3 Business Activities You Could Get Away with Outsourcing
Entrepreneurs often work 50+ hour weeks getting bogged down with mundane tasks and day-to-day decisions.
Some of this stems from a force of habit. Most entrepreneurs do everything in the early days and never quite learn to delegate. The rest of it stems from keeping some activities in-house that you should outsource.
If you find the idea of outsourcing troubling, remember that one of its biggest benefits is letting you focus on core business functions.
So let’s jump in and look at three business activities you can get away with outsourcing.
Bookkeeping
It turns out that around half of business owners despise bookkeeping. Some possible reasons for that hatred include:
- steep learning curve
- mistakes can cost you big
- it eats your time
Not everyone hates it, of course, but it’s not a core business activity for most business owners. Just as importantly, there are people who specialize in bookkeeping and accounting.
Outsourcing your bookkeeping makes sense on several levels.
You get a hated task off your plate. That frees up time and mental energy you can put into making deals and building your business.
Putting it into the hands of a pro also reduces the chances of mistakes. That benefits you every time taxes come due.
Billing
Billing is one of those areas that often gets overlooked when things get busy or you suffer from high staff turnover. That has serious consequences for cash flow.
Say that you run a one-doctor medical practice. You average 14 patients per day, five days a week. That’s 280 invoices a month before you even get into insurance claims.
Now, let’s say you hire another doctor to help out three days a week. They see an average of 12 patients a day. That adds another 144 invoices a month.
If you average $50 of revenue from each patient visit, a one-week lapse in billing puts a $5300 hole in your finances.
Outsourcing your billing frees you from a tedious administrative task and helps ensure steady cash flow.
Marketing
You can add marketing to the list of business activities that many entrepreneurs despise.
It’s partly psychological, in that many people feel like marketing is bragging. Some of the dislike stems from the fact that marketing is an ongoing process. You can’t put it away.
Marketing also involves a degree of technical savvy that not everyone possesses.
Outsourcing your marketing isn’t an all or nothing choice. For example, you might outsource your online marketing to a company that specializes in SEO and SEM. If you don’t want to deal with marketing at all, you can look into full-service marketing agencies.
Parting Thoughts on Business Activities You Should Outsource
Core business activities should stay in-house, but you can outsource some tedious or specialized tasks.
Bookkeeping and billing fall into the tedious category with a dash of specialization. They play an important role in every business, but they usually fall outside of core business functions.
Marketing falls into the category of specialized tasks. Marketers understand the strategies, psychology, and technology that draw in customers.
It’s practical and sensible to outsource these tasks to people who do them professionally.
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