Outsourcing: Use advantages, avoid disadvantages
Outsourcing has many advantages: Companies can save costs by cooperating with specialised service providers. This is especially true when it comes to one-off or infrequent tasks and service-oriented work areas. External experts have experience and expertise that your company can benefit from. This saves valuable training time and helps start-ups in particular to be able to work efficiently fast.
But be careful: Having too close or inflexible ties to a service provider may increase the risk of dependency; for example, disruptions in their operations can have a direct impact on your company's own business. Therefore, when choosing a service provider, you should pay attention not only to know-how but, above all, to reliability and flexibility.
The following five outsourcing tips will help you make the right decisions.
Tip 1: Recognise what your company can do and what it cannot do
It is crucial to analyse exactly which tasks your company can handle internally and which are better delegated to external service providers. So your motivation for outsourcing should not just be to "get rid of" work. You should strategically consider which external services will add professionalism and efficiency to your business. In this way, outsourcing serves to make your company more competitive.
A simple example: As a start-up in the e-commerce sector, it makes little sense to hire a specialist in-house for website development. Outsourcing this task to a specialised web agency allows the start-up to focus on product development while experienced experts put their expertise into website development and maintenance. If you opt for an agency, the external service provider's staffing level also guarantees you substitute availability, which you cannot benefit from if your employed staff is unavailable due to holidays or illness.
Tip 2: Finding the right service provider – this is how it works
When choosing a service provider, be it an agency or a freelancer, several factors play a role. Look at the external image first: Is the website up-to-date and convincing? For example, if you are looking for a social media agency, check whether they themselves are active and present on the latest networks. Also, make sure that the agency or freelancer has reference clients that are roughly the same size as your company. This is a good indicator of whether your content and financial parameters will match.
Your outsourcing decision should always be based on these professional criteria, but you should also keep your gut feeling in mind: In a potential long-term cooperation, it is essential that the chemistry with the service provider is right. Corporate philosophies and personalities should harmonise.
Tip 3: Use telephone services for constant availability
Your phone is ringing all the time? It’s good that you have many interested customers. However, the constant ringing can also disrupt your work flow considerably or overburden your secretary's office. Telephone services can be an ideal outsourcing solution here: They offer you the possibility to have external professionals receive your incoming calls. Telephone service providers such as ebuero filter telephone enquiries for you, pass on important information and coordinate appointments for you with professional secretarial staff –- be it via app or online portal. This ensures that your company is always available without you having to be constantly available yourself. Ebuero offers solutions for companies of all sizes, whether it's taking over secretarial services completely or relieving your company in the event of holidays, illness and other short-term bottlenecks. This is how flexible outsourcing works.
Tip 4: Hand over PR and marketing to experts
In the fast-moving field of marketing, there are numerous specialised tasks that can be ideally outsourced to experts. Specialised agencies or freelancers know how to use the latest communication channels and current trends ideally for your company. Depending on the size of your company, decide how much money you can and want to spend on professional PR measures. For smaller companies, experienced freelancers with meaningful reference projects are a good choice. Larger companies prefer to work with full-service agencies.
Jour fixes and regular updates are important tools for continuous exchange in this cooperation, in order to always stay up to date even in outsourced work areas.
Tip 5: Outsource your office costs and rent a business address
A prestigious business address in a top location not only creates trust among customers and business partners, but also reflects professionalism. Instead of paying large sums for office space, Office Club offers you the option of renting a business address. Depending on your individual outsourcing needs, you can flexibly rent office or conference rooms from Office Club or take advantage of additional services: With the Virtual Office you get an attractive all-round package for your business, in which Office Club reliably and discreetly takes care of all aspects of your mail handling. In addition to receiving, storing and forwarding mail, we also offer a convenient scanning service.
Conclusion: In essence, outsourcing is about recognising your strengths and focusing on them, while experts support your company in their areas of expertise. Outsourcing, when used correctly, can be an effective way to optimise resources, save costs and increase professionalism. It is important think strategically when you are outsourcing: Identify which tasks should be outsourced and which need to remain in-house. When selecting external partners, it is not only their expertise that is decisive, but also the personal chemistry between you both. In addition, services such as telephone services and rented business addresses offer customised and flexible solutions for your company.