How Outsourcing Can Help Your Small Business Grow

Your small business is growing, but not to the point of hiring another person, yet there are tasks you’d like to offload to prioritize other things. In situations like these, outsourcing becomes an attractive and affordable option.

Outsourcing can allow you to grow your business without hiring additional personnel until you are ready. It can often be a short—or long-term and cost-effective solution.

Assess and Identify

Review all aspects of your small business. Identify the tasks that take up more of your time than you feel are good returns or might be better done by someone else. Some tasks may be ongoing, while others are one-time needs.

Outsourcing options exist for almost any task, including design, marketing, sales, content writing, customer service, IT, accounting, and business planning.

Identify how much time each task takes and the cost—including opportunity cost—of each. During this phase, you can evaluate the price of outsourcing this workstream.

Common Areas for Outsourcing

You can outsource any task for any reason. Savvy small business owners surround themselves with people who are more skilled in areas they don’t enjoy, don’t excel at, or don’t fit into their priorities matrix.

• Accounting and bookkeeping: Outsourcing this task frees up time for the business owner and helps ensure small businesses comply with the proper guidelines.
• Social Media: Using a social media service can help build your brand and be an essential part of your sales funnel. If you do not have the knowledge, time, or desire to take on social media marketing, outsourcing this workstream can benefit your business.
• Human Resources: This is another area where outsourcing can help business owners navigate legalities and tasks like onboarding and payroll.
• Projects with short deadlines: Sometimes, you need a project completed quickly. From product and package designs and websites to email campaigns, outsourcing a project with a precise due date and specific requirements can help you focus on growing the business.
• Customer support: Taking calls and responding to customer requests can be time-consuming. Outsourcing this task to develop a network of customer support (both real-life and virtual) can result in supporting your sales funnel through various contact points.
• Purchasing, shipping, and logistics: If you need to spend time on tasks like marketing, outsourcing the fulfillment portion of your business makes sense. While you drive sales, outsourcing the fulfillment workstream allows you to grow your sales.
• IT Management: With so many customers conducting business online, this is an area you don’t want to take lightly. Areas like website design, preventing downtime, fixing bugs and issues, and cybersecurity are crucial for your business. Passing this workstream to the experts will give you peace of mind and offer legal and financial protection.
• Property Management: If you own several properties, using a property management company can free you from screening tenants, rent collection, scheduling maintenance and repairs, budgeting, and all the legalities with these areas.

Expectations and Expense

Be sure to set clear goals for any work you plan to outsource. A specific outline of your goals and expectations will help you obtain a precise cost estimate.

Start researching outsourcing providers and their prices. Some businesses specialize in supplying consistent outsourcing and sites that connect your organization with individuals. Many of them have a database of potential candidates you can interview.

Some common websites for outsourcing include:

• Upwork (verified time worked by freelancers)
• Guru (US-based freelancers)
• Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (developers)
• Cloud Tasks (revenue operations)
• Fiverr (mostly gig-based workers)
• 99 Designs (all things art and design - from logos to websites)
• 20four7VA (virtual assistants)

Some companies offer tailored outsourcing services to help you grow from a startup and maneuver areas like branding, purchasing, navigating supply chains, and various banking tasks.

Another factor to consider is whether you plan to outsource a workstream (like email newsletter design) for just a few emails or the long term. This will impact the cost and how you find the right person.

Outsourcing is an effective strategy for small business owners to free time and energy to focus on growing their business rather than the "nitty gritty" details. While it might require some up-front investment, it can pay big dividends in the long term by reinforcing your business with the right experts to help you grow.

Resources:

https://www.fiverr.com/?source=top_nav

https://www.upwork.com/

https://www.guru.com/

https://www.mturk.com/

https://cloudtask.com/

https://99designs.com/categories

https://20four7va.com/

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/list-tasks-running-small-business-21161.html

https://www.uschamber.com/co/start/strategy/small-business-tasks-to-outsource

https://www.sba.gov/blog/10-small-business-functions-can-be-easily-outsourced

https://www.fortunebuilders.com/what-does-a-property-management-company-really-do/

 

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