Are you outsourcing?

By: Lisa Marie Koebcke

As a business owner, are you waking up every day and doing what you’re good at? Is your staff? This is an important question especially for your bottom line. On its face, outsourcing might seem like an added expense, but utilized in the correct application you may be able to bring in more revenue, reduce stress, and increase bandwidth. Let us give you an example:

Patrick runs an Audio Visual integration company in Las Vegas. He has hired an Office Manager to run daily operations, schedule appointments, and handle social media and marketing. When asked her strengths in the job interview, his Office Manager, Leah stated she is a creative person who excels in driving processes forward. When asked her weaknesses, Leah stated she does not enjoy or thrive with financial management or numbers in general. Patrick hired Leah for the position and in an effort to save on overhead, had Leah manage the finances for the company in addition to her other tasks.

In this situation, Leah spent hours of her day agonizing over how to properly organize processing reimbursements, submitting invoices, tracking payments, and much more. Many times, she found herself working overtime just trying to keep up with her other tasks. Her strengths were unable to be utilized to their max capacity, because it took more effort to bring her weaknesses up to sub-par.

If Patrick saw the value in Leah’s strengths, an outsourcing solution would be to hire a 3rd party local accountant who would manage and provide reports the company needed. As a result, Leah would be able to focus on office management, client satisfaction and marketing. The outcome would be more referrals and the generation of new clients.

This is one example of how playing to your strengths will improve the efficiency of your company. You can sub-out Leah with a sales rep installing dimmer switchers, or your best programmer trying to handle your sales and marketing – it is a waste of time, money, and energy.

There is another layer to this, what if you don’t know you are not leveraging your staff’s strengths? If you don’t immediately know the answer to this, evaluate your company culture. Take a look at some of the cutting edge corporate cultures like Zappos, Twitter, and Google.

At Pulse Group we have a Business Service Division dedicating to helping companies evaluate their structure, staff, and profitability. Contact us for a free consult today!