Small businesses have one important thing in common: they need to save as much as their resources as possible. It’s not to say that this isn’t just as important for larger businesses, though, but the startups have so many competitors they’re up against and way too many uncertainties – they simply can’t afford to splurge.
Luckily, there are a few tried-and-tested methods of saving a bit more money during the early phases in order to give yourself a running change. Here is a handful of the processes you might want to outsource rather than hiring someone to do it in-house as well as the ones you should focus on training someone for as soon as possible.
It just makes it a bit easier to stay ahead of your competitors and keep your funds for when you need it the most.
First: Determine your strengths and weaknesses
Before we can get cracking on the processes you might want to hand over to someone else, it’s important to keep in mind that your business may be slightly different from others. That’s why you will need to identify your core competencies, first of all, before you start to weed them out of your business; as an IT company, for example, it makes little sense to outsource your IT tasks.
Take a long and hard look at your business before you do anything else and make a list of the processes that you should definitely keep in-house. That way, you have a clear picture of what you should work towards in terms of training and the areas you might want to strengthen.
#1 Highly repetitive tasks
While all businesses differ slightly from each other, most of them have a few things in common: they need to pay their employees’ salaries, handle their data entries, and keep track of their inventory. These are tasks that tend to repeat themselves each month and you can definitely outsource these in order to not just save money – but also to avoid that someone with less competence makes a major hiccup.
Messing up your employees’ salaries is, after all, something you’d rather avoid while you’re still young and fairly new to the field.
#2 Specialised knowledge
As a small business, it’s not really that easy to find the resources to hire an IT-expert. You don’t necessarily need someone to take care of this at all times either, though, and as long as your company doesn’t specialise in these solutions, you might want to find some managed IT services instead. They will have the right skill set in any way and you can feel confident that you’re getting the expertise you need.
#3 Social media management
Again, this is something that you will have to consider for your individual business. If you rely on a consistent tone-of-voice and use social media platforms a lot to interact with your customers, you’d probably want to hire someone to handle this instead.
Yet, social media management is the kind of task that a lot of business owners struggle to wrap their heads around. More often than not, they end up neglecting it altogether and risk missing out on a lot of valuable marketing and, above all, the opportunity to build lasting relationships with your network.
When you have grown a bit bigger and stronger, it might make sense to take back control over these tasks and handle them yourself – but it’s not really necessary when you’re still small.
[…] 3 Business Tasks You Should Outsource […]
[…] and the business model itself will be incredibly flexible. So, you certainly shouldn’t fear to outsource. Instead, you should embrace it as a saving feature of your business model. That’s if you can […]
[…] your accountant through recommendation or searching for a reputable company if you want it done externally. A good accountant will be able to save you money and advise on certain cuts you can make […]
[…] loads of unique ideas for services which can be provided over the air, opening the doors for normal work to be made much easier. Accessing and creating documents, for example, is made far simpler when you’re using a system […]
[…] help people to want to look at what you’re doing and use your business for their purpose. You can work closely with your designer to get your blog looking the best it possibly can so that you can drive more people to it. Below, […]