How to choose what to outsource when starting your business

When starting a business, it’s difficult to know where to start. You could start by thinking about the skills you already have. What you like and what you don’t. You might review your own skills and experience, then decide whether you need help with the tasks involved.

As a new business owner, the success or failure is down to you. Therefore, choosing the right people with the right skills, to help you achieve your goals, is crucial.

So, in this post I’m giving you the different areas which you could consider, in terms of who does what, before diving in to start your business.

I’ll give you the benefits and cautions of outsourcing each activity or keeping them in-house.

Outsourcing your finances

If you want to keep your business afloat, your finances are one of the most important things to get right.

When you’re leaving work and losing a regular, weekly or monthly salary, dealing with sporadic income is one of the biggest challenges.

If you don’t see yourself as a Finance and Accounting type of person, have a look for Accounting firms for start-ups, who would be happy to give you some guidance and even do the accounting work for you. At a nice price.

When starting out, though, you don’t need too much going through the business in terms of money in or out, so it’s still a good idea to review the cloud solutions that are available on the market.

From there, you can decide if you’re happy to learn the system and do it yourself or get an accountant.

The other benefit of outsourcing your accounts is that you will have a 3^rdeye on your business at all times, helping you steer the business in the right direction.

Outsourcing your marketing (online or offline)

In the early days of your business, your ability to sell your product or service will be the one thing that determines whether you will need to go back to work, or not.

These days, there’s 2 core types of sales & marketing you need to get right. They are 1. offline marketing and 2. online marketing.

In most businesses business, the fastest way to get a client is by doing some of the fast-track sales techniques, such as cold calling, cold emailing and business networking. These are difficult to outsource, mainly because it requires you to give some of your money out when a sale is made. So, you will probably want to do these yourself, particularly in the early days

In terms of online marketing, bear in mind that this is often a long-term route to market unless you are going to put a vast amount of cash into paid advertising.

So, you may want to look for a local digital marketing agency or SEO company to help you with your long term goals online. If you don’t already have the knowledge, it can be a long slog to learn how to grow a website, so at least engage in conversations with people who do have the skills. Even if you just want to learn from their ideas.

Outsourcing your Human Resources

This may not be important just yet, but as soon as you hire your first employee, you will need to know the ins and outs of legal employment.

There are consultants in the HR field who will be more than happy to help you with your HR tasks. Alternatively, if you have a financial advisor, you could even ask them a few questions to get your employment off the ground at the start.

In HR, laws are changing all the time, so it’s almost a full-time job just keeping up-to-date. A good example is the ever-changing pension rules. That’s why it could be a good decision to outsource this activity.

Outsourcing your Operations

You might think, what’s the point in setting up a business if I’m not going to deliver the product or service myself. However, with eh rise of web marketing, it has become a lot more common for new businesses to be the face of the brand and have the orders despatched by a distribution company, who then makes sure the products are sent out on time and in good condition.

That way, you can focus on the marketing and growth of the sales without being bogged down with the day-to-day stuff. Then, when you’re in position to take on employees, you could bring the operations back in-house.

Often the decision to outsource tasks is based on what you do or don’t like doing yourself. But remember when setting up a business, there’s guaranteed to be tasks you just have to do. So, don’t be afraid of jumping into the deep end to get things done.