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What Can and Cannot Be Outsourced

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Many entrepreneurs at the initial stage of project development cannot decide which competencies are better to do themselves and which to outsource. Is it worth keeping a staff of lawyers and marketers, or would it be more proper to use the services of specialized agencies? And what should be done with targeting?

How can outsourcing help your business?

Outsourcing is an excellent business tool that helps companies focus on the most critical processes. It is beneficial for young projects: a growing team often has more tasks than it can physically complete, especially at the startup stage.

Focusing on non-core tasks will take up too much time and energy for the management team and require quite a significant financial investment. At the same time, outsourcing will help relieve the key people in the company, free up resources and allow them to work quietly on the things that bring profit.

In addition, thanks to their specialized expertise, external specialists can offer unique solutions to optimize business processes.

At the stage of company formation, it is crucial to immerse into the business entirely. The better you understand all its intricacies, the more competitive advantage you have. In addition, you gain experience.

The exception may be areas that have little to no impact on the success of your business. For example, restaurant owners often outsource areas such as SMM or restaurant PR.

And even in this case, many of them have to be fully immersed in the promotion of projects at first, as contractors need to understand the specifics of their clients’ business clearly.

What is better not to outsource?

You can outsource everything except your core expertise. Outsourcing blockchain development may not be a brilliant idea if your company’s core competency is blockchain technology.

For example, in education, it is content creation, development of teaching methods, marketing and sales of courses, and the actual training of students, helping them to find further employment. It is extremely important to keep these functions within the team, fully immersed in the work on the product.

But you can outsource design, video editing, accounting, and more. This allows you not to keep people on the staff, but at the same time at any moment to solve arising problems in a quality way.

It would help if you transferred a function from outsourcing to in-house only when it is economically justified, and you have the volume of work for at least two employees. Otherwise, the vacation or sick leave of the only full-time employee who closes their function will threaten to stop the work.

At the startup stage of a business, you often have to restructure communication with the client and business processes within the company. Therefore, key “frontline” things have to be set up independently.

And then, with the growth of the business and a precise understanding how you should organize the work process, you may outsource part of the tasks. The main thing is that this should not affect the quality of services and the company’s reputation.

It is not uncommon to observe a situation where business processes within one company are decomposed and can be separated into independent businesses, such as a call center. For example, a bank used to attract, process, and serve clients independently, but now many functions (such as working with delinquencies) have become independent businesses.

It happens because the company’s specialists, purposefully engaged in the profile service or product, do it more expertly, fully concentrating on their activities.

Summary

Outsourcing is a great solution that helps reduce the total cost of many tasks. If you make machinery, you don’t necessarily need a whole department dealing with advertising – you can outsource that. If you offer SMM services, you don’t have to hire analysts and bookkeepers on staff – outsourcing is much more efficient.

However, under no circumstances should you outsource tasks that directly affect your business’s development and relate to your team’s core competencies.

 

 

Jeff Campbell