We often think of a company in a fairly simplistic way: as a self-sufficient organization. We think of it as a corporation with various departments, like Human Resource Management, Accounting, and Finance, Production, Research and Development (R&D), Purchasing, Marketing, and Selling.

But, in fact, the world of business is a far more complicated place. Almost every business needs a service business every once in a while, or on an ongoing basis, to keep the show on the road. These support businesses can be broken down into two broad categories: technical services and business services.

Technical Services

A business needs all types of technical services, depending on the nature of the business. These services can rarely be handled in-house because they require a great deal of specialized knowledge and experience.

Some examples of technical services are electrical services, computer repair services, IT services, and freight brokerage services.

1. Electrical Services

Technical systems might be related to machines and equipment. A company with a large number of electrical systems will need an electrical contracting business to aid with design, maintenance, instrumentation, controls, and so on.

2. Computer Repair Services

In our current economy, computer “downtime” is a crisis. It means that the information processing has come to a complete standstill. This, of course, means much more than forced idle time, it means a loss in the mechanism of revenue generation. Computer repair people are necessary for diagnostic savvy and technological know-how. They are not merely tasked with getting their client’s computer online again, but with getting the business itself humming once more.

3. IT Services

While computer repair services help with hardware issues, IT services usually focus on software and networking issues. IT services cover a wide range of things, for instance, front-end development, full-stack development, or migrating all business data to a cloud service.

4. Freight Brokerage Services

In the Internet age, many businesses are now international businesses. This means that goods are being shipped between states and across the globe through a complicated commerce system that requires a knowledge of land, rail, sea, and air shipping transportation, warehousing, government regulations, and other types of logistic knowledge. Freight brokers provide this specialized service.

Business Services

While technical services help companies keep their physical or virtual systems up and running, business services are a little more abstract: they help keep operations running smoothly.

Some examples of outsourced business services are business planning, accounting and bookkeeping, advertising, and sales training.

1. Business Planning

It’s not easy to come up with a business plan, whether you’re an entrepreneur or the head of an established business firm planning to develop branches or stores in other states. Business plan consultants help create a plan that makes it possible to convince lenders or investors to provide the necessary financing. A good plan also helps to develop a vision of what is possible and contingency plans to deal with anticipated obstacles. A business plan consultant often has a team that assists with writing skills, market research, budgeting and forecasting, and general business know-how.

2. Accounting and bookkeeping

While many businesses have their own internal team of accountants and bookkeepers, as well as plenty of sophisticated software to automate processes and crunch the numbers, outsourced accounting and bookkeeping services are still thriving. They provide small businesses with money management services and help short-staffed medium and large businesses with their books.

3. Advertising

Advertising is such a specialized skill that it’s often reckless to simply rely on a manager to do it in-house. Copywriters are skilled in how to position a product or service to a target audience. They understand the psychology of words and know just the right thing to say to trigger a high response from advertisements. Although expensive, the return on investment they provide is usually high enough to justify their fees.

4. Sales Training

While most companies have their own sales staff, these salespeople all need a high level of training. While a sales manager may be able to provide some level of coaching on how to generate leads or close sales, he or she is often too busy with the supervision of the sales department to be enough. For this reason, an outside sales trainer is indispensable.

Conclusion

In conclusion, business has become far too complex for one organization to have all the specialists it needs under one roof. It’s much more realistic to think of businesses as requiring both their own teams and outsourced teams.