When to Outsource Your Business Tasks

One of the biggest strategic decisions any business has to make is whether to hire in-house or outsource. There are many departments that this choice applies to. Should your order takers be in house or in a call center? What about support? Fulfillment? Tech and IT?When should you outsource your work to an outside company and when should you hire your own staff to do it? In this article, we will discuss how to tell when to outsource, or when to retain tasks in-house.

Communication

When it comes to communication, hiring in-house is a clear winner. With outsourcers, you often have to go through a system to communicate with them. You might use email, or have to wait for them to return your calls if they are not on site. With someone in house, you can just walk down the hall if you need to confer with them. With an outsourced worker, you might be in different time zones. You might even have language barriers depending on who you hire.

+Cost

On the other hand, when it comes to cost, outsourcers almost always win hands down. Usually when you outsource, you pay a per-item or per-project fee that is significantly lower than if you had to hire someone on staff to handle it. Remember, staff costs aren’t just salaries. It’s also their share of the office space, medical insurance, the social security that you split and so on. Calculate an additional one-third on top of the base salary that you offer someone who works in-house to arrive at the real cost and you can see that if you want to grow your business rapidly, you can hire several outsourcers for a fraction of what an in-house worker would cost.

+Scalability

Outsourcing is much more scalable. Hiring people is difficult to scale. If you suddenly get a huge surge of customer service issues, it is very hard to hire a dozen high quality support staff overnight and find a place to put them all. However, an outsourcing firm can easily snap up the volume and you can hire as many people as you need to cover your busiest times, and get rid of them just as easily with no real obligation during slow periods. Keep regular communication with the best workers so you do not lose them to others, but you can easily lay off the rest.

If you suddenly get a lower volume of calls, if you workers are in-house, you still have to keep paying your staff per hour even if they’re sitting there doing nothing. With outsourcing, you don’t have to pay anything if you are not getting calls.

+Quality Control

On the other hand, quality is almost higher in house than when outsourced. If you’re outsourcing your programming for example, you’ll almost always find that the quality of the work isn’t as high as what you’d get from in house programmers.

There are many reasons for this. They are less accountable. They don’t have to look you in the eyes. Also, you can’t be as discernining. It is much harder to hire the best when you are only going by online profiles. Having said that, there are many reliable professionals working as outsourcers. You just need to find the right ones to work in your business.

Making the Final Decision

outsourcing is a good business strategy to follow to make more profits provided that you follow a few simple rules. Firstly, do not outsource your core competencies. So for example, if you are a technology company, don’t outsource your programming and other highly technical work. However, if you’re a printing company that has some technological needs from time to time, you may very well want to outsource that rather than hire a full-time worker with little to do. The things that you need to excel at, do in house. The things that need to get done inexpensively, outsource, and see the difference it can make to your bottom line.