Outsourcing can be beneficial to small businesses as they grow. It helps to save money and gives businesses access to flexible services. When using outsourcing, you can often easily scale up or down the service that you use so that it suits the demands of your business. There’s no need to take on a significant commitment as there would be if you had permanent employees. You can take up new outsourcing partners easily and often stop working with them easily too. And if you need more or less help, you can simply ask for it. These are some of the tasks that your small business could outsource.
1. Marketing
Marketing involves many different tasks and specialisms. If you need help with your marketing, outsourcing is often the best choice. When you outsource your marketing, you get a whole team to help you, instead of only being able to afford to hire perhaps one or two people. Many marketing agencies can take care of a huge range of marketing tasks for you, from content marketing and social media to PPC ads and print marketing. Having a single solution to take care of all of your essential marketing needs can make it much easier to have a coherent marketing strategy. Outsourcing can help you get a lot more done with less money.
You can also hire individuals to help you with specific tasks. You might already have someone in charge of marketing for your business, but perhaps you need some help with something specific. This could include content marketing such as writing blog posts or promotional emails, or perhaps search engine optimi-zation. It might be creating graphics or developing your website, or it could be taking care of your social media channels.
2. Accounting
Taking care of your finances is another important task for your business. Some small businesses decide to hire one person to take care of their finances. It might be an accountant or bookkeeper, or they might ask their office manager or administrator to do some tasks like payroll. But if you think that might not be the right choice, outsourcing these tasks to an accountant or bookkeeper could be a better one. They can help with daily or weekly tasks, or just when you need to file your taxes.
Many small businesses decide to keep payroll in-house, despite the fact that it’s very commonly outsourced. When you hand it over to an outsourced service, you could save money. It also helps with compliance, as does having other financial tasks carried out by an outsourcer. When you get your finances wrong, it could lead to problems like penalties for incorrectly filing your taxes. When you use an outsourced service, you can have an independent person checking everything over for you.
3. Admin
Small business owners can have lots of administrative tasks that end up taking up their time. If you want to be able to focus on your core business instead of sorting out admin tasks, outsourcing is a smart choice. You could have someone come to your office to complete admin tasks for you if needed, but many can be completed remotely. A virtual assistant can take care of many of your administrative duties, from data entry to transcription or answering emails.
Virtual assistants could also help you with things like making appointments and scheduling meetings. Many small business owners find that having a personal assistant makes things a lot easier for them. While their assistance helps to run things in the background, they can focus on what’s really important. As well as scheduling business owner’s tasks, outsourcing admin can also help with scheduling employees. Some businesses choose to have a person do this for them, and there is also the option of using automated scheduling software, which some outsourced services can offer too.
4. Customer Support and Reception Services
When you consider how to handle customer support, you might think that it’s better to keep it in-house. That way you can train your staff in exactly how you want to handle your customers. However, outsourced services can also be instructed to deal with your customers in the way that you want them to be. Whether you want a virtual receptionist to answer your phones or emails, or you even want customer service representatives to carry out live chat support, you can tell them how you want them to do it.
As well as customer support, small businesses can also benefit from outsourcing reception duties and call answers. Having a first point of contact for customers and clients that can be available when you’re not is very useful. A virtual receptionist service can answer your calls and take messages for you, then pass them on. They can be instructed to say what you want them to say, and they can redirect calls if you want them to as well. You can have all or some of your calls answered or redirected.
5. IT Management
The technical side of running a business can be lost on many business owners. You might know that you need to fit your office with computers and set up a network, but that doesn’t mean you know how to manage it all. You might hire one or two permanent employees who can do day-to-day tasks if you think it’s necessary. However, many businesses feel that outsourcing their IT management, or combining outsource with permanent staff, is the best choice.
When you outsource IT management, they can take care of a range of things for you. They can help with installing and setting up new systems and products, and they can take care of the maintenance of your hardware and software. Many IT outsourcers provide IT support for small businesses when they need it. This could involve offering help in a number of ways, from dealing with IT security to everyday troubleshooting. They can even help by giving basic training to your employees.
Small businesses can save money and time by outsourcing some tasks. They can also ensure the tasks are completed to a high standard.