When you start a business, much of your attention goes toward building your team. Whether it’s mechanics, fabricators, nurses, or bakers, you work to surround yourself with skilled people who can help your business grow.
But sometimes, busy entrepreneurs may overlook the other team members that they need to involve, team members who aren’t on the payroll but who contribute just as much to the business’ bottom line as those who are out there selling, building, or otherwise working for you.
The team we’re talking about here is the professionals who handle important business functions for you. As a small business, you don’t necessarily have the expertise or the personnel to justify the cost of getting a qualified staff in-house to do these things, but you still need the high level of service that they provide.
Contracting with a Salt Lake City CPA Anderson & Bradshaw will be cheaper and far more effective than trying to put one on staff. Their firm handles a number of functions online, reducing the steps necessary to track the status of your returns, refunds, and so forth.
And that’s just one example of who you should look at for the peripheral services in your business. In general, they are highly-skilled people or firms that you only need occasionally or for very short periods of time, such as when you hire someone new or expand your facility. Let’s look at some examples.
IT Support
In your earliest days, you probably did most of the setup and troubleshooting yourself, or trusted it to an employee with some experience. But as you grow, you’ll have a greater quantity of secure information that needs to be protected–things like customer payment information, personal information on workers, and maybe even proprietary product ideas.
You’ll reach a point where you are too big to do it yourself but not big enough to hire someone full-time. It’s at this stage where you want to find a qualified IT company that will contract with you to do upgrades, monitor security, troubleshoot failures, carry out backups, and recover data after crashes. And even if you could justify a single IT worker, you would still be better off to contract it because an IT firm would have a much broader base of experience than any single employee you could hire.
Shipping & Logistics
The situation is similar here. When your outgoing parcels become numerous enough that they cover the front desk, it is probably time to start making arrangements with a company to handle those for you. The uncertain pickup schedule for low-volume customers won’t be adequate for you, and you’ll waste a lot of time sending office staff out to pack and ship items that could be picked up for you.
The value of this service is that you not only don’t have to tie up your staff with all that running around, but also that you can come closer to achieving your delivery goals. And when you can do that, your customers will keep coming back.
Social Media
As widely used as social media is these days, it’s no surprise that it made our list. The progression of social media demands for your company is similar to that of other functions. You start out with a modest commitment that you can manage yourself. Then the business grows, the demand for the work grows, and soon you can’t handle it well yourself.
Companies that specialize in social media representation for your business know all the best strategies. They know which platforms to use, what hashtags will get the attention of customers, and how frequently to post. That carefully-planned technique, honed through their own many years of experience, will enable you to keep a very savvy presence without a huge commitment of your own time.
Growing a business takes lots of different ingredients. Like a plant’s roots stretching to reach water, you can stretch yourself very thin trying to cover basic needs when you would do much better simply to have those duties covered for you. As your business grows, build a team of outside help and they’ll bring the water to you so that you can focus your energy where it counts.
About Carson Derrow
