Are you a small business owner with deadlines, expenses, and stress?

The solution might be to outsource some of your tasks. There is only so much that small businesses can do with the limited resources they have. There is always more work to be done.

One of the smartest moves you can make is outsourcing some of the work. It will help you invest more energy and time in productive strategies that add value to your business. 

In this post, we will take you through 7 areas where small businesses should outsource more. 

Let's dive right in

Human Resources

It might be a good idea to outsource your HR entirely. 

Third-party agencies offer custom HR packages according to your requirements. From recruiting to marking attendance to workforce management, you can take it all off your plate. 

Backend administrative work, tax law, compliance - a remote HR team can manage it all for you. 

Marketing

Marketing has got a lot to it. 

Content creation, editing, email marketing, advertisement, social media, and more. 

Timeliness is a chief concern when any small business wants to run a full-force marketing campaign. 

Assembling a salaried in-house marketing team will require the involvement of HR and management both. Whereas outsourcing the marketing functions will be a comparatively quicker process. Remote talent solutions can help you post a remote job with your pricing and make sure you get the most deserving candidate for your business. 

Bonus Tip - As you can hire marketing experts on a project/contract basis, you may employ them only when a new product campaign is launched. This means you can go easy on your budget on other days when you can manage the marketing load on your own. 

Accounting and Bookkeeping

You can refocus on making growth while the outsourced accountants and bookkeepers take care of everything from the day-to-day transaction coding to payroll processing.

Why bear the overhead expenses of hiring and training the accountant team when third parties have it all covered for you? 

While outsourcing bookkeeping can have its pros & cons, you get to save on payrolls and operational costs by virtual bookkeeping. 

Sales

Being a small business owner, you can work with a sales team that is already in place. A team that knows the drill and is already skilled in a new sales management software. 

You may not have the time and energy to hire an in-house sales team or train them on new technologies.

An engaged sales outsourcing services team can help generate successful sales plans in a short time. They also know how to professionally break into new markets, which a small business will do at the cost of trial and error.

Information Technology

Why pay a local IT expert more when a remote offshore employee would charge with the same or maybe even better set of skills?

Outsourcing allows access to a global talent pool for your IT services. 

Also, establishing an IT setup is time-intensive. Outsourcing helps you get an established team of fully trained workers who have already dealt with a business like yours. 

It is not feasible to hire new developers every time you have a new and differently demanding project at hand. But you can always scale up or scale down your outsourced IT expert team according to your requirements. This means you don't need to worry about paying regular hefty salaries to in-house developers even after a project is over. 

Customer Support

Outsourcing customer services is a fantastic idea for small businesses. The generic queries by users are usually based on shipping, return policies, pricing, etc.

By outsourcing customer support, you can save money on the office space and customer support technology including hardware and software. 

Administrative Tasks

Every expense matters when you're an entrepreneur or a small business. You can hire a virtual assistant at a fraction of the price of a new worker. 

VAs (Virtual Assistants) will take hold of the recurring tasks freeing your time to focus on scaling up the business. 

A competent VA will do all the day-to-day tasks like database management, daily posting on social media, making invoices, managing websites, etc. A VA can even replace a customer service representative by answering emails and attending calls. 

Third-party agencies have potential Virtual Assistants on board who are proficient in CRMs, MS Office, and other software of the sort. 

You can find virtual assistants at different freelancing portals with a rate as low as $10/hour with a home office setup installed.

What else? You are not paying them anything in the name of employee benefits. Furthermore, they do not charge for hours they don't work.

Agencies vs. Freelancers

Once you decide you are outsourcing, the next dilemma would be to go for an agency or a freelancer?

A third-party agency acts as a mediator between the freelance professionals and you. Whereas freelancers work directly and independently for you. You hire them directly based on their skills and experiences through various freelancing platforms. 

Agencies come with better accountability and coverage than individual freelancers but they can cost you more. 

Therefore, what route you take for outsourcing completely depends on your:

• Budget
• Specific business needs

Conclusion

Budgeting and outsourcing go hand in hand. Other than saving a lot of money, outsourcing lets you employ from a global talent pool without anyone needing to fly all over to your country. 

This is the primary reason why big enterprises, namely Google and Microsoft, also outsource their workforce. Conclusively, you can delegate what you are not good at. 

With the right techniques, your outsourced team of workers will bring out the same productivity that you would otherwise have.