As your firm expands, you’ll start handling tasks that are far and far away from your core business activities, which you could outsource. Often, these activities distract you from your core business activities and may force you to take a lot of time learning new skills. Unfortunately, the new skills you spend your precious time learning can only apply to limited functions, including tax preparation or bookkeeping.
These tasks are essential, but except if you’re an accountant, they’ll distract you from critical business tasks that can help grow your firm. Therefore, you must outsource such business activities to firms that can tackle the work seamlessly and affordably, saving you the hassle of doing it yourself. It’s more economical to outsource some business processes than hire new employees to tackle them.
Here are six key areas in your business you should outsource to vendors today.
1. Information Technology/Cyber Security
A study conducted by Deloitte in 2014 discovered that close to 53% of businesses outsource some of their IT functions. The survey also revealed that 26% of the businesses plan to outsource some of their IT functions in the future. Apart from realizing significant cost savings, outsourcing some of your IT functions makes your company more agile and flexible.
For instance, you can outsource your cyber security functions to a cloud-based virtual CISO service provider. The CISO will strategize, manage, and streamline your company’s cybersecurity function, allowing you to focus on growing your business without the worry of being hacked.
2. Accounting
Another area in your business you should consider outsourcing is the accounting function. If you aren’t an accountant, it’ll require time and effort to acquire the necessary skills to complete the accounting processes and comply with standards effectively. You should outsource your accounting to a company such as Bookkeeping Toronto to increase efficiency, comply with standards, and focus on your core business activities.
3. Customer Support
Hiring qualified and dedicated customer service employees may not be possible for most small businesses. Often, this forces smaller businesses to use their office or sales personnel to tackle this function. Unfortunately, this distracts them and divides their time between their roles and customer service. Outsourcing to a vendor can help optimize your customer support while allowing your sales personnel and office staff to focus on other critical business activities.
4. Logistics
As a company, outsourcing your logistic functions allows you to focus on business expansion activities, including merchandising and selling. Having your warehousing, fulfillment, and delivery functions tackled by a vendor lowers costs while enhancing your company’s customer service. Such vendors are excellent in what they do. Therefore, they’re able to respond swiftly and scale to satisfy your clients’ needs more than you would.
5. Human Resource Management
Recruitment, staff training, payroll, performance reviews, and benefits administration are all activities under the human resources function. Often, these activities are time-consuming, making human resources one of the highly outsourced functions.
Additionally, most HR functions are standardized, making them more suitable for outsourcing to third-party contractors. Nevertheless, you wouldn’t prefer your outsourced vendor to conduct performance reviews, but they might be perfect for handling payroll or administering benefits. Therefore, outsourcing your human resources function can go a long way in streamlining the hiring, payroll, and staff training processes.
6. Quality Assurance (QA)
Do you intend to test your newly launched product? You outsource quality assurance services from a third-party vendor specializing in testing new products. Quality assurance is popular in the software engineering sector. However, it’s also applied in other sectors.
For instance, product manufacturers often outsource the services of testers who sample their products to guarantee their integrity and quality. Outsourcing quality assurance services can help your company lower the number of defective commodities that reach your clients. And since it’s a huge undertaking and your staff may not get enough time to handle it efficiently, you should consider outsourcing this function.
Concluding Remarks
Today, outsourcing is a popular strategy used by various businesses to extend their capabilities while maintaining their focus on core business activities. Besides, outsourcing can help your company cut costs by 30 to 50% over hiring full-time workers. Ultimately, outsourcing some business functions is an excellent way to scale your business without compromising your core activities.
