In business planning, what systems you put in place and what operations you offer your client base are crucial early considerations. These decisions can lead to successful outcomes or unnecessary delays and costly mistakes that hinder your business growth.
One thing to consider is the current size of your business and how much growth you can project. As a business grows, so do the issues and complexities grow with it. When you first started out, you may have handled marketing, invoicing, logistics, and accounting. Now that you’re growing, delegating is an important skill to learn and develop so that you have time, energy, and resources to devote to tasks that you do well, namely growing your business.
Benefits of Outsourcing
The benefits of outsourcing your business activities include but are not limited to cost advantages of hiring someone to perform a task rather than continued payroll costs. By hiring outside specialists you also are able to focus on more efficiency within your organization. The reason is because while you and your team are experts at what you do, there are experts in other critical areas that can be hired for a particular task or role, freeing you and your team up to dedicate to tasks that you perform well.
Delegating tasks in your company can take a number of forms. You can set up an organization chart that defines the types of responsibilities and roles for each member of your team. Another thing to consider when delegating tasks is to consider outsourcing activities and roles that are not the strength of people in your organization. Perhaps you don’t have a marketing team in place, then hiring an ad agency that specializes in the type of marketing you want to utilize is a good example.
In fact, there are a large number of activities that can be outsourced for your business that will streamline your process, increase your productivity, and allow you to redirect important personnel and resources into more important roles. According to the Small Business Administration, more than ⅓ of current businesses are thought to outsource some critical need or function.
To Delegate or Keep In-House
Before you outsource any business function, ask whether that is a task better suited for inhouse specialization or whether it’s better to hire outside your company. Even larger, multinational businesses are beginning to see the benefits associated with outsourcing certain roles and tasks. Areas to consider outsourcing aren’t limited, but a good starting point would be the following roles and tasks:
- Administrative Tasks: Hiring outside help to coordinate everything from appointment setting to scheduling team tasks within the company and setting up metrics for outside vendors will give you much more efficiency and improved productivity with your office hours.
- Human Resources: Many payroll services also offer complete Human Resources for maintaining compliance with Federal OSHA and State Labor laws, helps with mediation and other issues a business must be set up to address.
- Accounting: Hiring an outside bookkeeper and accounting expert to handle your financials is important for most businesses as they start out.
- Marketing: To increase your brand awareness, your product offerings, and improve your brand loyalty, having a marketing team dedicated to working with you is crucial. If you need to pare down costs, hiring outside marketing teams is a good way to go.
- IT Needs: An IT team is remarkably important when things break down, but unnecessary on a moment to moment basis. By outsourcing your IT needs, you can have oncall professionals resolve any IT needs without the overhead of having them on weekly payroll.
- Customer Service and Sales: Don’t have a dedicated team to fielding customer service concerns? Hiring a third party customer service program is a good way to offer outstanding, on call customer service. And to gin up added outbound sales can be difficult so consider to hire out and have those cold-calls become warm leads for you to follow up.
- Research: Outsourcing your research, whether its to consider new product offerings, or evaluate third party products that may improve your company’s performance is a good idea. For example, if you are a business specializing in heating and air conditioning but need to be more efficient in your business, hiring someone to review a number of hvac software programs before you purchase the product is an awesome way to mitigate risk and unnecessary expense.
Outsourcing isn’t about losing control of your process, rather its about refocusing your business performance on the areas you already do well. Hiring outside experts can lower your overhead, free up time and resources for better efficiency, and improve your overall organization’s performance.
