Regardless of the industry, starting up a business is challenging
Many startup business owners and CEOs find themselves faced with tough hiring decisions. What positions to fill first, what service offerings or products need to be managed by someone and where will I find the time to recruit my new staff?
Entrepreneur Magazine states that “Entrepreneurs have long seen outsourcing as a strategy reserved for big business, but technology has made it a more accessible tool for small businesses–and for some small firms, outsourcing has made a powerful impact on their growth, productivity, and bottom lines.” If your business isn’t quite ready to hire more permanent employees, and you have grown to the point where you can’t do all of the work alone, outsourcing is an ideal solution. And the best part is that modern outsourcing service providers can start small and grow with your company at your pace. Here are four ways outsourcing can help you grow.
4 Ways of Building Better Business with Outsourcing
1. Outsourcing Services Can Provide Consistent 24/7 Support
A good example of providing consistent 24/7 support is by outsourcing IT support. When you utilize a third party for IT outsourcing, your business receives support 24 hours a day and seven days a week ensuring there’s no downtime to negatively affect your services or customers. Being able to provide nonstop support for essential services, like Network Operations Center (NOC) or Customer Service, as well as being there for your customers when it’s convenient for them, is a significant outsourcing bonus.
Furthermore, your BPO partner can use technology and processes to garner insight into every channel and touchpoint along your customer journey and provide your sales and marketing teams with this holistic view. If you’ve struggled with responding to every social media comment or spending as much time as you’d like providing customer support, your outsourcing team can bridge the gap and deliver the timely, comprehensive help that customers need.
2. Outsourcing Allows You to Remain Nimble while Scaling up your Processes
Developing and adhering to logical, effective processes is one of the most useful startup business tips that can help a company grow. When you engage with a BPO, they take on many of the daily chores of running your business, like those dealing with customer service, technical support, order management, warranty management, and beyond. When there is a systematic protocol in place for these essential business functions, you can replicate them to scale quickly, globally, and even in multiple languages. Outsourcing processes like this equips you to retain the agility you’re accustomed to as a startup while enjoying all the benefits of operating like a large and refined business.
3. Outsourcing for Startups Can Lower Costs and Free up Resources
One of the main purposes of hiring a BPO is so that your employees can concentrate on what your business does well (and relieve them from spending energy and time on other business processes). Everything other than this is a distraction that can lose you time and money. Services that can be taken out of the house and free up space include using a virtual assistant, IT support, data cleansing, and customer onboarding order management. Since a BPO partner will have already invested in – and figured out best practices for – smart delivery locations, tenured leadership, optimized processes, and top technologies, you can save anywhere between 40 and 70 percent of your costs. This additional budget can then be directed to where it’s most important: consolidating and growing your business. Furthermore, saving this much of your expenses allows you to extend your runway with the funds you have, ultimately leading to increased retention of your valuation by founders and early investors.
4. An Outsource Partner Brings Specialized Skills and Support to Your Business
As previously mentioned, hiring a BPO partner is an effective way to help grow your business by freeing up resources and allowing you to focus on your core competencies. But you still might be short on specialists in a given area, which is where a BPO partner can step in and provide specialists with the tools necessary to represent your business. Even if your company is young, you can tap into decades of experience in the area you choose to outsource, which can greatly help you accelerate your time to market. One of these areas could be product and service development. Since your outsourcing partner is likely communicating to your customers on the front line while providing customer support, they can use that constant stream of feedback to help your product team iterate in order to better meet customer needs. Being able to act on such specialized, real-time input is a surefire way to see impressive results.
There are many benefits of outsourcing a variety of business functions, all of which allow you to focus your time, energy, and resources on the mission-critical areas that really matter. By freeing up your team’s valuable time and allowing them to specialize in the business itself, and entrusting your BPO partner to specialize in other processes, your startup business can firmly land on the path to success.
