Benefits Of Outsourcing

In today’s competitive business world, the idea of outsourcing is often one many small business and startup CEOs overlook. But outsourcing can be highly beneficial to small companies and is not just reserved for large, multi-national corporations with limitless budgets. In fact, outsourcing to local freelancers, designers, or specialty, third-party companies can also be beneficial for your local economy.

Outsourcing processes like copywriting, research, and design can free up your employees for more higher-level thinking about everything — from your next product to your current marketing campaign. In this way, you redistribute the creative process of your company so your employees have more time to devote to new, creative, and inspiring ideas, and your business’ efficiency doesn’t suffer.

How Outsourcing Works

1. Top Outsourcing Considerations

Small businesses routinely export their payroll processing, distribution, accounting, and a range of other important functions, and the reason for this is simple — time is money.

Typically, the types of tasks you’ll want to outsource are those that are simply too time-consuming. Ideally, you’ll want your dedicated teams spending more time coming up with ideas that will provide immediate benefits over the short-to-medium term.

However, if your team is too busy creating copy and designing every little graphic that you need, it’s likely that you aren’t managing the creative process as efficiently as you could be.

Instead, reserve your team’s skills for only the most important projects, and outsource others.

In most instances, businesses will outsource tasks that are:

• Low value: These kinds of tasks may need to be completed often, but they aren’t as important as some of the other tasks your team has to manage. Tasks like regular copywriting, blog writing, and basic time tracking or account management can often be handled by a third party.

• Highly repetitive: Tasks that are characterized by tedious operations such as data entry or inventory tracking would generally fall into this category. While it’s definitely a good idea to have one of your team members verify that the end results are correct, you can likely find a third party or freelance data specialist to handle the footwork for you.

• Highly specialized: Specialized skills, like graphic design and website design, have attracted many brilliant minds to these fields in recent years, many of whom work on a freelance or contract basis. Thus, you can outsource many of your small graphic or website update tasks, and freelancers save the skills of your in-house team for the really big projects.

While this certainly isn’t a comprehensive list, hopefully it will get you thinking about the areas of your business that would easily lend themselves to outsourcing.

2. Outsourcing Helps Handle The Grind

Many new business owners don’t thoroughly understand the benefits of outsourcing. What’s perhaps even more alarming is that businesses refusing to outsource are effectively denying their operations the opportunity to grow and adapt.

Especially as your business begins to grow, your customer volume may begin to outpace your in-house capabilities. You’ll need to take action to avoid labor shortfalls. Outsourcing smaller or less important tasks to local freelancers and third-party services is one of the easiest ways you can keep your creative processes and company efficiency at its peak.

Of course, everyone wants to have as much control over their business operations as possible, and many CEOs fear this won’t be the case if they outsource. However, many freelancers and third-party companies desire a steady relationship with the businesses outsourcing tasks to them. Thus, you can manage your third-party team or freelance team as if they were a sub-team of your company. This allows you to keep an eye on these outsourced tasks, and understand what your outsourced teams are capable of and where their limitations lie.

3. How Your Team Benefits From Outsourcing

With more menial tasks outsourced to individuals or specialty companies, your team will have more time to devote to the important tasks and projects that are underway in-house.

Here are just a few of the ways that your team can make the most of the time gained through outsourcing:

• Hone your focus: If you’re a small business, odds are you operate within a specific niche and are great at what you do. Outsourcing will allow your business to focus on those immediate activities and adjust priorities quickly if needed.

• Improve cost efficiency: Businesses that carry out all aspects of operations in-house tend to have larger than average research, development, marketing, and distribution expenses. Outsourcing those areas that are not integral to maintaining day-to-day cohesion can therefore save you money.

• Greater competitive edge: When the cost of developing your products is high, the flow-on effect is your customers lose out.  An external provider’s economy of scale and cost structure should provide your firm with an increased competitive advantage.

• Allocate time effectively: Your employees will find they have more time, which equates to higher levels of performance and an improved ability to contribute creatively and collaboratively.

While no outsourcing procedure will reduce the amount of risk to zero, the process does allow you to build a team of skilled professionals and streamline your operations. Ultimately when you outsource, you are spending your time where it matters most and are finding more efficient ways to achieve your set goals.