If you’re a business owner in any industry these days, then you’re aware how many things your office is juggling at any given time. No matter how much capital you’ve got, it always seems as though you’re maxed-out and still have room for improvement.
One proven technique that alleviates the pressure is outsourcing. Take an assessment of business support activities, and decide which ones can benefit the most from outsourcing. This can cover everything from licensing a storage facility, to investing in commercial garbage pickup that provides you with smartphone updates to ensure everything’s running smoothly and on time. Let’s take a look at five business-related actions you can take to loosen the pressure valve.
Content provision
You would be hard-pressed to find a business these days that doesn’t have a website, from which it can corral traffic via blog posts. It’s a proven method with a very high ROI (when done correctly); however, if your business doesn’t revolve around content provision, it can be difficult to craft effective blog posts.
Because of this, it’s best to outsource your blogging duties to a viable search engine optimization (SEO) company or sole proprietor. Most times, all you need is a single freelance writer who has displayed his or her skill with published blog posts and a portfolio.
Social media activity
Because of the rise of giants such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, social media is an absolute must if you want to have a robust web presence. In fact, one of the best features of using social media is the analytics feature that is available on all of the platforms. You can use it to tailor future posts to your incoming traffic, by identifying your best posts and following up on them. Granted, keeping up with social media activity requires a small but consistent effort, however, which is why you should outsource it to a college student or someone similar at a low monthly fee.
Customer support
A mid-sized business also quickly realizes that support, although straightforward, can be time-consuming. Your technical support desk is easily outsourced, however, given that there are dedicated companies that specialize in doing this and are able to charge a relatively low fee because they have several companies using their services.
In fact, there are monthly subscription services available that will even send out technicians to your location when necessary. The bulk of the service is remote, however, and can really help you keep costs down without unduly draining your resources.
Office cleaning
This is related to the aforementioned garbage collection mentioned. In fact; the same company might have this included in their services. Office cleaning is necessary only twice a week at most, and outsourcing it frees up your employees’ time and energy. Much like customer support, there are plenty of viable companies that provide cleaning services at nominal fees because of numerous clients they have under their banner.
Document scanning and bookkeeping
This takes the cake as the most time-consuming process that nearly every business has to deal with. If you’re scanning years – decades, even – worth of documents to electronic files, so that you can improve security, business continuity and maybe even disaster recovery, it could take months.
It’s better to outsource these duties to a dedicated company that has best practices and protocols in place to expedite the process. Furthermore, it would require a large fraction of your resources to do this if you kept it in-office. The point, overall, is to let outsourcing optimize your office activities.