What and When to Outsource – 7 Top Tips to help you decide what and when to outsource.
Outsourcing – making your business more productive and profitable
Outsourcing necessary but time consuming business administration chores can make your business more productive, profitable and motivating.
Many small businesses complain they are ‘drowning in paperwork’ from all the invoicing, chasing accounts, paying employees, dealing with HMRC, promoting and marketing of their company. Added to this is the problem of fielding the many incoming telephone calls are often cited as the main chores that really sap the time, energy and motivation of business owners.
Outsourcing can be a valuable and strategic tool for making your business more productive and profitable – if you know when and how to take advantage of it. The key factors that need to be considered are WHICH business functions are suitable to be outsourced and WHEN is the best time to ‘farm out’ this work for someone else to do.
Stop and consider what your ‘core’ business is? Are the tasks helping you to grow your core business?
What is your main skill set? Are the tasks taking you away from what you do best?
Here are 7 Top Tips to help you make your decision about WHAT and WHEN to outsource:
- Outsource tasks that are not central to generating profits, competitive success or help you to grow your business.
- Outsource routine but necessary jobs that regularly ‘sap’ your valuable time and energy.
- Outsource tasks that reoccur regularly – like basic administration.
- Outsource tasks that are less expensive to have someone externally to do than to do yourself – or by a member of your own staff.
- Outsource activities that CAN be done cheaper in-house, but that drain the resources of you or your team and get in the way of achieving something EVEN MORE valuable to your business.
- Outsource when the task requires a skill that is so specialised that it’s just impractical to have a regular employee do it badly and take more time than a professional – i.e. designing and building a website, transcription, or writing marketing copy and image manipulation.
- Consider outsourcing when the activity that needs doing is one that nobody wants to do or feels they can do it well.
And don’t just look at the cost of outsourcing – think about the time and money it will SAVE you – and how it will motivate you to focus on the core activities of your business!
Outsourcing is a viable option for everything from transcription and dictation, bookkeeping, telephone answering, databases and mailings, graphic design, marketing, event organisation and website design. The key advantage of outsourcing is that it enables you to invest your resources into more profitable activities that drives your business forward.
Related article – ‘Outsourcing: You can’t afford not to’ The Globe and Mail http://tiny.ly/fqw8
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Great blog! Started using Business Visions a number of years ago and wish I had got this advice when I first started up.
This a very persuasive blog. I worked in outsourcing for many years – and there can still be resistance to the idea. So, what do businesses do? Do they outsource or not? Is there anything that contradicts the negative points raised against outsourcing? The answer is “YES”.
For example, one often-used argument is “lack of company knowledge” – and it’s true that an employee would have a better knowledge of the business. However, that knowledge is not built over time. Any service provider can build the same kind of knowledge provided there is a structured knowledge transfer from the business to the service provider.
This is key decider on which outsourcing partner to use – and (unlike some!)I know Business Visions takes a rigorous approach to knowledge transfer
This is a great article! You mentioned how draining for business managers it could be just to field the telephone calls. That brought back memories of my work as an Examinations clerk for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. There were numerous occasions where I would end up spending seven hours out of an eight-hour work day just fielding the phone calls. As the lead clerk, I found it very difficult to get the rest of my work done, i.e. creating files, processing applications, transcribing data from the applications into three different computer systems,filing files, and preparing the entire Examinations officers’ written correspondence.