Small business owners are often reluctant to give up control and try to be jack-of-all-trades. What eventually ends up happening is that they spread themselves too thin and try to tackle tasks they are not truly qualified for. They might be able to get away with it up to a certain point, but it eventually catches up with them. Either they can’t handle the workload or they end up making important mistakes that could get them in trouble. Let’s take a look at some business functions every small business should consider outsourcing today.

Accounting and Payroll

If you have a relatively small operation but plenty of employees, or you work in an industry that’s heavily regulated, we would strongly suggest that you let an expert team deal with your accounting and payroll. You need someone who will be aware of the most recent changes in legislation. One small mistake could be disastrous for your organization, and very few small business owners have the time or expertise to understand these changes. Outsourcing these functions will also allow you to save money on employees you probably wouldn’t be using to their full capacity.

IT

Unless you’re an IT professional yourself, there’s a good chance that you would benefit from outsourcing IT. We would advise against hiring someone in-house in this case for many reasons. For one, having only one person taking care of IT means that there will most likely be some skills that they don’t have or situations they have never encountered, in which case, you would have to bring experts in any way. This means that if you want to handle things in-house, you’ll have no choice but to assemble a team, and that is not something that would make sense for most small business owners.

Instead, you could go with a team that has all the resources in place already. A managed IT service such as INC Systems will have experts that can deal with virtually any type of issue. Not only that, but INC Systems could also provide your team with 24-hour assistance without having to be on your payroll. 

Speaking of which, hiring a team takes away so much of the hassle of having to find top talent and retaining it, not to mention the hassles of absenteeism. If someone doesn’t show up, you could have a very serious problem on your hands, especially if the person in question is the only one with inside information about your systems.

Working with a team means more reliability and someone who will be able to monitor activity on your networks at all times. There’s also the very real risk of your head of IT going rogue and orchestrating an attack or leaking valuable information. This is less likely to happen with a firm that cares about its reputation.

Human Resources

HR is one of those functions that many small business owners think they can handle themselves. But you could be wasting a lot of your time while not getting the best results. 

HR professionals will do much more than interview people; they will help you create listings as well. They might give you advice on how to make you more attractive as an employer. They will also be able to help with onboarding. Having an HR team means that you’ll be better able to find the type of candidate you want and improve retention rates. 

Marketing

If you’re a small business, you probably don’t need to have a marketing team full time either. Marketing professionals tend to be very highly paid as well, and there’s no telling if you’ll be able to make a return on your investment. 

Outsource your marketing and you’ll have a full team working with you when you need to roll out campaigns and only pay for services rendered. They will be able to help with ad design and give you access to techniques and strategies you probably didn’t know existed. 

Sales

Outsourcing sales could also be a good idea if you don’t have the expertise in your team. Making sales calls, setting up sales funnels, and closing deals is a very specialized skill set. If you go out and try to find great salespeople yourself, there’s a high chance that you’ll have to kiss a lot of frogs before you can find someone who can perform well. However, there’s still no guarantee that they’ll stay. These are all things you won’t have to worry about when hiring an outsourced sales team.

Administrative Tasks

Another thing you should do is look at virtual assistants. Virtual assistants could allow you to take care of a lot of menial repetitive tasks that you may have in your enterprise. These could be taking a lot of valuable time away from your employees. Outsourcing could be a great way to make their workload easier and allow them to focus on more important things.

Virtual assistants can handle all sorts of tasks. Some will be able to handle everything from answering calls and emails, to posting on social media, and setting appointments. Some will even handle things like content creation. 

Don’t expect them to be out of your budget, however. You can find a VA for as low as $10 on sites like Upwork or FlexJobs. But, like anything else, you get what you pay for and most VAs with specific skills will cost you between $30 to $75 per hour on average.

Research

Small businesses don’t spend enough on research, and that’s a shame. Understanding your market is essential whether you want to expand to another location, scale your business, or launch a product. Thankfully, this is something you can easily outsource to a third party. 

Research teams will have all the tools and people needed to get in-depth information about your market and present the insights in simple and actionable terms. Not only that, but they can help you with a plan of action to reach that market as well.

These are all examples of core business functions that all small businesses should consider outsourcing. Doing so could help you save money and free up some valuable time that could be redirected towards more important tasks.

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