Currently eCommerce is entering an era of extreme competition and greater professionalism that is causing small and medium businesses (SMB) to fight to attract new customers and grow their revenue. It raises the requirements to manage and optimize their digital marketing strategies, order fulfillment processes and other business operations.
Outsourcing some of your more peripheral business operations to service providers like Back Office Pro can be incredibly beneficial in helping you survive and thrive in this era by giving you enough time to focus on core in-house operations. It may not only save you on costs, but also time, hassle, and frustration.
Business operations to consider outsourcing
Website management
When you created your initial website you probably did it DIY with a template. You might know how to build a website on WordPress perhaps but you may not have access to certain tools or plugins. You probably were also not familiar with the visual language of professional website design and what elements would be ideal for representing your business.
Find an expert website development team that can build, manage, and maintain a website that you can be proud of and sit back and examine the outstanding results which you alone couldn’t have achieved. The team will focus on integration, security, troubleshooting and can assist you with other ways to better improve your site’s performance.
Unless you have a real eye for design and a technical understanding of how websites work, getting professional help with your website is usually the first step to scaling your business.
Growth marketing
You might excel with your marketing strategies in the beginning but eventually, the results will slow down as you have to focus on other parts of growing the business as well.
Outsourcing marketing operations to an external growth marketing firm can save you from planning, designing, measurement and execution. These firms employ rigorous A/B testing and analysis to determine better marketing strategies and tactics for your business.
You may not have time to continually experiment with ad design or implement the best microcopy on your site. If that’s the case, hire someone who does.
Accounting and bookkeeping
Your business can start bleeding losses under your nose if you are not closely accounting for everything going on. Many business owners when they start out like to do their own accounting but pretty soon they discover they need at least a bookkeeper to lighten the load.
For keeping the business running smoothly as you expand, you should consider farming out tax payments, payroll, bookkeeping and, maintaining compliance standards to an accounting team. There’s a lot more involved than simply crunching numbers and you need to focus on ways to generate revenue for your business.
Let professionals that understand relevant tax laws and regulations do the work for you.
Chargeback management
While we’re on the topic of finance, we should address the key issue companies face when they start accepting credit card payments: chargebacks. The process of fighting credit card payment disputes is a drawn out and complex one that can last 120 days from when the chargeback is filed. If you’re experiencing a growing problem with chargebacks and do not have enough time or strategies to deal with it, try outsourcing the work to a professional chargeback mitigation company.
A chargeback mitigation company will have specialist knowledge in dealing with the complexities of payment disputes and the processes involved. They can track, monitor, and report your data using custom tools while giving you feedback to improve your business operations. Done right, a chargeback mitigation company will help you prevent chargebacks from coming in the first place, improve customer satisfaction and recover lost revenue all at the same time.
HR & recruiting
Human resources is another area that SMB owners often like to handle themselves too long into their company’s growth phase. SMBs can turn over human resources management to a professional third-party organization to organize the recruitment, onboarding, offboarding and training of employees efficiently and effectively.
Most often your employees will be more comfortable dealing with HR issues with someone who is not the owner. Meanwhile, outsourced HR for a company with less than 50 employees is less costly compared to hiring a full-time HR specialist.
You can use the savings from utilizing a third-party HR services vendor to hire external training providers for employee workshops to fill in the gaps caused by a lack of a full HR department. Invest in your employees’ well-being without feeding admin sprawl.
Final thoughts
While considering the benefits of outsourcing, you should think twice if that job can be efficiently done in-house by your employees. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably used to doing things by yourself since you started the business. Don’t let that tendency get in the way of your growth when you are ready to scale.
Once you have a product or service that people really like focus on keeping existing customers happy and attracting new sales. The rest should be approached on a cost-benefit basis and whether adding roles and functions to your business will promote the growth of the whole or just be an added cost center.
