If you've been following my most recent posts, you'll notice a theme: delegation. Sometimes, delegation takes the form of outsourcing. Most creatives I've met have a laundry list of things they'd love to pass off to someone else, but don't really know where to begin.
That's what we're going to tackle today.
Outsourcing offers a wide range of potential benefits to your business; there’s no doubt about that. If you’re going to achieve your dreams, it’s sometimes necessary to ask for help, which sometimes means outsourcing. But which things should your business be most interested in outsourcing? That’s the question we’re going to answer today, so read on to find out.
It’s often a good idea to outsource financial tasks, especially if you or someone on your team doesn't already have the expertise. Whether it's basic bookkeeping and accounting or more complicated financial issues like payroll, taxes, and benefits, this is one of the first places I see most creative entrepreneurs get help in their business.
Outsourcing payroll (and the tax statements that go with it) is increasingly common. It makes more sense to outsource it than to take care of it in-house in many instances. Companies like Paychex have been doing it for years. Mistakes in bookkeeping can be very costly, s0 put this work in the hands of people who know what they’re doing - and give yourself some peace of mind in the process.
Marketing is something that should never be overlooked. Good marketing tactics can be the difference between success and failure in the world of business, so demanding the best is necessary. A failure to market your products or services effectively only results in squandered potential, and no entrepreneur wants that.
With that in mind, outsourcing certainly makes a lot of sense as it allows you to hire a team of dedicated marketers to focus their full attention on marketing your business effectively to the right audiences.
When you've got employees, you'll need HR when you're dealing with more than the bookkeeping part of the employee equation. Things like benefits, inclusion & diversity initiatives, government paperwork, employee conflict resolution. I had ONE part-time employee and it was stressful managing just the government mandated paperwork. Imagine having more than one employee to content with!
Outsourcing your HR team means someone else can take the lead on those issues - including hiring and firing, if needed.
Outsourcing this need to a companies like Paychex, Bambee, or XMI Growth can make HR easy. If an in-house approach isn’t producing the results, consider this option instead.
And if you're looking to hire remote contractors on a short or long-term basis, a service like iworker can pre-screen their candidates to your job description. You'll get a list of qualified people to interview and select from without having to start from scratch. You pay the placement company, not the worker, so you have a lot more peace of mind if you need to replace someone.
One of my Incubator clients had hundreds of images that needed to be converted to a different file format because she was switching to a new publisher for her book. Instead of sitting down and doing all these file conversions manually, she passed that task off to our team, where we found a simple automated way to convert them. What would have taken her hours, if not days, of manual labor, we were able to complete in about an hour.
Things like data entry, scheduling blog posts or social media content, for example, are very necessary to the health of the business. But, they’re basic tasks that can be done by anybody, and that’s why they’re often best outsourced. It rarely makes sense to invest your time and energy taking care of these things when you can pass them to someone else - or even outsource them.
If you're at the point where you have more tasks than time or energy, it might be time to start outsourcing. One place to look is the Creative Freedom Incubator. We provide hands-on business support to all our Level Three clients. If you're ready to let go and trust a team of professionals to get your business operations humming along, join us! Enrollment is now open.