When you’re running a small business, you’re going to find yourself with a whole lot of work on your hands. It takes all sorts of tasks to keep things up and running. You’ll have to focus on product development to have something to sell to your customers. You’ll have to carry out market research to find out whether your product is worth sending into production and whether it has potential to be profitable. You will need to carry out advertising and marketing campaigns to raise brand and product awareness. You’ll have to create a site to sell from. You’ll have to manage and dispatch orders. You’ll have to deal with customer queries. You’ll have to process refunds and complaints. The list goes on and on. So, it’s not all too surprising that you may begin to feel overwhelmed. Whether you’ve just started out, or whether you’ve been running for a while and are beginning to expand, you may find that outsourcing can prove extremely beneficial for you. Here’s everything you need to know on the subject!
What Is Outsourcing?
First, let’s focus on what outsourcing actually is. Put simply, it’s a business practice that involves handing over parts of your work to an independent third party. Rather than taking on work in-house, you let someone outside of your company take care of it. Usually, this third party will either be a self-employed individual (or freelancer) or an agency who have a number of freelancers on their books, or their own employees who can complete the work for you. There are countless benefits that come hand in hand with outsourcing aspects of your business’ operations. First and foremost, it will lift a huge weight and workload from your own shoulders. You won’t have to worry about carrying out the work yourself, or having to take on employees who can complete the work for you. As you’re likely to know, employees are a large responsibility and you will have to provide them with many perks, such as regular contracted hours, training, annual leave, sick leave, parental leave and more. When you use a third party, you’ll generally agree a one-off fee for the project and pay that alone. You’ll also know that the people carrying out the work are already experienced and trained in their field, so you won’t need to provide any preliminary or additional training. Plus, they will have their own equipment, so you won’t have to buy equipment or machinery for the major jobs!
Areas You Might Want to Consider Outsourcing
There are all sorts of areas that you might want to consider outsourcing as a business owner. Here are some of the most commonly outsourced tasks or areas of business operation!
Manufacturing
Manufacturing is perhaps the most outsourced aspect of business. Whether you need products manufactured, packaging manufactured or parts manufactured by specialists like wire manufacturers. Manufacturing tends to be outsourced as it is simply such a large task. To manufacture things, you need a factory filled with necessary equipment and machinery. You also need the staff to operate this machinery, which entails a whole lot of health and safety and training. This is a lot for any business to fund and manage – especially when manufacturing is just one part of your process. Instead, you can outsource to manufacturing plants who make it their whole business to manufacture goods. They’ll have everything necessary to create what it is you want. Outsourcing manufacturing also helps you to switch your products as and when you please. Rather than having to stick to making the same products, you can move with trends in the market and begin outsourcing to different companies if your products change, rather than having to sell up equipment, buy new equipment and retrain staff.
Web Design and Web Development
Nowadays, a website is essential for any business – even those that still have a traditional brick and mortar store. E Commerce is currently reigning supreme when it comes to many companies’ sales and it also provides a good space to establish your brand and answer customers’ questions. Your website will put your products or services on display and provide potential customers with other important information, such as your contact details. Having a website also means that you can make sales around the clock and sell on an international basis easily. Now, chances are you’re not going to be able to create a full, working website alone. You need to be able to understand things like HTML, CSS and Javascript in order to be able to do this. A website designer and website developer will be able to help you along the way!
Customer Support
Customer support is essential in any business. You need to be able to answer emails, calls and social media messages to keep your customers happy. Answering questions and queries can help to boost sales and is likely to result in higher levels of customer satisfaction, which will, in turn, result in increased future sales. Consider outsourcing customer support. There are plenty of services out there that can take care of all of these things for you!
IT
In-house IT departments are becoming increasingly rare in business. Instead, many companies will outsource their IT to companies who will monitor their IT around the clock, resolve issues and keep things up and running. This really is an essential. After all, without your tech working, you’re not going to be able to get a whole lot of work done!
Hopefully, some of the above information will help you to manage and run your business more effectively. Outsourcing really is simple and can make all the difference. So, consider some of the above areas and try them out for your own company.
