If you are a small business owner, it’s possible that you wear many hats. The main reason people start a business (besides working for themselves) is because they have a talent in that particular field. No one knows everything, nor should they. That having been said, you should not be wasting time on jobs that take you away from your area of expertise if you’re able to pay someone to perform those tasks, particularly if the price is less than the lost income you confront by tackling them yourself. The secret to running a business successfully is to place all of your efforts into what you do best and outsource everything to maximize the earnings potential of the business. While in the beginning, it may look like this strategy gives you total control over your entire business, it might be costing you in terms of consumers and therefore income. Ultimately, taking this course may wind up costing you the business you worked so hard to construct, and many times, this occurs before you get very far into the entire life span of the business.
There are numerous regions of business performance that entrepreneurs have a tendency to perform themselves. Not only will you be wasting your time, but the odds are good that would be in a position to perform them considerably than you can. Examples of tasks that are suited to be outsourced are:
- Bookkeeping (i.e. charging, revenue & payroll taxes, collections)
- Legal Services (i.e. drawing up contracts)
- Marketing
- Web Design
For instance, if you’re a physician running a solo practice (or a lawyer, or salesperson) and performing the books at precisely the exact same time, you are costing yourself important billable time (or time that you may be selling). So, if you spend 1-2 hours a day paying bills, balancing the checkbook, running reports, etc., and also an hour of your time is worth $100 (for argument’s sake) you’re losing about $100-$200 a day. That may not look like much, but pro-rate that over 240 business days (48 weeks x 5 business days conservatively assuming you shut for holidays, personal days, and holiday time), and you may possibly be costing your business between $24,000 and $48,000 annually. If you were to hire an accounting firm that charges even $1,000 per month to handle all the bookkeeping, bank reconciliations, and report analysis, it would cost your business a total of $12,000 for the year. It comes out to a savings of 50%-75percent yearly.
Even if you already have a bookkeeper on your outsourced payroll, outsourcing still makes fiscal sense from the perspective that if this person is very knowledgeable and skilled you are still paying much more than $12,000 annually to employ them not to mention any secondary costs such as insurance, payroll taxes, supplies, etc. in addition to the time when they’re getting compensated for idle time. The other side of this equation is that you’re using a educated and less proficient person, in which case you will benefit from outsourcing the accounting duties by acquiring a service system that is built-in but also not only saving money. Yes, it could be difficult to give up control and supervision over such an important aspect of your business, but then again you most likely went into business to make money, not to let it go towards prices that you may minimize by taking proactive steps. And, if you do your bookkeeping after-hours all, wouldn’t you rather have that time to spend with friends and family, and save yourself?
To take it a step farther, certain tasks such as drawing up contracts should be left to the attorneys since they know exactly how to draw up them in a manner that not only makes them law-compliant but also safeguards you against missing crucial points within the documents. Something such as marketing ought to be left to specialist marketers since they know what works vs. what doesn’t concerning marketing strategies for a specific industry and target market. There is absolutely no reason to throw money into marketing campaigns that you design if you do not understand the first thing about analyzing a target market, or the anticipated response rates among different kinds of marketing paths. And when it comes to web design, generally the first thing a prospective customer sees that reflects your business, you should always opt for a professionally designed option rather than something that looks like it was done within a matter of moments using a free app, which a kid could do a much better job in designing.
Sure, like anything you can educate yourself to do any task, but you want to ask yourself if the time spent self-teaching is worth more than what you could be earning if you were spending time conducting your business. You have to take into account the fact that these jobs could be (I prefer to say undoubtedly will be) more effectively and efficiently done by PEO Canada. The main point is that you have to consider the customers first and foremost. They do not care if you do any of these things yourself or should you outsource, they care about the service or product you send to them. And, if attempting to be the jack of all trades is negatively affecting those outcomes from the clients’ eyes because you’re spending too much time on projects that are not your bread and butter concerning skill or experience, then you probably won’t have to worry as they won’t be customers for long.
Taking everything into consideration, oftentimes it just makes good business sense to stick to one area and bring others on board with professional experience and skill to deal with all other areas.
