Outsourcing will continue to be highly essential to every startup founder who intends to build a successful business. It is an effective way to reduce workload and expenses, increase productivity and maximize efforts while handling other critical operations such as product development and customers.
However, only a few entrepreneurs understand the benefits, what to outsource, and how to outsource operations. Most startup founders tend to take responsibility for every operation as it relates to their business. They handle social media, customer service, sales, accounting, product development, and management, among many others.
Founder searching for an appropriate expert to outsource operations to. | Photo Credit: Unsplash
This may be achievable and slightly comfortable initially, but it becomes a burden that spirals into an impediment to growth in the long run. In such cases, startup founders can quickly become overwhelmed and focus less on what is most important – product/service and customers. Recent research revealed that 17 percent of failed startups are as a result of poor products.
Many founders have proceeded to outsource operations to direct efforts and resources into more essential operations in response to this.
While this is an excellent strategy to adopt, funding needed to hire and pay full-time staff may be a challenge. To address this problem, startups can utilize technology for specific tasks and hire hourly outsourced experts to deliver outstanding results. Projects, tasks, or operations can be outsourced to experts found on freelancer sites such as:
- Guru
- Upwork
- Fiverr
- Freelancer
- Virtual-assistant sites such as Remote Coworker and Zirtual etc
As a startup founder, it is vital that you identify the right operations to outsource, who to outsource them to, and understand the benefits of outsourcing. This way, you can leverage its advantages to facilitate business growth.
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Operations You Should Consider Outsourcing
Operations should not be outsourced just because you don’t want to. Before projects or tasks, careful thought must be given to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of your business. In addition to this, you must also ensure that you are working with a reliable and effective expert. Here are some operations, tasks, and projects that you can consider outsourcing for effective management.
- Social Media Management
Social media is one of the most valuable communications, advertising, and marketing tools for businesses today. Through social media, entrepreneurs reach out to their potential customers, build customer relationships, offer customer support, drive website traffic, etc.
Although this is important, it takes a significant amount of time to build your following, generate content, keep up with trends, and ultimately build a social media presence. Fortunately, this operation is one of the easiest to delegate. There are several platforms that give you access to skilled experts in social media management.
However, while outsourcing this operation as a startup, be sure to narrow your focus to two or three platforms for better results and easy tracking of progress.
- Website development
Website development is a core strategy used by businesses to develop and maintain an online presence. And, like every other thriving business, startups need a website that leaves a positive and lasting first impression. If your startup team isn’t proficient with website development, this operation should be delegated to an expert.
- Content Marketing
Social media pages, website traffic, SEO ranking, increased lead conversion, etc., thrive on quality content. Only a few entrepreneurs can create engaging yet informative content that appeals to the target audience, markets their brand, product, or services, or achieve its ultimate goal.
Startup founders can partner with content marketing agencies or hire freelance content marketers who can carry out this operation effectively while saving time and cost.
- Customer Support/Service
Customers are the primary reason every business exists, and it is crucial that founders understand their needs, listen to feedback, and respond to them accordingly. However, responding to each customer and solving their issues, although fulfilling initially, quickly becomes overwhelming and time-consuming.
This operation can be outsourced to a customer support/service specialist. To ensure that you remain in the loop, your customer support specialist can provide you with daily summaries or brief synopsis of customer feedback and problems.
- Administrative Tasks
As your startup continues to grow, outsourcing administrative tasks such as bookkeeping, payroll, event organization, responding to and sending out emails will become more challenging.
Hiring virtual assistants who can handle this quickly and effectively is a great way to free up time for other critical aspects of your business – leadership, product management, and customers.
Benefits of Outsourcing Operations
A happy entrepreneur assessing the progress of outsourced tasks. | Photo Credit: Unsplash
Outsourcing offers numerous benefits to startups. Some of these include:
Minimizes overhead cost
The expense of handling some operations or projects yourself may be more expensive than outsourcing them. You may need to purchase new equipment, expand your office, or hire new internal staff.
With outsourcing, the need and cost for all these are drastically reduced, and the desired result is achieved. Outsourcing can lower costs associated with hiring new internal employees, such as:
- Payroll taxes
- On-boarding
- Medical insurance
- Paid time off
Promote business growth
Outsourcing ultimately leads to increased growth of your startup. Operations are carried out faster and more effectively, maximum attention and efforts go to core operations, and costs and risks are drastically reduced. All of this contributes to the speedy growth of your startup.
Sustain operational control
Most entrepreneurs will agree that growing a successful business is not a day’s job. Outsourcing specific supporting tasks, especially through outsourcing companies, ensures efficient management and allows you to retain and maintain control of your business activities.
Increased efficiency and productivity
Rather than focusing your efforts, time, and attention on running every business operation, hired experts can effectively handle secondary operations. This allows you to execute major projects and campaigns targeted at promoting your business’s core competencies.
Outsourcing increases performance and efficiency in secondary tasks as well as core projects and operations.
Conclusion
Generally, the running of your business ultimately depends on you. However, this does not mean that you should shoulder all the responsibilities of your startup.
To maintain focus on core operations in the early stages of your startup, you need to leverage the benefits of outsourcing.
Although outsourcing is not devoid of risks, its benefits to startup founders outweigh the risks and disadvantages.
When you outsource, you free up time to focus your attention, efforts, time, and resources on your business’s major operations to sustain growth, increase productivity and efficiency.
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