Help! I’m Drowning at Work. Where’s the  Life Buoy?

Imagine this: It’s late, and your to-do list is longer than the Declaration of Independence. Business is booming, so much so that you can hardly keep track of all the things you need to get done. Until now, you’ve been handling things yourself or maybe with a very small group of people. The cold coffee in your mug and lukewarm soup on the stove are saying what you’ve been putting off. It’s time to get help.

As the business owner, the buck stops with you. Clients flood your inbox with requests, and all projects require a go-ahead from an overwhelmed mind. Worse, your role leaves you with the tasks you really hate doing or exist outside your comfort zone. Those can feel like an even bigger drain on you when you’re already working over capacity.

So what does help look like? There is a common misconception that “help” means a full-time hire. At your stage of entrepreneurship, and even for established, larger companies, that additional position might not make sense. This scenario is where a flexible support service comes in.

These organizations can help you with anything from marketing collateral to large-scale ideas. Are you looking to secure grant funding for a research project? Support services can handle the finances, leaving you to dwell on the bigger picture. Did you design a website that is in serious need of an overhaul? A small team of experts can fix up your page without costing you an arm and a leg.

Founded and run by a military spouse, Powerhouse Planning offers a total remote team solution in all facets of business growth, from strategic planning to administration, marketing, and likely any other need you have. Even better, our team understands the hassles of balancing work and family life. Powerhouse offers everything from graphic design to professional grant writing. Since our grant-writing team’s creation, we’ve secured over $11.4M in funding for our nonprofit clients. We come beside you, leveraging our proven remote team solution to provide you with the strategic thinking, business development, content creation, and event facilitation needs you need, helping you manage the tasks and deliverables you don’t have the time or skill set to do yourself.

We’ve grown through 14 years with one focus in mind: helping you not only realize your business goals but also grow beyond them to places you’ve never considered.

At the end of the day, that’s what support services are for. Briefly taking a load off your plate and giving it to capable people so you can continue to dream. What new projects do you want to tackle? Can you see a new office space in the next five years, complete with lumbar-supporting chairs and a foundation that can take you further than you ever thought? Let us handle the nitty-gritty, so you can take your dream and run with it.

Contact us today to learn how Powerhouse’s total remote team solution can help you leverage your business to the next level and beyond

Fourteen Years of Powerhouse: The Visionary and the Future

Fourteen years ago, Jessica Bertsch was a military wife trying to balance corporate and family life with constant moves. It wasn’t easy. Her husband, Fritz, deployed over twenty-five times while he was active duty in the U.S. Coast Guard. Companies were wary of hiring someone that would only be on location for a year or two. She spent a few years wanting to tackle the business world as an entrepreneur but struggled to figure out how. Then a conversation with her father-in-law changed her life.

“He asked me how Powerhouse was different from any other freelance agency,” Jessica says. “Then it clicked. We would be primarily based on military spouses. A market that is overqualified and underutilized.”

The plan was for military spouses to come in and build upon their career. They would stay for six months to a year, develop skills, and move on. To Jessica’s surprise, however, the company was a place where freelancers found a work home. “People came and fell in love,” she says, “and they just stayed to make Powerhouse their career. That, I did not predict.”

But what did that mean for structure? If people wanted to stay, didn’t it make sense to be a full-time, “butts-in-seats” company? “It [would be] easier for me,” Jessica says, “because right now, there’s so much flexibility that I have little to no control over things.” To settle the debate, Jessica turned the question over to Powerhouse’s greatest strength: its team members.

“We started having town hall meetings last year to find what feels healthiest and what feels right,” Jessica says. They all echoed a similar view. “We are Powerhouse because we have this unique structure,” Jessica explains. “We need to stay who we are while scaling the way we are, to be open and honest about the growth and the challenges.” It was decided: Powerhouse employees would stay as primarily 1099 freelancers, to allow them the flexibility that Jessica first imagined. With the projected growth, Powerhouse may have to pivot some of its leadership positions to employee status, but that will be determined in 2027.

As popular as the company was with its freelancers, however, there were hurdles Jessica had to overcome. The biggest was finances. “Do I pay myself or reinvest? How do I structure the company’s finances? It took a long time—years—until I decided to pay myself,” she says.  Jessica is a huge proponent in doing what you love and finding joy. Finances do neither of those for her.

Luckily, her recently retired husband has her covered. “He’s been secretly volunteering for Powerhouse since day one. He’s been handling the finances, especially when I didn’t have the finances to bring on accounting assistance,” Jessica says. She added that he would have full-time responsibilities now that he’s retired from the Coast Guard and has joined Powerhouse as its vice president of operations and finance.

Still, Jessica had to organize and run a company as a military spouse. Her husband’s career brought her to ten different stations—seven of which while managing Powerhouse. “It was really hard,” she says. “For so many years, I didn’t realize how hard it was. And I never let people know. Every time we move, I have to keep state compliance. It’s a pain, being based in Virginia. I have to register doing business in every state I move to.” The solution to this problem? Communication, via internal meetings meant to share stories with her employees and boost company morale.

“I started the State of Powerhouse [quarterly internal meetings] so I could tell people about all the awesome stuff happening,” Jessica says, “and to let everyone know that this is hard. Like, super hard. I step back and realize it’s hard for a lot of us, so we want to focus on the good stuff sometimes.”

To Jessica, “good stuff” is intentionally vague. Sometimes she wants to highlight large grants her team secured for a client. Other times, she’s celebrating a work anniversary, birthday, or new baby.

“Good stuff” also has a different meaning to Jessica. Powerhouse donates ten percent of its gross revenue to charitable causes through its Share the Goodness program. “As long as I’m morally aligned with the organization,” Jessica says, “I say, let’s do it. We’re funding scholarships with it and large-scale things. Even private things, like helping a young man go to dance camp, or helping someone cover their mortgage.” Jessica roots the Share the Goodness program in her faith. “Ten percent is my tithe. Even when I wasn’t paying myself, we were still giving back ten percent. I felt called to do it,” she says.

Fourteen years later, Powerhouse is continuing to serve. Indeed, fourteen years was longer than Jessica could have hoped for. “Most companies don’t make it past year six or seven,” she explains. “When we got ready to have our ten-year celebration, that was a big moment for me, because it just hit me that, ‘Oh my gosh, we made it ten years!’ Next year, we’re doing something for our fifteen-year anniversary. It’s wild that we can.”

Jessica envisions a bright future for Powerhouse, and she plans on delivering it by sticking to what works. “We have grown through primarily organic growth. We’ve grown through word of mouth and success after success. If we have success with a client, then they go talk to others about it. I plan for more organic growth. Word of mouth. Growing our brand on our service and capabilities,” she says. She also wants to embrace artificial intelligence to take Powerhouse forward. “We’re not fearful of the future,” Jessica says. “We’re trying to embrace it. To get ahead of it. I’m building my own virtual chatbot assistant to help me do behind-the-scenes things, and in the first few months after AI exploded into the business world, we created an AI policy for how to use it. We also are in the process of building phGrants to do even bigger things to support our nonprofit world.”

As Powerhouse continues to grow, Jessica wants to keep all that makes Powerhouse special: its unorthodox yet effective structure, fantastic team members, close relationships with clients, and its charitable Share the Goodness program. Jessica looks to the future with the same energy she had in this interview: with a shrug, smile, and a nod.

“This is us,” she says. “We are Powerhouse.”

Why Outsourced Teams Work Best When They Act Like Partners

The difference between a vendor and a partner is rarely a line item. It’s how the work gets done.

Outsourcing is no longer the cost play it was a decade ago. In Deloitte’s Global Outsourcing Survey, which gathered responses from more than 500 executives worldwide, 50% reported using outsourced services for front-office capabilities such as sales, marketing, and research and development, functions that used to live firmly inside the building. Deloitte also reports that 67% of organizations have adopted outcome-based outsourcing models that prioritize measurable results and innovation rather than billable hours. Put simply, organizations have stopped buying tasks. They’re buying outcomes.

Outcomes, though, are harder to hand off than tasks. The same Deloitte research found that 70% of executives have pulled some previously outsourced scope back in-house over the past five years, and the motives have less to do with price than with quality control and rebuilding internal expertise.

Read that carefully. The work didn’t come home because it cost too much. It came home because it never quite fit. That is almost never a talent problem. It’s a relationship problem, and it’s a solvable one.

At Powerhouse Planning, we’ve spent years watching what separates an outsourced engagement that drains a leader’s calendar from one that gives them their week back. It usually comes down to a single distinction: A vendor completes your scope of work, while a partner takes ownership of your outcome. Below is what that difference actually looks like in practice, and what to look for when you’re evaluating whom to bring alongside your team.

Partners learn your mission before they touch your deliverables. A vendor asks what you need. A partner asks why you need it, who has to act on it, and what happens if it doesn’t land. That context is not a nicety. It’s the difference, for instance, between a grant narrative that recites your programs and one that makes a funder feel the gap you’re closing. When an outsourced team understands your mission well enough to defend it in a room you’re not in, the work stops needing so many rounds of revision. You spend your review time confirming direction instead of correcting it. Ask a prospective partner what they’d want to know about your organization before producing a single deliverable. The depth of that answer tells you most of what you need to know.

“Powerhouse Planning stepped in when we needed to fill an immediate marketing need, providing incredible marketing and HR support whenever we needed it. They have become strategic partners as invested in our growth and success as we are.” – Michael Wright, Vice President, Business Development, JANUS Research Group

Partners bring you the ideas you didn’t have the bandwidth to have. Bandwidth, not budget, is the scarcest resource in most organizations. Leaders know exactly which projects are sitting undone. What they rarely have is the room to step back and see the ones they haven’t thought of yet. A true partner shows up with more than a status update. They notice you don’t have an annual report, a consistent way to launch a campaign, or the marketing materials you need to target the customers you’re most interested in, and they propose it before you ask. This is what we mean by thought partnership, and it’s consistently the piece our clients name first when we ask what they value. Real thought partnership is not upselling. It’s noticing.

“Working with Powerhouse has been a genuine partnership where they have joined our team and filled critical supporting roles with team-oriented passion and flexibility whenever necessary. This has allowed our small full-time staff to focus on the needs of our clients, increasing our efforts and efficiency.” – Gene Anderson, Executive Director, Operation: Job Ready Veterans

Partners communicate before you have to chase them. Communication is the quiet failure point in outsourced work, and the evidence suggests the weak link sits on the management side of the relationship far more often than the talent side. In that same Deloitte survey, 70% of executives said their vendor management function is not fully mature, and only 20% said a vendor management office owns their external workforce strategy at all. Translated out of consulting language, most organizations are managing outside teams without a real system for doing it. A good partner absorbs some of that load rather than adding to it. They assign clear ownership, state a timeline out loud, and tell you the moment the timeline is at risk. That last part matters most. Anyone can report good news on schedule. A partner tells you about the problem while there’s still time to solve it together.

Partners tell you the truth, even when it cost them the work. There is a particular kind of trust that gets built the first time an outsourced team says, “We’re not the right fit for this piece, and here’s who is.” It feels counterintuitive from a business development standpoint, and it is the single fastest way to earn a long-term relationship. The same is true for honest pushback. If a strategy won’t get you where you want to go, a partner says so before the invoice, not after the results come in. Vendors protect the scope. Partners protect the outcome, and sometimes that means telling a client something they’d rather not hear.

“Powerhouse will honestly assess if they can help or recommend alternative paths if they can’t. Their genuine goal is to see you succeed, regardless of whether they’re the right fit for you. – Angela Degnan, Executive Director and Cofounder, Zip With Us®

Partners build capacity that outlasts the contract. A vendor’s contribution ends when the deliverable is delivered. A partner leaves infrastructure behind: a documented grant or marketing library, a template set your staff can actually use, brand standards written clearly enough that a new hire can follow them, a communications calendar that survives turnover. Infrastructure can feel like a strange thing for an outsourced provider to invest in, because the better the systems, the less dependent the client becomes. We think that’s exactly the point. Organizations that grow into new capabilities tend to bring their partners along, and organizations that feel trapped tend to leave. Strong systems are how a partnership earns its next chapter.

“Partnering with Powerhouse has been a great experience for the Wright Museum of WWII. Their innovative approach and unwavering commitment to our organization have brought new energy and ideas to our marketing approach. Thanks to Powerhouse’s expertise and collaborative spirit, we’ve been able to enhance our marketing collateral in more dynamic ways. We are incredibly grateful for their support and look forward to continuing this partnership.” – Stephen Farley, Wright Museum of WWII

Partners give you a team, not a seat. One of the most underrated advantages of the right outsourced model is range. A single hire, no matter how talented, brings one perspective and one skill set. A well-built remote team brings just that: a team. From writers to designers, from quality assurance specialists to strategists and project managers, all contribute their unique perspectives and skill sets to the same problem. And the result is more nuanced than any one of them would have produced alone. It also means capacity doesn’t disappear when one person takes leave or moves on. For a growing nonprofit or business, that continuity is often worth more than the individual line items on the scope of work.

“The Powerhouse team gave us access to marketing expertise that would have been difficult to build internally. From strategic planning to content creation and analytics, their team handled every aspect of our social media efforts with professionalism and creativity. The results have exceeded our expectations, helping us expand our reach, strengthen our brand presence, and engage our audience in meaningful ways.” – Jay Chapman, President/CEO, Hartman & Hartman

Here’s the bottom line: Whether you get a vendor or a partner isn’t determined by contract size, engagement length, or price point. It’s determined by behavior, and behavior shows up early. When you’re on that first consultation call, listen for what they ask you. Do they want to understand your mission or just your deliverables list? Do they name an owner and a timeline or speak in vague reassurances? Will they tell you honestly when they’re not the right fit? Those answers predict the next two years of the relationship far better than any capability deck.

Outsourcing works best when it stops feeling like outsourcing. The goal is never to hand work away. It’s to bring the right people alongside you so your mission can move faster than your headcount allows.

Powerhouse Planning was built on the belief that outsourced support should feel like an extension of your team, not a transaction. Our total remote team solution gives you access to an experienced bench of thought partners, writers, marketers, designers, and communicators at a scale that works for your budget. Contact us today to start the conversation.