Outsourcing for Small Businesses – Your Strategic Advantage

It is no secret that the small business landscape has radically changed over the past couple of decades. Rapid advances in technology have essentially eliminated the constraints of time and space, allowing businesses to maximize their productivity through a network of geographically dispersed personnel. The ability to outsource certain marketing positions can pay great dividends in terms of allowing a business to focus on other critical in-house functions such as product development and operations management. By tapping into the power of virtual outsourcing, small businesses can assign certain portions of their marketing efforts to external vendors, which will allow them to give attention to the many projects that tend to remain neglected due to limited time.

Ever since the advent of the “digital revolution,” outsourcing has rapidly evolved as an industry in order to serve the needs of budget-conscious businesses that are looking to reduce overhead and increase overall efficiency. Incorporating outsourcing into your small business strategy offers several key benefits, including the following:

1. Reducing Capital Expenditures

Numerous small business outsourcing statistics suggest that businesses that do everything themselves typically carry higher operating costs, the majority of which get passed on to customers. Outsourcing will free up capital for investment into other critical areas of your business, and it can help you avoid large up-front expenditures (e.g., employee overhead, etc.) in the beginning stages of your business. This will help you to direct your capital into more revenue-generating activities, which are the lifeblood of your business.

2. Immediate Access to a Skilled Workforce

You can save yourself a ton of time and money in recruiting and training expenses by simply hiring an outsourcing company that is already skilled and experienced in executing your desired tasks. A quality outsourcing firm will be equipped with the resources and personnel to start on your project immediately.

3. Expands Your Options

Outsourcing enables you to recruit talent from literally anywhere in the world, versus being relegated to only one geographic area. With certain overseas firms, you may even be able to get work done while you sleep due to time zone differences!

While outsourcing does provide your business with several important advantages, it must be properly managed in order to derive maximum benefit. Fortunately, cutting-edge technologies such as Sococo have been developed in order to help you manage a distributed team from a secure online interface using a private virtual environment. This not only gives you the ability to initiate projects and issue key directives, but it also allows you to effectively manage and communicate with your virtual workforce throughout the process.

As you consider the viability of outsourcing as a means to address your business needs, it is worthwhile to examine the evolution of outsourcing, as well as its strategic implications. The infographic below offers key insights into not only how we got to where we are now in terms of the evolution of the workplace, but also what tools are available for small businesses to maximize their outsourcing efforts.

Are you taking advantage of outsourcing in your business? Share your thoughts in the comments!

http://blog.sococo.com/tips-and-tricks/infographic-how-to-manage-connect-your-distributed-team.html