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Running companies has been an incredible learning experience for me. It’s taught me how to be a better communicator, a better sales person, a better leader, and a better person. But it’s also taught me a lot about what I’m terrible at. In fact, being an entrepreneur has stripped me of all my pride and made me feel helpless more times than I can count. But those moments of humility have also been great learning experiences for me. They’ve taught me a crucial lesson in building a successful company: to succeed, you have to focus on the areas where you excel.
Too often entrepreneurs, when they’re first starting out, will attempt to be a jack-of-all-trades in order to keep costs low. This means that a technically inclined founder will find themselves managing payroll or doing sales, likewise the marketers and sales focused entrepreneurs will try their hand at web design and human resources. Most entrepreneurs are guilty of doing this at one point or another. But the truth I’ve discovered is that dabbling in areas where I’m weak can often end up costing me more in lost time and revenues than the cost of outsourcing it from the start.
Embrace The Idea Of Outsourcing
By now most entrepreneurs should be comfortable with the idea of outsourcing. With the proliferation of the internet on a worldwide scale, outsourcing overseas is no longer reserved for larger organizations. In fact, when several of my companies were in their infancy, I often relied on the services of contractors in Asia, Europe, and sometimes South Africa.
So, if entrepreneurs have access to any skillset at any time, why isn’t outsourcing the go-to method for growing a company? Well, as I examined my own hubris on the matter, I came to the conclusion that I was afraid of relinquishing control. If I was physically doing an activity, then I felt that I had control over that initiative. But having control over something doesn’t mean that it’s being done well.
Thus, I had to get over my fear of relinquishing control. And a funny thing happened when I did that, I also relinquished the stress that was associated with that activity. For instance, managing my payroll and bookkeeping was one of the last things I was willing to give up. And I’m a terrible numbers person. However, I wanted to know where every penny of my company’s money was going, and thus I agonized over payroll, new hire paperwork, and taxes several times per month. I would stay up late making sure I had everything in compliance and that paychecks were always out on time. It often took a herculean effort for a math ignoramus, like myself, to get everything done and having it done right.
But then a fellow entrepreneur shed some light on my dilemma and told me I was being foolish. He made an introduction to a payroll group that would handle everything payroll, finance, and human resources related for my company.
Hesitantly I turned over control of my payroll, and to my amazement everything became better. Paychecks came out on time, my books were balanced, the tax man was paid, and I barely had to think about it. And what was even better was that the cost of outsourcing the tasks was a lot cheaper than I had imagined. And in the end the savings in time and effort more than paid for the costs .
Identify Your Strengths
Now, I do see the irony in the fact that someone who runs an agency that is an outsourcing solution for marketing, had such a hard time outsourcing himself.
But, after I got a taste of the stress relief that outsourcing provided me, I started looking for other things I could outsource. And here is a list of common outsourcing services that I think entrepreneurs should utilize. Because once they outsource everything they don’t enjoy doing or are not great at, they can focus on their strengths and really make the most of their efforts.
IT Solutions
Having grown up tinkering with computers, I liked to imagine that I was a bit of an IT support staff for my company. But when five computers turned into 100, I quickly realized I was completely out of my depth. While I could debug an operating system, I didn’t have the slightest idea on how to set up servers, VOIP phone systems, corporate wifi, or firewalls.
Again, feeling humbled and realizing I was in way over my head, I turned to groups like Pythian, an outsourced IT services company, to take my company from barely getting by on technology, to being well ahead of the curve and ready for anything that might come our way.
Payroll, Human Resources and Book Keeping
As I’d previously mentioned, this was a difficult one for me to relinquish, but it’s so time consuming that entrepreneurs should learn from my folly and outsource this task quickly if they’re not cut out for numbers. There are thousands of small companies in every geographic region that can handle these tasks, but there are also larger national groups like Zenefits and A Plus Benefits that can service companies regardless of their industry or where they’re located.
Marketing
I’m a little biased on this one, seeing as I run a full-service digital agency, but I really do believe that a great agency can provide a much more efficient and effective marketing initiative than an internal team, in certain cases. When you run the numbers and realize that hiring a full-time marketing employee can cost well over $5,000 per month when salary and benefits are included, then outsourcing those efforts to an agency for much less than that is just a better alternative. Especially when an agency can provide an array of expertise like SEO, design, content creation, and other tasks that are difficult to find concentrated in one individual hire.
But like any outsourcing initiative, proper vetting has to take place. So, look for a group that has great reviews, references, and can show their track record. This should help you avoid any unpleasant experiences.
Training
This one was a bit of a revelation for me. I’d always assumed that training was something that had to come from within an organization. But the truth of the matter is that while we, as entrepreneurs, are great at what we do, we’re not always the best teachers. Thus, relying on professionals can provide us with insights and techniques that we never would have discovered on our own.
There are groups that will train your organization on almost any topic from sales to leadership and even conflict resolution. So, if you’ve identified that your organization is weak in a certain arena, don’t bang your head against the wall trying to come up with a solution. Instead, lean on the experts that can bring your team up to speed faster and more efficiently.
These are just a few of the many ways that a company can outsource. There are dozens, if not hundreds of other outsourcing solutions for almost anything you can imagine. The trick is to identify what you’re great at, focus on that, then find a way to offload the rest to professionals who will make you more efficient.
