The most crucial aspect of your business should be the part that you put the most effort into. The thing that makes you all of your money is fundamentally the most significant aspect of what you do. There may be other areas of the business that you end up putting a lot of time, effort, and money into though.
For every employee that you have working on your core product or service, you will have people supporting them. That’s an admin team dealing with invoices, paying the bills, keeping the roof over your head. There will be a payroll department who make sure that all of your employees get paid. Your IT department will no doubt work hard at keeping all of the computer systems, and the company network all working smoothly. Your business cannot function without all of these additional services.
But when you look at how much you spend on employing people to focus solely on these tasks, the amount builds up very quickly. Then there is the technology that you will need to use to keep everything moving. All of that has a shelf life, and you’ll need to think about repairs and replacements as time moves on — more expense.
The infrastructure that surrounds the fundamental core of your business operations can be vast. The time you spend on managing that infrastructure is time that you could be using honing your product and innovating. Your primary focus should always be the reason that you got into business in the first place; your product.
One solution to your problem might be outsourcing. By taking non-essential tasks, and paying an external business to complete them for you, your business could save a great deal of time and money.
Secretarial Support
When your phone is ringing all day in the office, it can mean you don’t get a chance to get on and do the jobs that you need to do. You may end up struggling to keep up with your workload when each call adds to your stress. But hiring someone to sit and take your calls can be an expense. An entire additional salary may seem too much, plus you will have to manage that member of staff. Taking the time to recruit, train, and develop them can be tough, and again, another drain on your finite resources.
You can, however, outsource the job to a professional answering service. Your calls will be received and dealt with by a specialist with excellent communication skills. You don’t need to hire or train them. Because they work for another company, they can be engaged in work for other businesses in the same situation as you. Between you all, you share the wage cost, and you get a service staffed by some of the most experienced staff that you will find.
IT support
A significant area that a lot of companies outsource is IT support. When your computers go down, having someone on hand to fix them can be handy. But when they’re hanging around waiting for something to break, it is not an effective use of your payroll budget.
Hiring support services externally will allow you to get some of the most experienced people in the industry. They may offer support for many other businesses and will have access to the best technology.
You may even want to lease equipment from a third party company too, to save investing in your whole IT infrastructure.
Warehousing
Keeping your products stored and preparing them for distribution is a mammoth undertaking. Firstly, you will need to consider that you have to hire space in the first place. Renting warehousing facilities can be a significant expense. But if you can share that burden with other companies, and have your products housed next to those of other brands, then you will be helping reduce your costs.
Having teams of well-trained staff to pick your stock is also a great advantage of outsourcing. There is no need for you to train them, and you won’t even have to manage any aspect of their employment. An outside agency will deal with everything, and you get the benefit of their service.
Distribution can be another big area that can be costly. Renting or buying vans, and hiring drivers are significant investments. However, by using the services of a logistics chain, your products could be delivered to where they need to be using the same vans as other brands are using. Sharing this will make for more cost-effective trips, and these savings will be passed onto your business.
