It is most likely that you are outsourcing some business tasks, such as administrative, criminal checks, and payroll for employment already, especially in this era where almost any task can be outsourced, due to the availability of a large number of qualified professionals changing from corporate jobs to work as contractors or freelancer. In spite of that, you should not outsource a task based on the above scenario alone. Hence, we will explore “what to outsource” in this post.
What to Outsource
It is essential to take a great look at your business and determine its strengths and values before deciding which tasks to outsource. Most especially small businesses should identify their core abilities and focus their own resources, and talents management on being the best in their industry. Because outsourcing any aspect of the above-mentioned tasks would be a big error as they would stop to offer anything that their own customers could not get in other places. So a small business that focuses on product design must not outsource any task connected to developing the design activities or their internal design talent. Rather they should under seek or examine any opportunity for outsourcing only indirectly related processes like administration and payroll services among others.
According to the director of growth management at CBIZ MHM, the nation’s eighth largest accounting and business services provider named Gregg Landers categorized the types of tasks that are excellent to outsource into three: The extremely skilled professionals, highly repetitive job or duties, and specialized knowledge. For Gregg, the first categories of tasks to outsource are tasks that require the highly skilled professionals to handle. For instance, you may not need to pay a chief financial officer salary however, you can have a chief financial officer-level person to come in a few times every month to check financial analysis to make sure that all financial records are accurate and the bookkeeper is handling the books well.
Tasks such as data entry and shipping inventory fall into the highly repetitive category. While the last category known as specialized knowledge comprises of instance whereby you need an IT support for your network or accounting system but you do not need a permanent IT person or you may not be able to afford it. Therefore it is easier to change to an outsourcing vendor with the right skill set as your IT needs change.
