As a business grows, it faces some important decisions. IT, project management, marketing, and many other processes need to be supported on a much larger level. But without guaranteed income coming in each month, a business may feel uncertain about committing to assigning full-time team members to the process.
As workloads increase, however, eventually businesses have no choice but to make a decision. Outsourcing has become a workable solution for many businesses in recent years, allowing them to hand off processes to contractors or freelancers and avoid committing to an annual salary. Here are some tips to help you determine the types of processes that can be delegated to a non-employee.
Project-Based Workers
The easiest decisions relate to those projects that will only take place one time, like application development or creating a disaster recovery plan. Your existing team members likely won’t have the skillset necessary to do such specialized work and even if they do, finding time to take on such a time-consuming task is likely impossible. By hiring specialized contractors to do this type of work, you’ll set your project in motion without bringing on additional salaried employees.
Short-Term Work
Businesses also outsource processes that have long-term benefits after a short-term increase in work. Many businesses have dealt with this in moving old processes into newer ones. An investment in new document management technology, for instance, may require hours of scanning documents if a business uses existing employees who scan paperwork in what little free time they have. Instead a business can either bring contract workers on site or outsource to a professional company who can complete the scanning process in a matter of hours rather than months.
Outsourcing to Technology
A third option for outsourcing doesn’t require the use of workers at all. Team members can save time and money through the use of software solutions that take a five-step process down to a one-step process. Processes like billing can be automated both on the business and the vendor side. Instead of spending time manually creating invoices and entering payments, a portal can be set up that allows vendors to log in, view all documents associated with his account, and make payments. The employee is then freed up to focus on more important tasks. See how Concord Hospitality did it.
Prioritized Work
For businesses dealing with an increasing workload without additional resources, prioritization can make a big difference. Daily operations will always be a priority, which means major projects and improvements will become secondary. In the rush to ensure customers and orders are handled on a daily basis, it can be easy to set even the most important long-term projects aside. Outsourcing allows a business to make sure those tasks are handled while still having employees in place to keep daily activities going.
Outsourcing is the perfect solution for growing businesses that don’t have enough resources in place to handle the increased workload. When the right projects are delegated to non-salaried employees and technology, a business’s team can handle their daily activities without sacrificing important projects.
Ramon Ray, Marketing & Technology Evangelist, Smallbiztechnology.com & Infusionsoft. Full bio at http://www.ramonray.com/ . Visit his Small Business Solutions Blog Author Page to get in touch on Google+, Twitter or Facebook.
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