Entrepreneurs in South Africa are known to love to try and do everything themselves and have thus adopted the term "DIY" as a favourite into their entrepreneurial lexicon. But this mindset is often the greatest downfall in numerous businesses today. Far too often only when the growth of your business stalls and is no longer viable do you question yourself as to why you never sourced the necessary expertise to make your business work earlier on in its lifecycle.
Marketing, sales, product development, legal issues, human resource management accounting and many more facets of a business become the responsibility of a new entrepreneur when starting out. And this is completely normal, however, often entrepreneurs find that when their business moves to the next level, they are still trying to do it all. But the critical question is: why? Is it to save costs? Or is it because you believe that nobody can do anything as well as you can?
As a business owner, your job is to grow the business, which you cannot do if you are still attempting to be the business. So rather than continuing to do everything yourself, outsource to another business or employ someone who can focus all their time into the tasks you should be starting to move on from.
These are the 4 most common tasks that can be outsourced:
1: Marketing
Traditional marketing is gone now; just about everything is digital. Facebook, Instagram and Google are among the best marketing programmes to use to get your product and/or service out to the world. And of course, you may be able to do this by yourself, but the simple truth is that the right marketing agency will do it better and more efficiently for your money. There's also a steep learning curve to many facets of business and digital marketing is one of them and outsourcing an agency allows you to put that time that you would have spent learning into something more productive. You know your business and product or service the best, but they will certainly know how to market it best.
2: Legal
When it comes to legal fees and administration, businesses are often penny wise and pound foolish, most often resorting to downloading standardized templates from the Internet and reshaping them to fit their business' imminent needs. This is essentially just finding an easy way to do a half-job of it. This, however, can cost the business dearly in the long run when you get taken to task over faulty contracts, or illegal practices. Instead, you should find an affordable expert or firm that can sort out your legal work and will be able to defend you in court if things end up going south, as well as providing the best advice on how to avoid ending up there in the first place.
3: Human Resource Management
HR Management is an essential part of any organization. The HR department is typically responsible for almost every facet of employee management and is both comprehensive and complex. When your HR needs exceed your internal HR capabilities, consider outsourcing some of your HR functions. Many types of HR outsourcing options are available to employers. The options can be as specific as outsourcing one particular aspect of one HR function such as recruitment or payroll or as broad as outsourcing the entire human resource management, from contracts and performance management to policies and procedures and everything in-between.
4: Accounting
Often a service many entrepreneurs think they don't need help with, but you can easily (and should) outsource this task to experts to avoid, amongst others an insurmountable pile of invoices. Experts can advise you on how best to run your business, how to save on taxes and most importantly, keep you on the right side of the law. Monthly accounting service packages are generally cheaper than employing your own internal accountant and come with a lot more expertise and experience.
The benefits of outsourcing can be substantial - from cost savings and efficiency gains to greater competitive advantage. As entrepreneurs, we often find it difficult to let go of different parts of our business, but what needs to be remembered is that it is important to focus your time on where the money lies and instead get the right experts to support you with the other tasks.
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