If you’re a small business owner, you probably devote a lot of time to managing your company’s day-to-day activities. You might take pride in the fact that you handle your own marketing, bookkeeping, administration, or data entry.
But these tasks take time, valuable time that can add up and take away from focusing on growing your business, making lasting relationships with customers, or even just spending time with family and friends. If you’ve reached a point where you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the extra business-related tasks you’ve got to do, it’s time to consider outsourcing.
What is outsourcing?
Outsourcing is the practice of hiring a third party to perform services on behalf of your business. Like everything, outsourcing has positives and negatives.
The Benefits of Outsourcing
- No need to hire an employee: When you outsource work to a third party, the role of employer is taken off your plate. This reduces risks, compliance costs, and the chance of hiring the wrong person for the job. You only pay for the work done, so there’s no chance of paying an employee when there is no work for them to do.
- Access the right skillset: By outsourcing, you can employ a third-party that specialises in certain tasks. With their high level of expertise, you can be confident they will do a good job.
- High level of efficiency: With a high level of expertise usually comes a high level of efficiency. Contractors know what they’re doing and how to do it quickly, probably much faster than you or a less qualified employee could complete the same task. This saves everyone time.
- Increased flexibility: By outsourcing some aspects of your business, you can adapt and change quickly, as you do not need to use internal staff resources to complete tasks that would normally be used for the outsourced task.
- You can focus on what you do best: If you outsource some tasks, you no longer need to spend time doing tasks that do not grow your business or interest you.
Potential Negatives of Outsourcing to Consider
- Service quality and delivery: If you have engaged the wrong third party then you may not get the quality service you deserve. This could be in the form of the work not completed on time or not meeting expectations.
- Confidentiality: You are engaging someone outside your business, so there is a higher chance of data security falling short than if you kept tasks in-house.
- Rigid contracts: Depending on your contract with the third party, the contract may not allow flexible or fast changes with your requirements.
- Instability: If the third party goes out of business, you will have to find someone new and retrain them.
- Offshore challenges: Outsourcing to another country can be highly cost effective but can come with additional challenges such as language barriers, dealing with time zones or cultural preferences.
To avoid these outsourcing issues, don’t be afraid to ask for testimonials or ask around to get a good understanding of the workplace culture, expertise, data security methods, and values of your chosen third party.
What tasks can be outsourced?
Lots of business-related functionality can be effectively outsourced. Example of common tasks to outsource include:
- Bookkeeping
- Marketing
- General administration
- Hiring
- IT and website development
- Calendar management and bookings
- Data entry tasks
- Customer service
- Logistics and shipping
What tasks should you outsource?
This really depends on your business and preferences. When deciding what aspects of your business to outsource, consider:
- Expertise: What are you or your employees experts at? If you aren’t an expert at a task, this could be a good task to outsource to someone who is.
- Time: We all know how valuable time is as a business owner. What takes up lots of your time? One of the benefits of outsourcing is that you can focus on your core business and know that the outsourced task will be done properly and on time.
- Repeatability: Do you have tasks that are repetitive and able to be taught to someone else? These are usually good tasks to outsource.
- Enjoyment: What tasks do you enjoy? If you love doing your own data entry, this might be worth keeping in-house so you can continue to enjoy it. But perhaps you dislike having to do your own bookkeeping, making that a good task to consider outsourcing.
Outsourcing can greatly increase the efficiency of your business by getting the right people to do the jobs you don’t want (or don’t have the time) to do yourself. If you’re looking for a reliable, friendly, expert bookkeeping service, get in touch. We’d love to help.
