Crossings
Based in Sacramento, California, Eight Crossings provides medical transcription services for physicians and hospitals.
Its employees also answer phones, edit documents, and transcribe legal documents. The company’s 85 employees work either at the service center in Sacramento or in their homes, where they receive audio or text files via the
Internet. In this way, Eight Crossings employees can work in their specialty as needed without tying up a doctor’s or attorney’s office space.
Initially, the ease of sending files electronically was an advantage that enabled Eight Crossings to grow at a tremendous pace. But it has also opened up the company to competition from similar services provided from low-wage locations such as India. In addition, as voice recognition software has improved, automation could take over some of the processes that have been handled by skilled, experienced transcribers.
In that situation, Eight Crossings CEO Patrick Maher felt the pressure when clients began to ask him for a lower rate. Most of the costs of running Eight Crossings are related to labor. Overhead and materials are minimal for this type of work. Consequently, for Maher to offer his clients a better price, he would have to cut what he paid employees or stop earning a profit.
The pay level at Eight Crossings had been about 5 percent about the average for the industry. Maher believed that this pay strategy gave his company an advantage in recruiting and keeping the best transcribers. Pay was calculated per line of text at a rate that varied according to the complexity of the material being transcribed. Depending on how many hours they worked and how complex the jobs they took, each transcriber earned between $20,000 and $70,000 a year.
In looking for ways to trim expenses, Maher considered that part of most documents included sections of boilerplate text. These are generated automatically by transcribers’