Eight services every scaling small businesses can outsource
Small businesses can benefit enormously from outsourcing a number of their services. Outsourcing is growing tremendously in popularity – especially amongst businesses who have already enjoyed the benefits of outsourced. More than half of companies say that they are increasing their outsourcing, while just 9% say that they are stopping their outsourcing.
There’s a good reason for this – outsourcing is hugely. But it is important that you are outsourcing the right areas of your business. If you are a small business that is looking to scale upwards and grow, there are certain services that can be hugely beneficial. Here we take a look are six services that every business should outsource.
IT services
Most small businesses don’t have the resources or skills to host and maintain all IT services in-house. There are numerous benefits of outsourcing IT services, including Increased competitiveness, reduced costs, access to up-to-date cloud services, increased performance and access to a dedicated customer support.
Typically, small businesses commonly outsource services such as IT helpdesk, security, hosting and data center services, backup and disaster recovery, network monitoring and maintenance and IT audits.
Accounting
Accounting is something that the vast majority of small businesses will do themselves initially. There is nothing wrong that – however, the problem arises when the job of doing the accounts pushes beyond the complexity that you have the ability to deal with. Thankfully outsourcing accountancy work is easy.
There is no doubt that many businesses understand the benefits of outsourcing their accountancy services; in fact, 37% of all accountancy tasks in small businesses are outsourced. If you dread having to deal with all of the accounting tasks of the company, now could be the right time to switch over to an outsourced service.
Consulting services
Every small business faces a major change once in a while, ranging from the need to react to a disruption in the external, strategic planning, a large system implementation or an acquisition process. In such cases, it may be more sensible to outsource (a part) of these tasks to expert consultants who specialise in the matter.
External consultants can be hired on a one-off basis, commonly on an hourly fee or a day rate, or can be hired on a recurring basis through package agreements. For example, some consultants offer SME businesses a fixed number or consulting hours that cater to their strategic and business change needs.
Sales
Outsourcing your sales team can be a huge advantage to a small business. With an in-house sales team you would likely be relying on a small number of people working over a relatively limited time-span. For growing smaller businesses, it can be advantage to benefit from the diverse expertise of an outsourced sales team.
Not only do you receive help from the highest quality professional sales reps with years of experience, you get it with lower cost and risk to your business. The team is constantly updated with training, and they have the infrastructure to manage greater demand as your business grows. Better yet, outsourced sales teams can be available at a broader span of times without you having to employ multiple in-house teams.
Digital marketing
It is certainly the case that digital marketing requires a wide range of skills and specialisms, hiring this through an in-house team would be prohibitively expensive for a small business. Outsourcing your digital marketing to an experienced agency can provide your marketing strategy with the expertise needed for planning and delivering powerful campaigns.
Print marketing
Print marketing is still hugely effective – it delivers your marketing messages in a tactile and engaging way that is extremely popular with customers. But designing, planning, and printing a high-quality print marketing campaign takes a great deal of specialist skills.
Given the higher costs of actually printing materials, this really isn’t something that you should do casually. Outsource your print marketing campaign to ensure that it looks fantastic and delivers the results that your business needs.
Customer services
Customer services is a vital task for small businesses, but the economics of small companies often means that this work has to be carried out by all members of staff. And yet if someone of your business-critical staff are spending a significant portion of their days answering phone calls and dealing with customer queries, it can decrease their efficiency.
It’s a much better idea to simply outsource your customer services and support so that the rest of your team can do the work that they are good at.
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity has become completely essential for every small business with any kind of web presence or computer system. And even if a business has a budget for an IT specialist, they probably don’t have the expertise to deal with the sophisticated and ever-changing demands of modern cybersecurity.
Worse still it has become extremely expensive to hire an in-house cybersecurity team due to the digital skills gap around the world. Working with a team of outsourced cybersecurity specialists can be a cost-effective solution that not only provides you with the expert individuals, but also the tools and software that have become an absolute necessity when attempted to protect a business from hackers.
Final thoughts
Outsourcing can have a hugely positive effect on growing businesses, providing cost-effective solutions and fantastic flexibility to benefit the company and help you continue to thrive.
