A Guide to Outsourcing
8 min read
Running your own business is a real challenge. Especially in small and medium-sized companies, you almost have to be in several places simultaneously. After all, someone has to watch over work progress in projects, look after office matters, and additionally search for new contracts. But what to do when the projects are piling up, and it is not profitable to hire an additional full-time employee for a short period? This is where outsourcing of work can help us greatly.
In this article you will learn:
What is Outsourcing?
Simply speaking, outsourcing means commissioning some of the work to external subcontractors in order to increase the efficiency and quality of our company's services while reducing the burden on full-time employees. Many companies—both small and big—decide to outsource different tasks because it's simply profitable and improves business process.
By subcontracting, we can also open the door to specialized services that the company would not normally be able to provide. In this way, we also get access to the latest technologies without worrying about the costs associated with the purchase of software or equipment for our own employees. Sometimes, thanks to outsourcing, labor costs can be reduced which leads to more cost savings.
What Can Be Outsourced?
In principle, most of the activities performed in the company can be outsourced. Starting from aspects related to the very basics of running the company, such as accounting, catering, or marketing activities, and ending with commissioning entire individual parts of the projects.
As long as we do not break any contracts signed with our business partners, we can outsource, for example: writing a script, translating documentation, testing an application developed by our company, making a package of assets or other game elements based on a provided Game Design Document, creating a visualization product, and many more.
Why Companies Outsource Various Tasks?
To put it shortly: outsourcing allows you to do more and sometimes better with less work. Many CEOs claims that their business functions better with outsourcing providers.
Outsourcing guarantees a lot of benefits including new useful skills to support the core team, and increased efficiency. In practice, this means:
More Time for the Company
As a business owner you are fully aware that sometimes twenty four hours a day are not enough to take care of everything. Time is precious and outsourcing can help to have more of it for tasks that you have to do in person. When simple but time consuming tasks are outsourced, you can easily focus on more important matters.
Professional Support at Any Time
If you choose to outsource work, you can count on professional support not only during standard office hours.
Online Collaboration
The Internet makes collaboration from all over the world possible. You can work with contractors from different countries, find the best experts in your industry, and outsource various tasks. It it especially popular solution in field of IT (information technology). You can even lower costs of office space—with more employees working remotely, you do not need a big (and costly) office.
Access to Professionals from All Over the World
With Internet there is no geographical barriers and there's no problem with working with a specialist from different continent. Company may benefit from fresh ideas, different perspective, and unique approach to solving problems presented by freelance providers.
How Does Outsourcing Help Your Company?
As a business owner, you can devote more attention to the development and implementation of key goals for the company instead of spending a lot of time on everyday matters, which are, however, necessary for the proper functioning of your business. Many people are aware that outsourcing means smaller labor costs, faster company's growth, and less pressure on in-house workers. Outsourcing can also improve your business process. What else can you expect?
Help from experts
By subcontracting, we can hire the necessary specialist or a specialized company only for the duration of the task entrusted to them—sometimes, performing certain activities by external companies and freelancers is much cheaper than employing professionals in the company on a daily basis, especially when we need their services only within certain time intervals.
In other words, by hiring a subcontractor, we reduce the costs associated with employing such an expert full-time. The subcontractor does not have to be physically present in the company, which allows us to establish cooperation with specialists from around the world according to our needs and use their skills, as well as specialized, often costly, equipment.
Benefits for small business
In the case of small businesses, especially one-person businesses where only one or a few people have to fulfill multiple roles, without outsourcing tasks, such as accounting, it may be impossible to run a business at all. It's not even about competences, but about time—if you spend two hours looking after the company's finances, you lose two hours during which you could search for new deals or attend the current ones.
Free time is also important—a man does not live by work alone, and constant worrying about company matters is an effective recipe for burnout and loss of motivation. For medium and large companies, to outsource tasks is an opportunity to increase their processing capacity at a low cost, thanks to which they can accumulate capital and grow.
What Should You Keep In Mind When Outsourcing Work?
When deciding to outsource, remember that we entrust internal information and company resources to third parties. This entails the need for increased caution when selecting business partners and undertaking legal security measures to prevent the leakage of sensitive documents, which may have dire consequences.
Keep a Balance
You shouldn't overdo it with the amount of work ordered. Think about the company's strategic goals—we don't want someone else to perform the strategic tasks for our business because not only it misses the purpose of running a business, but it also does not create the image of a business partner you can rely on.
Be Aware of Obstacles
Other essential factors are the attitude of the freelancer, as well as—in the case of foreign subcontractors—cultural differences and time zones. Cooperation is much smoother when your business partners report on time and show initiative rather than when they seem to be working with us because of a lost bet. In addition, the business etiquette or legal regulations may differ depending on the region—it is worth doing a bit of research before we post a job offer.
Check What Freelancer Can Provide You
The last aspect worth paying attention to is the scope of the services provided. If one person can carry out the entire project for us from beginning to end, it may be a much more convenient and cheaper solution than to outsource individual elements to different subcontractors.
With all that in mind, when outsourcing work, the following should be considered:
Is Outsourcing for You?
Everyone has to answer this question on their own. Outsourcing is not a luxury reserved only for large companies with a significant budget. It is also not a method of running the entire business for us. It should be viewed as one of the many tools that can help us save precious time, do things better, cheaper, or avoid crunch.
Treat this as another factor of running a business that needs to be balanced to get the most out of it. Regardless of the industry in which you operate, consider which aspects of your business consume the most of your time and how important it is that you or one of your employees must supervise it. Perhaps it could be taken off your shoulders!
What would you like to achieve. Our experts will answer on your all questions.
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