Maintain Agility By Outsourcing These Business Functions

Small businesses can move quickly, responding to trends and implementing cutting-edge tools with much greater speed and efficacy than large corporations. However, as small businesses achieve success, their needs tend to grow, which can start to slow them down.

If you want to keep your organization quick and agile, you might consider outsourcing some key operations. Outsourcing helps keep your core business small and manageable while providing the support services you need to achieve success. Some of the best small business functions to outsource include:

Accounting

Accounting is easily among the most important business functions, but it is also among the most difficult. Not all business leaders are adept at managing their books, and qualified accountants can be expensive to keep on staff. Unless you have experience with the accounting processes and compliance standards your company must meet, you should outsource accounting from the very beginning to keep your business safe.

Marketing

Marketing is essential for business growth, but there are too many important aspects of marketing for a small business team to manage on their own. Your company needs brand development, content creation, social media management, website and product design, search engine optimization and so much more, and a single marketing professional on staff won’t be able to complete all these responsibilities with equivalent success. Rather than finding a single marketing partner, you might try to connect with specialty marketing services providers as you need them; after all, a Phoenix SEO agency will be better at delivering SEO results than a traditional marketing firm.

IT Management

IT management is one of the most outsourced business functions, and it’s not difficult to see why. IT is essential for businesses operating in the 21st century, but IT tends to be frustratingly complex, well beyond the ken of the average small business leader. Fortunately, there are varying levels of IT services you can acquire, and even better, outsourcing IT management allows you to scale IT easily as your small business grows, ensuring that you have exactly the technical support your business needs.

Human Resources

Human resources encompasses a broad range of tasks, from recruitment and onboarding to training and development to managing compensation to ensuring compliance and so much more. You can outsource any or all responsibilities related to human resources, which can help keep your small business team more focused and impactful without compromising on the quality of care they receive under your employ.

Sales

Sales might seem like an odd business function to outsource; after all, without a sales team on staff, what is your business doing? However, many small business leaders are not born salespeople, and if managing sales staff does not come easily to you, you might be wasting your time and energy for little reward. It is especially easy to outsource sales if your business model involves cold calling or pursuing leads, as third-party sales firms are adept at bringing in business and closing deals.

Staff

Contrary to popular belief, your small business does not necessarily need any employees to function effectively. Depending on your business model, you may be able to fill your need for talent through freelancers and other types of contract workers, who do not require salaries, benefits or other expensive forms of compensation. By outsourcing your staff, you keep your business extremely lithe and capable of change — though you do risk losing reliable access to the top talent your small business might need to grow.

Manufacturing

Dedicated manufacturing facilities can be expensive and time-consuming to create, and altering or expanding them can be equally exhausting. Most small businesses opt to outsource manufacturing to partners who are more experienced in this step of product creation. Though offshoring manufacturing is particularly popular, you can find domestic manufacturing partners to keep your operations close and avoid concerns about labor.

Shipping and Logistics

In many business models, it is possible to ship products directly from manufacturers to customers, cutting out costly and inefficient steps. If you hope to accomplish this, it might be prudent to partner with a shipping and logistics company. When you are no longer worried about getting products to customers, you can focus on other aspects of your business that might be more interesting, like marketing or sales.

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