If you’re just starting a new company, you’ve no doubt been through many brainstorming sessions and thought out your business plan. You’ve accounted for things like equipment, space, marketing, inventory, finance, and sales. In visualizing your staff, maybe you’ve thought about outsourcing as an option or maybe not. Either way, it’s time to take a fresh look at this essential business strategy.
Outsourced services can help you when you need skills no one at your company has. That can be anything from accounting to manufacturing to specialized IT services such as Java development from a company like BairesDev. There are good reasons that more than one-third of small businesses outsource one or more of their processes. Not only does outsourcing free up your time, but it can also improve your business. Here’s how.
1. Raise Your Bottom Line
It may seem like hiring a bunch of outsourcing services will cost you more than hiring a bunch of employees. After all, you’re adding new expenses, right? Well, it’s not quite that simple. Hiring staff and outsourcing are two different things. When you hire full- or part-time workers, you’re paying them a salary plus benefits. When you hire outsourcers, you’re just paying for the service they provide, and you can start or stop it at any time.
That means, instead of hiring a full-time staff accountant, for example, you can hire outsourced accounting services. An accountant may cost you around $100K per year for salary, benefits, and training, while outsourced accounting services will likely cost you much less. Of course, if you need a full-time accountant, you should hire one. But consider an outsourced alternative first.
2. Maximize Productivity
With a small staff when you’re just starting out, you may be tempted to give everyone multiple hats. Maybe you’re a flower shop but you know you need to do marketing and ask one of your team members to come up with and execute a marketing plan.
There are several things wrong with this idea. First, while your employees may be smart and talented, and even know a little bit about marketing, their efforts will likely be much less effective than those of a marketing professional. Second, each hour your staffer spends on marketing activities is an hour they’re not spending buying, arranging, or delivering flowers (the core function of your business). Third, your worker may not like marketing and will, therefore, experience lower job satisfaction.
Instead, consider outsourcing the marketing and allowing your employees to do the jobs you hired them for. That way, both types of tasks get done right by the people who know them best.
3. Increase Flexibility
You might not need certain job functions at all times. For example, say you’re a software development company that generally has the right number of programmers to fulfill all client requests. But there may be times when production schedules collide, and you find yourself needing more workers to meet all your obligations. Or maybe you have a project that requires special knowledge.
Outsourced agencies can easily ramp up or ramp down the services they offer. Additionally, they’ve perfected the service they provide and are often very knowledgeable and up to date on the latest methods and skills.
In either case, you can hire additional programmers to get the extra jobs done. When the crunch time ends, you can let them go again.
4. Improve Customer Care
No matter what kind of product or service you provide, you’ll need to help customers when something goes wrong. Yet many new companies, especially smaller ones, don’t have the budget or space to set up a proper call center. You can outsource this work to a company that already has all the equipment and staff in place.
You could even elect a hybrid solution in which in-house employees work with customers one-on-one while you outsource repetitive tasks like creating contracts, developing reports, or sending out service personnel.
Additionally, outsourced care agents can take the time to fully listen to customers’ pain points and collect this information to be analyzed. When you understand what customers think, you have a blueprint for what to improve.
5. Encourage Loyalty
As you can see, outsourcing could make your company function better on many levels. When your business is running smoothly, customers will notice and will want to return. In addition, they may be inspired to:
- Spend more per visit
- Join your loyalty program
- Post about their positive experience on social media
- View and share your social media posts
- Encourage others to do business with you
These benefits can’t be understated, given that it costs less to retain existing customers than to attract new ones.
In Summary
In the early stages of your new business, you’ve got a lot to think about. But take a little time to consider how outsourced services can help you now and as you grow. Still not convinced? Try hiring just one outsourced service for a brief period and see how it goes.
