Five Services You Haven’t Thought About Outsourcing

Engineering and Construction Outsourcing

Many business owners shy away from outsourcing…

because they believe it’s easier to control work done in-house, and because they really don’t want to ‘lose sight’ of their business activities. However, it’s very hard to scale a Startup with a small team and a small budget. If you insist on doing everything yourself, it’s likely your business will grow at a very slow pace, and might even hit a plateau of zero growth. In other words, you’ll be stuck at a level where all your resources are stretched to the limits. Outsourced services can provide a quick solution to this dilemma. You can choose to pass tasks that are not part of your core business to remote specialists, which frees up your in-house resources to focus on growing your core business. While there are some services that are commonly outsourced, such as software engineering, there are actually hundreds of other tasks that can be effectively done by outsourcers, thereby helping to scale your business.

Here are 5 outsourcing services that can have a huge impact on helping your business grow:

Customer Support

for many businesses, customer support is not their core area of competence, and yet a high-quality customer support is often essential for success. However, if you hire in-house staff for customer support, this can be extremely expensive, as you may need to run several teams and multiple shifts to cover all support requests. You also have to add to this the cost of hiring and training a high-quality customer support team. If you are not an expert in customer support, that could require hiring specialized recruiters and trainers, to take the task off your hands.

On the other hand, if you choose to outsource your customer support activities, you’ll get instant access to highly trained experts at a lower cost, since many outsourcing centers for customer support operate in low-income countries, such as the Philippines. In addition, most outsourcing partners offer 24/7 customer support, which would be extremely expensive if you hire on-site staff.

Data Entry

Every business runs on data. The better you manage your data, the more effective your business efforts are. Unfortunately, that often means many hours spent transferring data manually from one place to another. Cleary, data entry is not the best way to make use of your highly paid on-site specialists. Instead, you can easily outsource this task, which frees up your staff to do more demanding tasks.

Lead Generation

Generating new leads is one of the most important tasks for growing any business. However, lead generation often involves a lot of tedious and time-consuming steps, such as finding and listing contact information of potential prospects. Instead of using your time for these tedious tasks, you can hire an outsourcer to do them systematically every day. That way you’ll get more results faster, while freeing up your own valuable time.

Human Resources Management

Your staff members are one of your company’s most important assets. That’s why it’s important for your company to have a good HR management. But HR managers are often expensive, and you probably have to assemble a whole team, since you’ll need to cover several areas of expertise, including payroll management, recruitment, compliance issues, etc. Because of this, hiring a full HR team is often too expensive for a Startup company or for a small business. In that case, a better way to cover these functions is by hiring an outsourcing partner who provides remote staff specialized in HR. In addition to the lower cost, there are several other advantages to outsourcing your HR functions. Most outsourcing providers offer flexible pricing, allowing you to pay just for the hours you actually need, and not for a full-time staff position. Also, remote HR specialists are highly trained and are usually equipped with advanced HR technology, which would be very expensive to buy in-house.

Finance and Accounting

Good accounting is essential to guarantee the financial health of any company. Daily bookkeeping and accurate accounting are critical to enable effective management of a company’s finances. Accurate accounting allows you to stay on top of all your businesses assets and liabilities and will allow you to put in place contingency plans for financial challenges. However, good accounting depends on highly specialized experts, who are unlikely to be useful for your company’s core business activities. Again, this is probably not feasible for a young Startup or small business.

Because of this, a very attractive alternative is to outsource your company’s accounting. An outsourcing provider who is specialized in finance and accounting can give you instant access to highly trained specialists. In addition, an outsourcing company dedicated to accounting will constantly stay up to date with current rules and government regulations. This fact alone is likely to save you a lot of money, since running foul of government regulations can turn out to be very expensive indeed.