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Most entrepreneurs think that they have to do everything in-house. All of their operations should be performed by people on their team, they believe.
But as most experienced company founders will tell you, outsourcing is one of the highest leverage options available to any businessperson. When you outsource tasks to a third-party provider, it can reduce costs tremendously and free up resources within the company to focus on the core objectives.
But which high-leverage tasks should you be outsourcing specifically? That’s what you’re about to find out in this guide. We rank the value of outsourcing, so you can focus on the 20% of activities that really push your business forward.
Bookkeeping And Accounting
Bookkeeping and accounting is probably the highest-leveraged task to outsource. As a random business owner, you probably don’t know much about taxes or how your business should handle its money. However, accountants know this like the back of their hand and they can help you with virtually anything that you need.
When you outsource your bookkeeping, you can save literally dozens of hours per month. Passing this task over to software and specialists who can check through your automated accounts reduces the expense of outsourcing dramatically, meaning you can sometimes get it for as little as $1,000/month.
If you need something more advanced, you might want to hire a fractional CFO. Fractional Chief Financial Officers can provide the same services as regular financial officers but without the full-time salary that usually comes along with it.
When they are in your company, they can prevent all sorts of headaches and protect you from the tax man. They can see issues before they arise and become a problem for your company.
Graphic Design
These days, graphic design is incredibly inexpensive. However, a lot of entrepreneurs still insist on bringing it in-house. They believe they need creatives on their actual team, providing constant output.
However, when you actually run a business, you often discover this is not the case. Creative work often comes in fits and starts, usually at the beginning of campaigns, and many graphic designers who work for companies full-time are often idle during the week.
Therefore, use graphic designers from platforms. Find services that can provide you with the graphic design that you need when you need it but that leave you alone the rest of the time. When you opt for this option, you can avoid all of the headaches that come with employing somebody in-house.
Video Editing
Video editing is another task that’s worth outsourcing.
Usually you won’t need to bring a video editor in house because you won’t be constantly editing videos all day. However, training someone on your team to do it can be expensive and time-consuming, and they might not be good at it.
The good news is that you can find video editors for YouTube, Reels, TikTok, and your ads for relatively low prices. They can often work between three and ten times faster than in-house staff, and they make content look better at the same time.
It’s a no-brainer using them even if they charge high fees.
Customer Support
Believe it or not, customer support is another task that’s worth outsourcing. Constantly serving customers in-house using people that you’ve hired specifically to your team is expensive. Again, you have to provide them with all of the benefits of employment, meaning that they have to add more than three times the value that you pay them in wages for them to be worthwhile.
Usually, this isn’t the case, but at the same time, if you don’t hire people you can’t provide customer support, so you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.
To solve this problem, just outsource your customer support. There are all sorts of outsourcing agencies you can use where you can hire people on a per-hour basis in countries where wages are lower, like the Philippines. These can provide you 24/7 support for far less money than bringing it in-house in a Western country.
You can also look into using AI services. A lot of AI chatbots are now so advanced that they can deal with 90% of queries without the need to escalate to a human agent. Again, this increases the leverage of your customer support system. That means that only clients with the most serious problems need to seek human support.
Data And IT
Managing data and IT in-house is another headache. You have to constantly be on top of backups, hard drive degradation, and system upkeep. It’s also very expensive. Running a data center requires an entire building, lighting, cooling, and energy. Something that your company probably wants to avoid.
Therefore, it’s a good idea to use colocation services. You can think of these as outsourced providers for data centres. No matter what you need to use these facilities for, co-location is an option that’s available to you. Here, a third party runs the data centre, so all you need to do is layer in your cloud-based apps and other applications. Don’t have to do any of the facilities management yourself.
Copywriting
If you’ve ever tried copywriting for your business, you’ll know that it takes up a lot of time. It also requires intense focus and effort. Just typing at a keyboard and translating thoughts in your head into words and sentences that make sense is extremely draining.
The good news is that you can go to copywriters to do it for you. They reduce the mental burden on your behalf and can provide you with copy that increases your revenue dramatically. Many copywriters are able to increase your revenue by hundreds of percent, so it’s worth paying them thousands of dollars in return.
A similar principle applies to web development. If you want to create things like custom dashboards and complex funnels, then finding a web developer is essential. If you try to do this in-house with your existing IT team, you’ll get something that doesn’t work and takes a long time to create.
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