5 Signs You Should Consider Outsourcing

Outsourcing has changed the way businesses of all sizes function. It effectively gave all businesses access to all sorts of staff, from entry-level to highly technical and niche positions. Businesses became more competitive within their respective industries as the number of options they had to achieve certain goals grew.

The term outsourcing refers to the business practice of hiring an outside party to complete a task or create goods that were traditionally done in-house. The umbrella term outsourcing covers many different services, from manufacturing goods to the completion of business processes in different countries.

1. Demand Outnumbers Your Supply

While this may seem to refer only to material goods, it also includes services. As your market, audience, or client base grows, you’ll feel like your time is being stretched thin. Having to stick to a schedule while juggling the needs of your customers is hard work. Outsourcing a position, such as a virtual assistant, will allow you to manage the growing demand.

The ability to divide labor in a way that allows you to keep up with the growing demand is something that is easily done through outsourcing. Whether you keep it onshore or offshore will be up to you, but either way you choose to go will allow both you and your staff to keep up with work.

In any case, having your demand outnumber your supply is one of the better problems to have in business. It is a clear sign that your business is growing, which means being able to invest more into it.

2. Performing The Roles Of Other Jobs

In a similar way that higher demand levels will have you swamped with work, being understaffed leads you or your staff performing roles not assigned to you. In most cases, business owners even have to take on finance roles such as bookkeeping, which takes away time from doing everything else that they need to be focusing on.

Now it’s not bad to be a jack of all trades, as the phrase describes someone who can adequately manage a wide variety of jobs; however, consistently doing all of those jobs will lead to burnout and items falling through the cracks.

Having to do multiple jobs at the same time means having multiple things on your mind at once. Being distracted causes wasted time in the office, as it takes the average person 22 to 29 minutes to get back on task depending on the origin of the interruption, with self-caused interruptions taking longer to recover from.

While wearing multiple hats, anyone is prone to more distractions. Let’s say that your primary role is sales, but you also function in the finance and IT departments. Whenever someone in those departments needs your help, you’ll be taken out of whatever task you’re currently doing, or the other person will be stuck waiting for you. No matter what the situation is, a bottleneck is created.

3. Difficulty Recruiting

If your company is experiencing difficulties with recruiting roles, no matter if they’re general or specialized, it might be time to consider outsourcing.

No matter the role, hiring someone outside your immediate location opens up recruitment. If you’re looking to keep the position onshore, you have the rest of the states (assuming you’re in the US) to look for the perfect candidate as opposed to just your immediate area and surrounding cities. If you elect to hire offshore, then you have the whole world to choose from, though it would be cheaper in certain offshore locations.

Cost per hire is another factor to consider when thinking about outsourcing. While it is possible to keep the job onshore and get it cheaper than you could locally, taking the job to a different country is the cheapest option.

For example, an average executive assistant in the US makes about $3,400 a month, whereas an average executive assistant in the Philippines makes about P27,000 which converts to about $480 a month. Note that these are averages and don’t reflect all assistant roles in either country.

4. Recurring Tasks Taking Up Valuable Time

Whether you’re a new or seasoned business leader, you’ve probably had to set aside some time to do recurring backend tasks. While these tasks are important, they don’t directly contribute to the growth of your business.

Depending on what the specific task is, it could take up a sizable part of your day, which means not being able to attend to more pressing matters.

Taking care of your email inbox could be a multiple-hour affair, depending on your position. Any sort of data entry, appointment setting, travel planning, and a plethora of other backend tasks can be given to a virtual assistant in order to free up time.

In the case of emails, training a virtual assistant to flag important ones and answer general inquiries will save you countless hours that you can reinvest in other areas.

If you’re spending more than 4 hours, roughly half of your work day, on backend tasks, you should hire help right away. Reclaiming 4 hours each day equates to 20 extra hours a week and 80 hours a month to do other, more critical tasks.

5. Late On Deadlines

If you’ve gone from consistently meeting deadlines to barely being able to catch them or completely missing them, chances are you need help. While this doesn’t immediately indicate the need to outsource, as the option to hire directly is still there, outsourcing offers a more pragmatic solution.

Outsourcing has 2 draws that make it attractive to businesses worldwide: its cost-effective nature and the instant access it grants to a wider range of staff.

The ability to potentially hire more staff for the same amount of money as a single in-house employee allows more work to be completed for less money. This means tasks can be split between more people, making the time to finish each task shorter and shorter with each additional employee.

In line with the previously mentioned recruiting difficulties, depending on where you outsource and what type of staff you need, the time it takes to fill roles is reduced. This allows you to get your new staff up to date quickly so they can begin helping you with tasks a lot sooner than if you were to hire in-house staff.

Conclusion

If any of the aforementioned signs can be seen in your company, you should look into outsourcing options that are viable for your business. Using all solutions available to you will allow you to accommodate more work which will lead to your business growing.

 

 

 

 

Author: Iohan loves short walks in his room and the joys of the great indoors. He joined the marketing world in 2021 as a content writer, making the transition from a recruiting position which gives him a unique perspective on topics regarding job positions.  Iohan writes content from Clarkstaff.