As a small business owner myself, I can understand the tendency to minimize costs and try to do it yourself. DIY may be popular these days because it promotes education and saves on families’ personal finances, but there is a different reality in the business world.
Doing everything yourself may increase your short term profit due to limiting costs, but it hurts business in the long run. Businesses need to take a different approach if they want to focus on growth, stability, customer service, and marketability. Another way of putting it is this: DIY may be advantageous in the short-term, but in the long-term, it is crippling your business. As a business owner, you should be concerned with growth. Since there’s only one of you – it helps to start looking at areas to outsource.
Areas for Business Owners to Focus on Outsourcing
It truly takes a business person’s mentality to run a business. That means not flinching at costs and understanding the true benefit. This is a challenge because it is a fine line between setting yourself up for success, and burdening your business with unnecessary costs. In other words, you need to know how to prioritize: when and where to spend right now, and what can wait for later.
Marketing
Marketing is one of those things that business owners often manage themselves. This can be a viable business plan if slow, sustainable client growth is the name of the game. If you would like to expedite the process, there’s nothing more helpful than hiring someone to do this for you.
Accounting
There’s nothing worse than having someone run a business who doesn’t understand numbers, or even worse, takes no serious attempt to run the numbers. If you are serious about running your own business and finance isn’t your speciality, consider outsourcing this. It will allow you to focus on what you are good at, and save you a lot of headache come tax time. You may not want to splurge on an accountant, but you can always hire someone like a bookkeeper to oversee the entry of transactions into accounting software.
Acquisitions/Sales
If you are looking at growing your business (think corporate acquisition or merger), or in selling your business (either as you approach retirement or want to transition jobs), this is a specialty area where it pays to get help. Companies like Transworld represent buyers and sellers when it comes to business sales. They’re going to be familiar with the process and know what to expect, what is reasonable, and maybe even suggest certain components of the sale agreement that you wouldn’t think about. Many of my friends who have sold their businesses have used a third party to negotiate for them and say it was the best thing that they could have ever done.
Running a business is challenging. You’re not only trying to satisfy your current customers, but also recruit new customers. There are way too many components to run by yourself. While you need to be conscious of your bottom line, it can pay huge dividends to take a few risks and focus on growing your business through outsourcing certain elements of the business.
