For some, this is where outsourcing steps in. Outsource firms are usually dedicated to a specific area of activity, like social media marketing or call centres. But how do you decide when to outsource and when you should keep the work in-house?
Save Money
The whole purpose of your business is to generate revenue, and when you have to spend a large portion of that to keep the ball rolling, it might be time to explore cheaper alternatives.
An in-house call centre can be costly to set up and maintain. Hiring a social media team to keep your brand alive online requires a group completely dedicated to that task. Even major media outlets – like HBO – outsource their social media outreach. If it’s cheaper, then consider keeping your costs down by outsourcing.
Save Time
Some tasks just take up too much of your time, whether you’re in a small or large business. Secretarial duties or customer service can eat up an entire day if you’re self-employed, while adding new departments to a large business can tie up the schedule of your executives who oversee them.
Outsourcing will give everybody some of their time back, to focus on the other tasks that matter to grow the business. While even the minutest operational detail can have a domino effect on the flow of work, if you can afford it – and trustworthy and capable sources are present – outsourcing smaller tasks is a great way to streamline your business’s efforts.
Save Resources
Working in-house costs time and money and the overuse of business resources stretches their effectiveness to breaking point. Whether it is your equipment, offices, supplies – even your network of contacts – all of these things are being used, limiting your overall productivity.
Outsourcing will free up all your resources for the preferred in-house purposes. But when is outsourcing not right?
Keep Your Valuable Staff
Outsourcing work often means replacing staff. It is an unfortunate reality for any employee that their position may not last forever. And you’ll want to consider the human element before outsourcing.
The bottom line is king, but which staff will it affect and can you afford to lose them? Do you have any valuable team players who are worth more than their salary? If you can’t move them to another position in the company, it might be worth keeping their work in-house for the time being.
Keep Your Money
While often it’s cheaper to outsource, this isn’t always the case. Be careful that you don’t get so excited about the time and resources you will save, that you forget to measure the price. Sometimes there are hidden costs that aren’t immediately apparent, so be sure to think it through.
It might be cheaper to outsource one department while productivity is reduced in others, now that inter-department communication is more difficult. Small changes can have big effects, so be sure that the benefits outweigh the costs.
Also, sometimes merely restructuring your work-flow can reduce costs. It is always possible that your current methods are neither the most efficient nor the cheapest.
And sometimes certain areas like your communications systems can be improved by educating yourself and your staff with materials, such as the ones on Certification Kits that provide training for complex networking systems. A trained team of staff is an efficient machine.
Keep Your Priorities Straight
Social media, for example, might be important for any modern business, but is it even more important for you? Does your entire business’s survival depend on the tasks you are looking to outsource?
Outsourcing can be great for business, but it means you have less control over the work being done. If the work is essential to your business, then you might prefer to keep it in-house, where you have more control.
Camille McClane is a writer, researcher and editor based in Southern California. She loves anything tech, business and social media-related, and is honoured to be a contributor for Business Becasue!
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