My entrepreneurial experience has helped me significantly to understand that running a modern-day IT reliant business is way more demanding and engaging affair than it apparently seems. It’s just the tip of the iceberg that you can see until you take a bad hit. One of the reasons is the sheer number of aspects associated with it, mostly requiring dedicated skills and resources to do the job successfully. Some major of them include:
- Website design and development
- Graphic design
- Content management and marketing
- Search engine marketing
- Social media marketing
- IT infrastructure setup and maintenance
- Customer service
- Operations
- Accounts and bookkeeping
- Supply chain management
Facing the crossroads
Entrepreneurs have to face this crossroad of deciding whether to outsource such operations or to hire in-house resources to manage the affairs. Let’s first explore the difference between in-house services and outsourcing for your business.
1 In-house services
In-house services, also sometimes referred as Insourcing, pertain to building your business a specialised and dedicated team to take care of various operations. Most companies prefer developing in-house resources in the area(s) of core strength to their business. For example, if you want your business to be distinguished for its top class web design services, you better build an in-house web design team.
Advantages
- This empowers you in controlling the resources’ performance, time, quality and deliverance aspects
- Offers you significantly improved command and control system over your resources
- Implementing changes is convenient and less time consuming due to immediate communication leverage
Disadvantages
- Significantly increased costs due to infrastructure development and resource retaining
- Often people end up working for their business rather than working on their business, which is against basic entrepreneurial guidelines
- Sometimes, the effort, money and time consumed on building an in-house team is not worth the productivity of the team
- It can deviate the business from its core objectives
2 Outsourcing
Outsourcing can be defined as the process of rendering the services of an outside consultant (which can be a single individual or an agency) with the intent of managing any operational elements of your business.
Types
Outsourcing for your business can be segregated into two main categories.
- Freelancing
It refers to hiring the expertise of an individual to perform a specialised task for a certain period of time. Platforms like oDesk, Freelancer and Elance enable you to do so. You don’t need to get into long term contracts with them; they just complete the assigned tasks and get paid for them. Though this turns out quite cheap, but there is no assurance or backup of the services you are getting from a particular individual. If he or she faces a problem, you don’t have any backup or reliable means of communication with them, and your whole operation can suffer beyond recovery.
- Virtual Staffing
Virtual staffing is a relatively newer and more reliable way of outsourcing your business concerns. The simplest way to understand it is to consider it as freelancing without all its conventional vices. This enables you to choose your own virtual resources by vetting them personally and they work like extended offshore element of your team. In fact, many virtual services providers offer you highly flexible hourly rates for the services being offered, which makes it much easier to manage your business affairs as per the need and demand of the situation.
Advantages
- Cost effectiveness is one of the biggest advantages of outsourcing, bestowing you with expert skills for a defined period of time. Even if you get slightly higher hourly rates for a given project, it would save your business thousands of pounds over a period of time
- No need of long term commitments
- No hassles of infrastructure development
- Enables you to focus your time, energy and resources on core tasks rather than getting stuck in operational glitches
Disadvantages
- It’s more of a challenge than disadvantage; finding the best combo of high quality services for significantly cost saving rates
- Similarly, communication might not be as affluent as in in-house setups
3 Hybrids
Going hybrid is yet another possibility to make sure your business venture ends up prosperous and thriving. This pertains to determining what areas of your business functions you need outsourced and where in-house resources can be more beneficial.
In the end, it’s all about being highly aware of your business model, your mission, vision and goals, so that you can make the best decisions when you are at any type of crossroads.
What you can do now…….
Give your opinion on this in the comment section below, share what worked the best for you.
Those of you looking to improve their odds of a successful business, my free ebook 100+ Actionable Business Growth Strategies by World Renowned Business Experts.
Khawar Zaman is involved with his interesting startup named Technorian during the day, while also taking time out to blog regularly on topics like entrepreneurship, startups, motivation and business growth.
