4 Signs That You Need To Outsource Business Activities

There comes a time for all businesses when you should outsource work to an external company. Whether it’s your accounting, payroll, customer service or marketing, at some point a helping hand from a professional will do you a lot of favours. However, knowing the right time to push the outsource button can be tricky. What activities should you let go and how can you tell when it is worth spending the money? There’s no straightforward answer, unfortunately, but the following list will give you a few ideas of when to call in the experts.

Tasks are wasting your time

As a small business owner, your time will be precious. You should be spending all of your time concentrating on the activities that earn you the most money. When other parts of your business start to encroach on that, then it might be worth outsourcing. For example, if you have to take a day out of your week to do your accounts, then that is almost a working week per month of lost opportunity. In which case, you should look into hiring an accountant. They will get the work done far quicker and leave you to generate another day a week of profit.

You go through cyclical periods

Most businesses have certain times of the year when they are busier. The most obvious example is around Christmas time in a retail environment. Stores will hire temporary staff to help them get through the busiest trading period of the year, and give them work until everything goes quiet after the January sales. Not all businesses operate like retail does, of course. However, if there are certain periods when you need extra hands on board, then you should identify them and act accordingly. Contacting a recruitment agency could help you here, as they screen potential temp workers and will cut down on the time you spend interviewing dud candidates.

Resources are being drained

Although on the face of things, doing everything in-house is cheaper than outsourcing, it doesn’t always work out that way. Let’s take a look at marketing as an example. Ideally, your marketing team should be concentrating on generating new business and getting your name out there. However, many tasks that need to be done – SEO, for example – can take up a lot of their focus without maximizing your profits. Hiring digital marketing professionals could free up those resources so that they can concentrate on more important tasks. It’s those routine – but necessary – tasks that should be outsourced.

Your team doesn’t have the skills

Although you and your team can excel in some areas, there will be times when you need a specialist. Let’s take social media as an example. It takes a lot of time and energy to keep on top of social media practices, and it is often more cost-effective to hand over the reigns to a firm that knows exactly what they are doing, such as Do Re Media! We recommend that you choose a company that can guarantee results. They should also have plenty of testimonials from happy customers to back them up. It’s standard advice that works across the board when outsourcing any part of your business, so make sure that you follow it.

Do you have any tips on when to outsource certain business activities? We’d love to hear about them, so feel free to share your thoughts. Until next time!

Image source: Tony Webster