Remember when you had this deep love and you took a chance and started a small business doing that very thing? Maybe it was baking cookies or tutoring or design. Now your business has grown a little and you realize you now do everything … except for the things that you love most. Other people bake, design and tutor, while you run the business. That’s not how you envisioned it working out, but you can get it back. By joining the outsourcing revolution, you can offload mundane work that can be done by anybody to a contractor eager to win your business.
You can outsource pretty much anything business related. Let’s take a look at some of the things that may help you get back to doing what you love:
1. HR and Administration – Companies that specialize in PEO and ASO will be your friend here. You can hire someone to take care of your HR needs, so you don’t have to. The PEO end can help with employee benefits, retirement, worker’s comp, recruiting and screening and so much more. If you don’t need quite so much, take a look at ASO services, more of the administrative side. Here you can find help with payroll and tax filing. Either way, you can find help with either the employee area of your business or the administrative side, or both. You may be amazed at how much time this frees up for you. When you figure out what you need or want, take a look at some of the services. The nice thing about these is that you can pay for what you need through different services, and not waste money on what you don’t.
2. Social Media – Maybe you love keeping up with your company’s social media. After all, it’s an excellent, pretty much necessary marketing technique, and through social media you can gain new customers and connect with old ones. Maybe you love updating Twitter, posting on Instagram and engaging on Facebook. Or maybe you hate it. Social media takes a lot of work, you have to update regularly and comment and connect with your followers. Posts must be relevant, engaging, and sharable to be worth it, and it takes time. Perhaps you want to outsource your social media. If it’s not what you love, let someone else take it on and you get back to doing what you dreamt of.
3. A Cleaning Service – When you opened your shop or office, you intended to clean it yourself. After all, a cleaning service is just another chunk of your budget. But do you really want to be vacuuming, dusting and cleaning bathrooms when you could be meeting with clients or other more relevant tasks that will increase your business? And your employees probably don’t want to clean either. Think about hiring a cleaning service, especially if you have clients and customers coming in. A dusty, dirty space is a big turn off; let someone else handle this aspect of owning a business.
4. Editing and Writing – Not everyone can write well or even likes to write, and this may be another area to outsource. Not everyone can catch a dangling modifier or knows whether to use an Oxford comma or not. If writing is frustrating to you, but you put out a lot of written material, whether blog posts, brochures or newsletters, think about hiring a writing and editing service or at least an editing service to help. Even if you are a great writer, another set of eyes can catch mistakes that you have missed.
5. Visual Content – Somewhere along the way, you are going to publish visual content, whether in the form of photography or videography. Outsource this. A professional not only knows how to make things look good, but he or she should know what is effective. You may or may not do something like this on a regular basis, either way, it’s a smart one to outsource. Perhaps you need stills to go with your brochures or on your website, or you like to release a new video every month. A professional can help.
Advantages of Business Process Outsourcing
The key advantage of business process outsourcing is allowing your business to scale fast without incurring a huge addition to your monthly overhead cost. At the same time, outsourcing certain aspects of your business are more efficient time-wise as it allows you to expand without having to start new teams and infrastructure from the ground up: your contractors would already have the infrastructure and they’ll handle finding the right people to do the work.
Business process outsourcing provides companies with limited resources access to technology and skill sets that would have been unavailable or unattainable if sourced directly. And whether you need these services and technologies for a short-term project or a long-term partnership, or whether you need additional or less help, business process outsourcing companies have the added advantage of being flexible enough to meet the demands of their clients.
There are only so many hours in the work week. Save some of them for doing what you love and get someone to help with the other stuff. Decide what you need, what you can feasibly do and what you can’t. Then hire someone.
