Importance of Outsourcing
The Main Benefits of Outsourcing
Before you learn more about some areas of your business that are worth outsourcing to the professionals, it is a good idea to consider what some of the main benefits of outsourcing actually are.
Aside from saving time that you can use for focusing on other areas of your business or even for self-care, outsourcing can have many further benefits. These include:
Growth Opportunities
Depending on what you outsource, you may put your business in a better position for future growth and expansion.
This is because when it comes to aspects of your business such as SEO and marketing, for example, you will be working with professionals who are experienced and may be better able to spot certain growth opportunities and take them, when you may have missed them on your own.
Boost Efficiency
Outsourcing rather than trying to wear all the hats yourself will often allow your small business to access a range of experienced support and professional talent that you may not have afforded in-house.
When you have access to this, you will also gain access to a range of innovative approaches, the latest technology, and cutting-edge solutions.
Save Money and Improve Your Bottom Line
While it might seem like it makes sense at first to do things yourself rather than outsource to save money, the truth is that over time you could end up losing more money.
This is especially true if you try to take on business functions that you are not very knowledgeable about since you will most likely make mistakes and errors while you are learning, which can ultimately harm your business’ bottom line.
Outsourcing to professionals means that you get access to experience and expertise from the start, resulting in your business being more likely to start turning over a profit sooner.
Spend More Time on Core Business Activities
As a business owner, doing too much on your own could mean that you’re not spending the time that you should on core business activities that ultimately generate an income for your business.
You could end up spending time doing things like IT support or HR on your own to save money but end up losing money overall when you no longer have the time to focus on developing customer relationships, for example.
Business outsourcing services you should delegate
Ideally, you should outsource anything that is not a core business function. However, this might not always be possible for every business owner.
If you are in a position where you need to do some things yourself and outsource others, then it is worth considering what is going to have the biggest impact on your business, and hand that to the professionals instead.
For example, while you might be able to easily handle your own customer service, specialist departments like HR or IT support are usually more worthwhile outsourcing since this gives you access to more talent and experience, and helps you get better results.
Anything that might take you some time to learn and master is also worth outsourcing, as learning curves might be helpful for your own development but may only get in the way of your company’s overall success and growth.
Finance and Accounting
Taking charge of your own accounting as a small business owner can carry a lot of work and a lot of risk.
If you are not a trained accountant then you might make serious errors or mistakes that could lead to you getting expensive fines or even having your business closed down, so this one is just not worth trying to do on your own if you don’t have the knowledge required. Having reliable business accounting software can help simplify the process and ensure accuracy in your financial records.
While you can get various software programs, apps and tools that are designed to help small business owners with doing their own accounting and finance, these are often designed to be used with the help of an accountant rather than replacing the need for an accountant altogether.
If you don’t want to hire an accountant all year round, it’s definitely worth working with one for at least the tax season.
Website Design
One main factor that many business owners will try to take on by themselves is website design. It is unsurprising given that there are so many different website building tools and DIY website platforms out there today, offering a range of themes and templates that you can simply customize to suit your brand.
However, before you sign up for these it is worth considering if getting a professional to build and monitor your website is a better idea.
Websites these days are becoming more and more important for businesses and might often be the first impression that a customer gets of your brand, so they are important to get right.
A good web designer will not only be able to create a website that is aesthetically pleasing, but also responsive, fast, and optimized for SEO, which might not always be easy to achieve on your own.
Human Resources
If you are hiring staff then an HR department is going to be an essential addition to your business.
However, HR professionals are not always cheap to hire in-house, so outsourcing might be a better option to think about. G&A Partners offer HR outsourcing Kansas City to help businesses of all sizes get access to the best HR support available.
Outsourcing HR means that you can get access to much more compared to what an in-house HR team might offer you.
HR firms that work with a range of different companies can often group the employee numbers of all their clients together to get access to things like better employee benefits.
They are also likely to know the tricks of the trade when it comes to finding and recruiting the best talent, ultimately helping your company put the best team for the job together.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
These days, it’s expected of every business to have an online presence and if you can’t be found online, you are not going to get very far.
Because of this, SEO has to be an important part of your strategy to ensure that your website is ranking for relevant keywords and builds a strong reputation online with both search engines and humans.
SEO is quite specialized and there is often a lot of room for things to go wrong if you are not sure what you are doing.
It’s all too easy to make serious mistakes and errors if you need to teach yourself SEO to do it for your business, and Google could end up penalizing your site, which will have the opposite effect to what you are aiming for.
If you want your site to rank better and faster online, then the best thing to do is outsource to an experienced SEO agency that can put a tailored strategy together for your brand based on their experience and expertise.
While no good SEO agency will promise you instant results or the ability to get you to the top spot in Google, you will definitely get better and faster results compared to trying to do it by yourself.
IT Support
For many businesses today, IT support is essential. Keeping up with the latest IT technologies has become absolutely crucial for small businesses that want to survive in today’s economy.
However, handling IT operations such as IT support in-house can be very expensive, unless of course you are running an IT company and already hire the relevant professionals.
On average, however, small to medium-sized businesses do not have the ability and knowledge that is needed to manage and handle all their IT needs effectively on their own.
There are many benefits to consider when it comes to outsourcing IT to a professional IT service and IT support provider.
Not only will they help you ensure that all your IT systems are running smoothly and as expected, but they can also help to keep your business safe from cybercrime.
With hacking attacks and cybercrime against small businesses on the rise, it’s never been more important to work with a team that knows what it will take to keep your company safe from these malicious attacks.
Marketing
How your business and brand are perceived by your target audience, and ultimately how successful your business can be in terms of customer numbers and sales, will often be determined by how effective your marketing strategies are.
However, handling all of your business’ marketing in-house does not always come cheap and trying to save money by doing it yourself or getting non-marketing staff on the job might not get you the results that you are hoping for.
Instead, it’s definitely worth investing in outsourcing to a marketing firm or marketing consultant who can help you get a different perspective of your business and where it stands in the market, along with how your brand appears to your target audience.
When it comes to outsourcing marketing, there are several options to consider. If you are already outsourcing SEO, many SEO agencies also offer a wide range of further digital marketing services that you can take advantage of as a client.
Content Creation
These days, content is everything and businesses that create and publish more content tend to get better results. However, creating all of your own content can be tiresome and even expensive at times.
There are many different ways to create content, and it’s no secret that the more you create, the more of your target audience you will be able to reach, and the higher your chance of ranking for relevant keywords in Google and other search engine results pages.
But if you do it all yourself, creating enough content to get the results that you want can quickly eat into all your time. This is especially true if you want to create a varied range of different content types including written, images, video, and audio.
You can outsource different types of content to individuals like video creators or influencers, or work with a content creation service to get all your business’ content in one place.
Outsourcing to a content writer or content writing service is a must since they will be able to provide you with the written content you need for your website, blog posts, descriptions, about us pages, social media, and more.
Social Media Management
Social media is only getting bigger and as a result, it has become even more important for businesses to have a strong social media presence.
Managing all your pages and profiles across various different social media channels can quickly become very time-consuming if you’re doing it all by yourself.
While there are strategies that you can use to make it easier on yourself, you’ll probably end up spending hours of time a week thinking of, creating, and scheduling content to be posted.
Ultimately, as a business owner, this time might be better spent elsewhere – so it is definitely worth working with a social media manager who can spend all their working hours focusing on getting you the best results from your social media channels.
Graphic Design
If you’ve ever been to a small business that has attempted its own graphic design without the right skills or tools, then you probably knew straight away.
These days, graphics and aesthetics are becoming more and more important for standing out from the competition and making what your brand does clear to your target customers.
While bad graphics can certainly be overlooked if you provide a great service and excellent products, the truth is that this is often the first impression that customers make – and some might not even bother to try your business once if they feel that it looks scruffy and unprofessional due to a logo made in MS Paint.
While there are more tools available these days to use for making professional looking graphics for your business, working with a professional designer will help you get a polished finish that’s difficult to achieve with the DIY route.
Customer Service and Relationships
While managing customer service on your own might be doable when you first start your business, this can get harder and more time-consuming to do as your business expands and grows.
As your business begins to get more customers, you may find that you need to bring in more employees to answer customer queries and questions, deal with complaints, and other interactions with customers.
Ultimately, having excellent customer service is imperative since this experience is going to have a huge impact on the opinion that your customers form of your brand and whether or not they decide to return.
Before you hire an in-house customer service team, however, it may be worth considering if you should outsource instead.
Often, outsourcing customer service can help you get more for your money. For example, for a flat fee, you may be able to get 24/7 customer service advisors to work for your company compared to paying for an in-house team that can only work business hours.
Administrative Tasks
As a business owner, you might often feel like you are drowning in admin tasks. There are always emails to answer, calls to take, and meetings to schedule that over time, cuts into the valuable time that you have to spend working on the core aspects of your business.
Instead of trying to do it all and keep on top of it all yourself, it might be worth outsourcing to a virtual assistant or a company providing virtual assistance, depending on the level of help that you need.
Virtual assistants can be an ideal way to get more done as a business owner since you have somebody who can step in and do those menial tasks that need to be done like updating your calendar, scheduling meetings, answering emails, and more.
Employee Training
Depending on the type of business that you run and the type of work your employees are doing, it might be essential to outsource training.
You may have little choice if you are running a business that requires your employees to use specialist machines and tools that you are not trained to use since they should be taught and signed off as ready to use the equipment by an experienced professional.
However, even if your employees don’t require specialist training, there are lots of benefits of bringing in an employee training company to do the work.
You can find coaches and trainers for lots of different things your employees might need to learn or brush up their skills on, such as customer service, sales, health and safety training, and more.
Shipping and Logistics
If you run a business that ships products to customers, then it’s worth outsourcing your shipping and logistics rather than setting up your own warehouse space.
Setting up a dedicated warehouse for packing and shipping products can often be quite costly as it will require you to hire a lot of staff to keep it running smoothly.
Thankfully, there are more options than ever before available when it comes to finding fulfillment centers or dropshipping services that can handle the preparation, storage, packing, and shipping of your products to your customers.
This can be especially ideal for eCommerce businesses, where you might want to be able to focus more on the online and marketing aspects of the company.
Market Research
Good market research can help you find out more about your customers and what they are looking for, ultimately helping you get better results from your business.
Is there something that you need to learn about your industry as a whole, or do you want to get a better insight into who your customers are?
Whether you are considering expanding into a new market or want to launch a new product or service, conducting thorough research will help you get the best results. However, conducting market research can be a time-consuming task.
If you do not have the time or the manpower to spend weeks buried under online content or sending out and reading surveys from your target audience, then it’s definitely worth outsourcing this work to a market research firm that will have access to more resources to get better insights.
Sum Up
No matter what kind of business you are starting or running, doing it all yourself can be a big mistake. These are some of the business functions that are always worth outsourcing to professionals.