Your company needs to keep its focus and produce to be competitive, but for small businesses, that can be a tall order. Often, essential support services produce too much labor and administrative overhead for small companies to manage themselves. Staying competitive often means understanding when you need to contract out to a service provider for administrative support like bookkeeping or for tech support and IT services.
Advantages Of Outsourcing Support Services
When you use an outside consultant for essential background services like your IT or your accounting and bookkeeping, you avoid having to invest in full-time staff for those roles. That is a great advantage when your needs do not require a full-time role. Splitting staff roles to cover support services winds up taking time away from projects that bring in payments.
The key to making the most of tools like managed IT services? For small companies it is simple, if the role would not keep a full-time staff member busy, you can probably save money by contracting someone who specializes in it. They service multiple companies like yours, allowing them to offer competitively priced rates on everything from communications management to cybersecurity.
What Services Do You Need?
Basic bookkeeping and accounting services tend to be easy to identify, because your tax obligations motivate your needs in that area. When it comes to items like your IT support, though, it can be tough to know what you need. That is where a good consultant comes in. They do more than just supply services, they also help evaluate your needs so you can decide what to implement right away and how to stay protected as you expand.
It’s also worth remembering that you can outsource more than just your IT and accounting. Managed printing services can streamline your office supply management and keep costs down, and it is also worth building a network of subcontractors in case your clients request work you do not do in-house.
Subcontractors and Equipment Savings
The biggest reason to subcontract is to keep yourself from having to invest in new equipment. That goes for IT services as well as for subcontracting actual work done on client projects. In either case, work that you do not usually do requires tools that you do not currently have.
It’s not just the fact that you save on the labor costs when you outsource, you save on the infrastructure investment too. That is an important item to keep in mind if you are expanding and considering which outsourced services to bring in-house and which ones you need to keep.
Keep Your People Focused
Putting your staff to work on projects that suit their strengths is an important part of maximizing your productivity with a small company. Whenever you ask someone to expand their role to include work that takes away from their billable or project-oriented hours, you need to weigh whether the cost of that lost productivity is higher than the savings represented by keeping those services in-house. For many small companies, it is usually better to run a narrowly focused operation that uses consultants and subcontractors liberally.
