by Haris Quintana
All small businesses have something in common: the need to save as much money as they possibly can. Of course, this is just as important for larger companies, but new start-ups are more vulnerable and have too much at risk, to begin with to start splurging and spending lots of money.
Fortunately, there are a few tried-and-tested methods of saving money order to give yourself a fighting chance at the beginning - one of which is outsourcing. Here, we have put together just a few of the tasks that you may want to think about delegating to people outside of your company as well as the ones that you may wish to consider training people to do in-house.
The first thing that you need to do before outsourcing tasks is to think about the strengths and weaknesses of your business and your employees. First of all, you need to think about your core competencies. If you are an IT company, for example, there is little point in spending money on IT management! If you have a medical practice, it might be the case that you benefit most from virtual medical assistants. You need to think carefully about the tasks that you want to keep in-house, to build up an idea of where you want to go with regards to training and the areas that need strengthening.
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1) Repetitive tasks
There are some jobs that pretty much every business has to do, and these can usually be outsourced. For example, data entry services can handle one job, an accountant might manage your finances, and a payroll company can deal with paying your staff. By outsourcing data entry services, you can save both time and money, and you have the benefit of making sure they are done by someone who can do it properly. After all, making a mistake on these jobs can have some quite serious consequences for your business.
2) Specialized knowledge
There are tasks that your business needs to fulfil but need quite specific skills and knowledge and as a start-up, finding someone to work in-house who can do these tasks can often be well out of your budget. By outsourcing this task, it means you can find a freelancer who is usually happy to work on a short term or as-needed basis, meaning you save money on training and the benefits that you would have to pay a full time, permanent member of staff. Tasks that may fall under this description may include search engine optimization (SEO) and website design.
3) Social media management
Social media is a vital part of marketing and advertising for many businesses these days, but it is one of the most challenging - and time-consuming - things to get right. You do need to take into consideration your tone of voice and whether you are looking for daily interaction with your followers, as this will influence how you go about finding someone to help manage your social media.
As your business grows, you may find that you want to take back control over these tasks and deal with them in-house, but when you are starting up, it makes perfect economic sense to outsource.