If you’re running a small or medium-sized business, have you ever stopped to ask yourself, `What if I had more time during the day?’ or ‘What if I could find more money in my budget?’ You probably haven’t because you have no time and no extra budget to spare! You’re doing it all – accounting, IT, product development, account service, and marketing. If you’re a Managed Service Provider (MSP), Value Added Reseller (VARs), or an IT service provider, this is especially true. Because let’s face it, the IT managed services market is growing at a tremendous rate, and there’s a lot of competition! According to ResearchandMarkets, the managed services market is expected to grow from a little more than $152 billion this year to nearly $258 billion by 2022. In a crowded market, MSPs and service providers need to stand out and spend more time providing killer service offerings and getting focused on revenue-generating opportunities. (Channel Partners Online).
The benefits of outsourcing are well known – cost savings, increase in business productivity and efficiency, reduced labor and infrastructure costs, access to specialized skills, etc. – and it’s time to consider what outsourcing can do for your organization. Let’s take a look at how outsourcing can help teams find the time and money they didn’t know they had.
Reducing costs and adding flexibility
Leveraging freelancers or outsourced help is a smart move for SMBs and companies hyper-focused on growth, particularly for tasks outside the scope of core business strengths. Often this includes functions like accounting and payroll, customer service, legal services, marketing, or manufacturing. Using skilled outside specialists in these areas will save significant costs compared to finding, hiring, and training a full-time person in-house. Outsourcing tasks that also have seasonal or cyclical demands can also bring much-needed flexibility to the organization and keep internal teams zeroed-in on core responsibilities like ‘wowing’ customers.
Promoting efficiency
Outsourcing makes sense when back-office tasks are somewhat complicated, and when the internal resources available makes it challenging to complete these tasks at a consistent and reasonable cost. In these cases, the overhead costs of performing a particular back-office function can be extremely high. Examples of typical back-office tasks where teams can promote efficiency with outsourcing are onboarding, procurement, account management, customer service, etc. For instance, if an MSP helps customers with billing resolution issues as part of its managed services offering, but it takes a full-time account manager five days per month to resolve issues, how much money is that ‘time’ costing the business? In this case, investing in an expert that specializes solely on billing resolution issues for clients can save valuable money and free up the account manager for other high-value work.
Breaking into new markets
If your organization is trying to move into a new market or add a new product or service to its portfolio, it’s hard to justify hiring a full-time staff member before winning a new contract or acquiring a new customer. Or in some cases, a large project can require skills that internal staff simply do not have. In these cases, outside contractors have the skills to meet that immediate need, and they can also help internal teams acquire a new skill set. As an example, let’s say an MSP offers network monitoring services and they want to add cybersecurity services to their offerings. If internal engineers don’t have the skills required to design and manage new equipment, outsourced engineers can fill the skills gap, and internal teams can learn their own skills in time.
Bottom line
Think about it: what if your internal team had the luxury of focusing 100% on what you do best – delivering exceptional service and focusing on revenue-generating activities? What would that laser focus do for your business? Chances are, it would make a tremendous impact on your bottom line. By relying on a specialist to handle back-office operations and other administrative tasks, organizations can invest valuable time and energy to grow their business.