Why would you consider outsourcing in your business?

Outsourcing parts of your business can be one of the best decisions you make and provide a range of benefits that can help you increase your productivity and accelerate your business’ growth – but only if you outsource the right parts of your business.

Manual functions that take time but are low value and repetitive, specialist skills like accounting and marketing, or even general administration tasks are all prime roles for outsourcing.

If you take the time to find the providers, negotiate the right price and choose the right parts of your business, you can quickly reap the rewards of outsourcing.

But, what exactly are the benefits you can expect by strategically outsourcing elements of your business to a third party provider?

In this article, Andy MacGregor, Managing Director at outsourced telephone answering service provider Face For Business runs through the outcomes you should expect from successful outsourcing.

Improved efficiency 

One of the main benefits you should get from outsourcing parts of your business is that it should make everything else in your business more efficient.

When outsourcing you’re bringing in expertise for a specific function that you either don’t have the skills for, or that take you too much time to complete.

Functions like business administration, accounting and even answering calls are all tasks that pull you away from your main jobs and can take up a lot of your day.

By removing these parts of your business from your own responsibility, you can have more time to focus on your business’ core functions.

Reduce your overall costs

You might think that outsourcing is a big investment to make for your business, and it can be depending on the level of skills you’re bringing in. But like any investment, you need to balance the initial costs against what it would cost to retain the function.

For example, when outsourcing your marketing you can easily find yourself paying upwards of £3,000 a month for a good agency.

But within the investment you’re getting access to a full range of services, rather than spending £3,000 on a single employee who might not have all the skills.

Similarly, outsourcing a function like telephone answering is far cheaper than hiring a full or part-time receptionist because you don’t need to pay a wage, just a fee for the time your calls are being answered.

You also have to factor in the additional revenue you could earn by removing a task from your own plate that’s taking up too much of your time.

Get access to a wider range of talent

We’ve touched on this already but it shouldn’t be discounted the benefits you can get when it comes to accessing a bigger talent pool by outsourcing parts of your business.

As we’ve mentioned above, outsourcing your marketing means you get access to experts in all aspects of marketing from design and development to content to social media – all within the one investment.

On the other hand, by trying to bring these functions in-house, you’ll end up paying the same – or more – for a single hire, but without the same level of expertise across the board.

You could also limit yourself to a local talent pool (although this has become less of a problem since remote and home working became more popular).

Get more scalable resource

When you bring skills in-house, you’ll be paying a wage regardless of how much you actually use the resource you’ve hired.

When you outsource you have the option to increase or decrease the services you use and pay for based on your needs.

If you need additional resources to cover a busy period, you can scale up your resource and pay more and then scale it back down later.

Ensure you get the benefits by strategically outsourcing

While outsourcing can provide the above benefits, and more, it will only bring these things to your business if you outsource strategically.

This means taking a close look at your business and identifying where the current inefficiencies are and then figuring out if outsourcing the skills and services will improve your business.

Most businesses go wrong with outsourcing because they don’t do their research.

For those that do, the rewards they reap in the long-term can be huge for the success of their business.