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Advice from Experts: How Outsourcing Encourages Business Growth

By: SmallBizClub

 

How Outsourcing Encourages Business Growth

Outsourcing in business has seen a significant rise over recent years and with the increasing number of startups worldwide, this is only estimated to rise. Outsourcing, or distributing specific projects to a third party, frees up essential time and resources within your company, which can then be implemented into other key areas.

During these stages of growth and development, it is absolutely crucial for your business to maintain its high quality standards and ethos. These key stages of development are where such qualities would otherwise be most affected, but the means of outsourcing enables a business to access skilled experts within the industry, who fulfill the work for such projects instead.

If you’re looking to outsource tasks as a means of encouraging business growth, we have spoken with a number of successful entrepreneurs. These individuals have adopted such methods to their business themselves and offer some actionable advice to other like-minded individuals who seek a similar experience.


 

Below we have insights from Julian Walker, the Founder of Property and Spain, an agency who assist clients in buying and selling properties in Spain. He highlights his entrepreneurial journey, where he opens up about the methods of outsourcing which he adopted and the benefit these have had on his business.

What made you decide to start the business?

I have been running Spot Blue, which specialises in property sales in the Turkish market, with my father David Walker for over a decade. We noticed that people started to have a keen interest in the Spanish property market where they could take advantage of the lower value of the Euro, cheap property prices and have the opportunity to soak up the sun in a glamourous property by the Spanish coastline. Since we have a strong understanding of what property buyers are looking for in either retirement, residential or holiday homes, it was an easy decision for us to launch our business in the Spanish market.

What services do you currently outsource?

We outsource a few tasks. These include Web development (we have a dedicated web developer who can manage the design and functional changes and operations for our website) digital marketing (we have a team of SEO, social and digital marketing specialists that help to keep our site optimised to appear on Google) and PR personnel (we use PR specialists to help promote our business and get exposure in relevant international property media).

How has this helped your business to grow?

The main benefit we receive from outsourcing is that it allows us to scale the growth of our business. We can focus on delivering the services that we are experts at (which is selling international property) whereas the experts that we hire can focus on their own expertise. (E.g. Digital marketers will focus on generating leads for our business.)

When you partner with an outsourced partner who is extremely effective at what they are doing, their efforts pay for themselves and they run profitably for the business. For example, if I pay an outsourcer £500 to do a project and he returns £2000, then our business grows.

What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs looking into outsourcing?

It is definitely worth committing to a scalable outsourced solution. It is cost-effective, however the risks are much higher when sourcing your team initially. There will be hits and misses, but entrepreneurs need to factor this into their budget for growth. Be cautious with your hiring process, check reviews and get recommendations from references that they can provide.


 

Next, we spoke to Stuart McClure, the Founder and CMO of Love The Sales, a site which gathers all the sales from 500 of the biggest UK retailers. Stuart speaks of the early stages of the business, as well as the services he uses to outsource tasks to improve growth.

What made you decide to start the business?

As the father of a young family I was always looking for ways to get the lifestyle products we wanted for less. Making money go as far as it can is always a focus. I used to spend ages surfing the net looking for items at the best possible price, and one day realised there was a better way to see what products were on sale – aggregate them all into one site. So that’s what we did. We knew most shoppers wanted to get their products for less, and that sales are key to that. We set about building something that would save people a lot of time and effort.

What services do you currently outsource?

As an online business, our core outsource is the hosting of our site and the various applications that go with that. Doing that in-house would be very costly, both from a hardware point of view and for salaries to pay for those managing the kit. We were fortunate enough to be successful in our application to the Microsoft Bizspark programme – that gives us a certain amount of hosting credit every month.

How has this helped your business to grow?

Outsourcing the hosting has been vital to us. As a small startup you don’t have the luxury of extra hires or buying expensive equipment – cloud hosting was the only feasible option for us. Another benefit is that we have the larger pool of knowledge and experience of the team behind the hosting provider (Microsoft in our case) to call on. This lessens the impact of not having certain hires in-house.

What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs looking into outsourcing?

Outsourcing can be an amazing way to add extra skills or resources to your business, but SMEs have to be cautious. There are times when there is a clear cost benefit, but there are also times when there isn’t. For example, we also outsource PR – we do that because we simply do not have the contacts required to feature in national press. So there’s a clear benefit.

However, I wouldn’t outsource something like SEO – this is an area notoriously fraught with hidden costs, brand damaging potential and a poor return on spend. It also takes a lot of knowledge and IP out of the business which are very important to an organic search plan.


 

We hope that the information derived from these interviews acts as actionable advice, inspiring you to outsource some of your projects as a means of encouraging the future growth and development of your business.

Author: Alec Laurie is the Managing Director and Principle Recruitment Consultant of Technology and Business Change Leadership at Laudale. Laudale are specialists in recruiting IT and business change exclusively in the North of England.

Published: May 12, 2016
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