If you think about your business, you probably have many projects written down on pieces of paper, on your computer, or just in the back of your mind that you know if you were able to complete them, you would see more revenue, increase your profits, become more efficient, and reach more customers.
Now, if you have employees working in your local office, you want to think about all the costs associated with having them. You have their salary. You have any benefits that you pay for them. You have the rent of their office space. You have their computer cost. And then, you have the management overhead of having someone there, local, in your office.
I’m not saying that it’s bad to have people in your office. If you like that, and it fits your business model, then it’s a great thing. It’s sometimes better to have somebody face to face where you can show them different things and resolve issues quickly. However, there are a number of opportunities where outsourcing to either another country, or, even in the same country, can be of benefit to you.
For example, if you take loading a group of 500 products onto to your website. Maybe it broadens your product line substantially, which can generate more profits, and, give you more tentacles, so to speak, on search engines to bring people to your site.
Let’s say it takes an average of ten minutes to get the data from the supplier’s site, format it, update your pricing, download the pictures, format those, and then go into the backend and actually add all the information and pictures. If you think about ten minutes per product, you can get six products done in an hour, and you have 500 products to do. That’s actually 83.33 hours of time. Now, of course, this is probably a high time estimate. So, let’s say it actually takes twenty hours. Well, is that something that you have, twenty hours to commit to adding those products? Probably not.
Also, if you have an employee in your local office do it, that’s another item on their plate. They cannot be doing something else for you. So, if they can be doing more profit generating activities, why not outsource this?
Outsourcing time consuming tasks and one time special projects can greatly decrease your fixed costs and free up you and your employees to allow more time to focus on more important, revenue generating tasks such as marketing and promoting your business.
If you’re new to outsourcing and don’t really know where to begin, there are actually only a very few places that you should spend your time looking for reliable and inexpensive providers. Most of these specific outsourcing websites provide you with a number of tools and services including payment escrow services, project management tools, integrated email / real time chat applications, detailed search capabilities, and thousands of high quality providers that are ready to bid on your job, and to make sure that they do a good job for you so you’ll want to use them again in the future.
Take the first step to removing yourself from the day to day operations of your small business, website, or eCommerce store and learn how to outsource today!
Author Resource:
Kyle Grant runs the http://www.eCommerceSiteOwners.com private members-only website, where he provides in-depth training, how to eCommerce videos, checklists, downloads, templates, and time saving tools for online store owners. Claim your Risk Free 7 Day Trial at http://www.eCommerceSiteOwners.com/