Outsourcing business processes can bring you untold benefits. Some people take years to realise that it’s safe to outsource some of your business needs, and some of the basic processes that you have in place to be able to find yourself in a more comfortable position with your business.
Outsourcing is an excellent strategy for businesses looking to grow while mitigating financial risk. Many people are looking to start a new career and their own business from home in these uncertain times. Outsourcing business processes can be a great way to put together a team of highly skilled and experienced individuals without the need for an office or lots of employee paperwork and taxes.
Outsourcing business processes can be highly cost-effective for several reasons
- Pay per project, not per hour or year
- No employment-related paperwork or admin
- No need for additional hardware such as computers and desks
- No need for additional software licenses
- Utilize the skills of talented individuals across the world
- Take advantage of geo-arbitrage
How to outsource business processes
The best way to start is to decide what tasks you should begin when outsourcing business processes. You can do this by keeping a journal or using some time tracking software to see what a typical working week involves in terms of tasks.
To begin with, outsource the tasks that are not core in terms of your business. Jobs such as email filtering, social media scheduling, and even blog copywriting. Suppose you are starting a digital marketing business, for example. In that case, it is best to carry out the core services such as Google Ads optimization and Facebook advertising yourself and outsource elements such as video editing, graphic design to a freelancer.
You can outsource various tasks to a virtual assistant (VA). These will typically include scheduling, updating blog posts, booking travel arrangements, and answering emails. The only downside to using a virtual assistant is that you will have to train him or her, and you will have to establish a means of scheduling tasks via a spreadsheet or project management software.
You may want to hire 2 or 3 VAs by advertising a temporary position and then offer an ongoing role to the VA who performs best. As with hiring full-time employees locally, there will be people who will work hard and lazy people – it’s essential to find the right people!
Using freelancers is a bit different. You can hire freelancers for tasks such as graphic design, web development, and Google Ads management. Freelancers typically don’t need any training; you just set them a task and a target and let them run with it. The good thing is that you can train your VA to hire freelancers for you. By giving them a budget, a required skillset, and asking them to review their work portfolio, you can outsource hiring freelancers to a trusted VA.
You can hire VAs from websites and you can hire freelancers from Fiverr.com, mTork, and UpWork. By hiring overseas workers, you can take advantage of geo-arbitrage. That is – you can take advantage of the strength of the US dollar, Euro, or British pound and hire experts and VAs in countries such as the Philippines for a relatively low cost.
- Phone Answering
As a business owner, we all know that calls are crucial. Whether it’s providing good customer service or capturing all of your telephone sales leads, missing a call can cost your business in terms of both brand perception and revenue.
The flip side of phone calls is a lot of them are annoying and unnecessary. It can be difficult focusing on the work at hand if you have to keep an ear out for the telephone or if you are interrupted by unwanted sales calls.
Outsourcing to a phone answering service can give you all the advantages of having a full-time receptionist, without the relatively high monthly cost. However, it is important to choose your answering service wisely as the quality of service can vary drastically. With Moneypenny, you will receive a dedicated receptionist, who will get to know your business, product, service, and customers. You can also opt for a 24/7 service, allowing you to switch off in the evenings and spend time relaxing or with the family.
- Graphic Design
Unless you are an expert – it’s a bad idea to attempt to do all of your graphic design yourself. Poorly designed logos, social media posts, and websites can be terrible for your brand’s image. Presentation is everything and directly reflects the quality of the service or product that you are selling.
While it is possible to create some attractive social media graphics using tools such as Canva, for the most part, you should consider outsourcing business processes related to graphic design. The end product will likely be much better quality, and you can focus your time on the core elements of your business. You may also find many graphic design houses will also help you with things like adwords management. If you are lucky to have a background in marketing already, however, always seek advice if you aren’t sure since marketing brings you new business over time, so it’s quite essential.
- Posting & Uploading
Uploading content is a time consuming and sometimes annoying task that a competent VA can do. Let’s say, for example; you have recorded a podcast. You will undoubtedly want to upload the podcast to Spotify, iTunes, Soundcloud, YouTube, and other podcast platforms such as Podbean, Buzzsprout, and blubrry.
By outsourcing business processes for uploading by using a VA, you can send them the file via DropBox and ask them to upload it to all the required platforms. So you can get on with creating more content or focussing on a new task.
- Video Editing
Videos and podcasts are a great way to reach your target audience. There are millions of blogs and blog posts online because they are relatively easy to create. While it’s still essential to have blog content, high quality, informative and entertaining videos can reach your audience with greater efficiency than blog posts. What’s more, you can always hire someone to turn your videos into blog posts!
Finding a competent video editor can take a few attempts, but it can save you so much time. You can make a video and then send it to the editor, who will be highly efficient when it comes to slicing and dicing your footage into something that looks very professional.
Conclusion
There are many things that you can outsource; in fact, you could outsource your entire business if you wanted to! The hard part is finding the right people and getting a process set in place when briefing in and approving work.
This may sound bizarre, but even if you work from home outsourcing things such as the cleaning, and other necessary items, will ensure that you are gaining time instead of losing it, time is money, and of course, you must make sure that you don’t lose time in the wrong work. As with anything, you know your business best, but considering outsourcing business processes for some of these tasks can be a game-changer for you.
