Richard Walton — July 20, 2017 — July 20, 2017
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Most entrepreneurs start a business because they’re passionate about their idea and want to see it grow and expand as quickly as possible. However, it’s hard to progress when you’re overwhelmed with time consuming tasks like recruitment, accounting, human resources, and basic admin.
Outsourcing offers an easy, cost effective and solid solution. By enlisting the help of offshore service providers, entrepreneurs can free up their time to focus on core tasks and monumentally expand the capabilities of a start-up team. It’s not a new business strategy, big organisations have been outsourcing for years, but the difference now is in the accessibility. Advanced software, online communication and security have created new possibilities for small businesses to streamline processes without the big budgets.
That said, outsourcing should be approached with caution as a bad job could end up damaging a company’s reputation and bottom line. Here are five areas entrepreneurs and start-ups should outsource:
Social Media
Most start-ups have realised the benefits of social media for marketing, sales and customer retention, but lack the time, resources and skills to effectively utilise the platforms. To really optimise social media, you’ve got to have a dedicated employee who can research hash tags, devise witty tweets, generate content and respond to interactions all day, every day. It’s a hassle for small teams who are concentrating their efforts on jump-starting the business, and for entrepreneurs its just another stress to distract them from the bigger picture. Hand it over to a social media specialist company and a strategy will be developed, monitoring followers and interactions to provide important client statistics that could prove invaluable for sales and future innovations.
HR
Whilst the back office administration is obviously crucial for small teams (payroll, benefits, recruitment etc.) there’s rarely enough work to sustain a full-time employee. It makes much more sense for start-ups to save money by hiring a freelancer or virtual services company who can handle the responsibilities as and when they arise. For example, if you need focussed research into salary benchmarks and skills, help with initial CV filtering, scheduling interviews with candidates, or general employee administration. This way start-ups get to benefit from the knowledge of an HR professional without having to pay the big salaries.
Finance
Financial management is an overwhelming, tedious and hugely time-consuming task, but the longer you leave it the more difficult it gets to organise. What’s more if you make a mistake, it could end up having very serious consequences for your start-up. In the past, finance was the one thing even big businesses struggled to outsource because of security risks, but now thanks to apps like LastPass which store banking information, logins and passwords electronically, generating new passwords automatically to prevent hacking, it’s safe and easy. Outsource to a specialist accounting services company and they’ll take care of expenses, bank reconciliation, taxes, spreadsheets, invoicing and debtors, keeping you up-to-date with progress reports.
Lead Generation
Marketing and lead generation is an area where start-ups can make huge savings and improve efficiency by outsourcing. Whilst sharing the responsibility across existing team members can seem tempting and less of a hassle, often it results in time being wasted making cold calls that offer very little return. By contrast, lead generation experts have deep insights into the marketplace, which they can utilize to target customers who are more likely to be interested in what
you’re selling. They do all the ground work and then your existing teams can focus their time on implementing more productive strategies informed by market research.
Basic Administration
Starting a business comes with a lot of admin. There’s email accounts to set up, office space to hire, contacts to be filed, the list goes on and on. In fact, it’s admin that’s usually at least partially responsible for start-up stagnation as entrepreneurs and teams find themselves knee deep in time-consuming processes that distract from the main aim of the game: growth. How do you solve it? Outsource everything from diary management, email correspondence and document formatting to stationary orders, transcribing and travel research. It will save you time, frustration and money. Think about it like this if you value your time at £20 an hour, and you spend 2 hours trying to work out how to make a half decent powerpoint presentation, that’s £40 wasted, when a virtual services company could do the same job for half the cost, in half the time. The maths speaks for itself.
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