Outsourcing Employees for Your Small Business
The average small business these days employs less than ten full time workers. No wonder many smaller companies have chosen to outsource many of their operations to other companies, rather than have a specialists in house for every aspect of their business. Outsourcing can be cheaper than hiring full time employees and can help you save time and focus your energies on the more creative aspects of your business. You can outsource work like payroll, Search Engine Optimization, website development, even personal assistants!
Here are the several important positions in an office to outsource and how they might save you some money.
1. Research
Your outsourced assistants can help you tremendously with business research. They can keep an eye on what products are working and which are flopping. After figuring out what people want out of a product or service, you can point your advertising/marketing in house people towards that target market, or to fixing the product that is already in existence.
2. SEO
There are numerous individuals who self identify as SEO freelancers. They build their business on getting your company into the top Google searches, so your business is easily found from a few key words.
Reasons to outsource SEO include:
Time: SEO is a specific skill that takes time to learn. Your money is better spent paying someone who already knows the skill rather than first training someone to do the job.
Human Resources: You need your in house people to focus on the day to day operations of your company. SEO is something that can easily be done out of house, as someone does not need to be intimately familiar with company details.
3. Sales and Marketing
You can outsource all of your sales and marketing to other individuals or companies. Many companies specialize in things like web design and online campaigns. You can shop around and find a particular company to work on each particular item in your marketing campaign, which means you get to be selective. Here are a few of the things you can outsource in Sales and Marketing.
- Illustration work in brochures and websites
- Basic graphic design
- Copywriting
- Copy editing
- Translation of your site into other languages
- Server hosting.
4. Accounting/Payroll:
These can easily be outsourced to particular companies. In smaller companies especially, each full time individual has a particular skill that they were hired for, which makes the business run smoothly. You do not need a full time person to handle the paychecks. Outsourcing this position is the most economically viable option. Some other reasons to outsource payroll include
- Avoiding IRS penalties for misfiled taxes.
- Reducing costs spent on paying an in house person to do payroll.
- Easier to offer direct deposit to workers.
- Avoiding technology headaches.
- Avoid payroll knowledge leaving with one employee.
Clearly there are many cost effective opportunities to outsource work from your small business to other companies. It is a great way to keep your employees focused on the tasks at hand, while assuring that each area of your business is handled by the most qualified outsourced individuals.
