You’re a small business owner. You’re used to handling every aspect of your business and hesitant to delegate tasks. After all, when you maintain complete control of your operations, you know that everything is done to your standards.
There’s just one problem with this scenario: It isn’t sustainable. If you want your small business to grow and keep growing, you can’t continue to take on all the menial tasks and back-office responsibilities that can be performed more efficiently by an outside source. By outsourcing smaller tasks that take up so much of your time, you can pour your energy and talents into the core functions of running your business.
Along with allowing you to spend your time on more important aspects of the business, outsourcing certain tasks can save you a lot of money—both in the short-term and long-term. Not only does it keep you from having to hire full-time employees, but you’re not required to provide the additional office space and resources that you would for a growing on-site team.
If you’re a small business owner looking to grow your business, it might be time to stop doing everything yourself. Here are some of the most common jobs that can be effectively outsourced.
Data Protection and Recovery
Protecting company data, which often includes customer and client data, is one of the most important tasks of any small business. To prevent data loss, be sure to effectively back up your data. Cloud storage is a wonderful solution for data backup. However, many companies find it safest to enact an additional backup system, such as one that uses an encrypted protocol for data transfer. Along with backing up your data, you should ensure you have adequate antivirus software in place and establish data security measures for all your employees.
If your small business manages confidential patient health information, it’s essential to comply with HIPAA standards. Compliance requires you to establish physical and technical safeguards.
- Limit the use of and access to facilities, workstations, and electronic media.
- Regulate the transferal, removal, disposal, and recycling of ePHI and electronic media.
- Implement encryption, decryption, user IDS, and emergency access protocols.
Data protection and recovery is as complicated as it is important. So, it’s definitely an area to consider outsourcing to professionals in the industry.
Web Design
Web design is another task best handled by the pros. Your business website is the center of your marketing, and how good it looks and works can play a major role in attracting an audience and converting them into customers/clients. Sure, you can go it alone and use the free version of a web platform to build a website. But if you want a high-quality, unique website without having to pour countless hours into it, outsource this task to a professional web design firm.
Social Media Marketing
Yes, your website is a key element of your marketing strategy, because all of your marketing leads back to your website. But there’s a lot more to marketing than your website. In this day and age, social media provides the biggest platforms for advertising your brand.
Some business owners handle their own social media pages. But if you want to be really successful at social media marketing, you need to post interesting content on a consistent basis. You can save time and money in the long run by hiring a freelance social media manager. And if you want to take it up a notch, hire a freelance content writer to write a certain number of articles each month for your website’s blog page. This will help to establish your company’s rapport in the industry, and you can post the blogs on your social media pages as well as Google AdWords advertising agencies.
If you want your small business to reach its potential, you need to consider outsourcing at some point. While there are other areas to consider, data protection and recovery, web design, and social media marketing are among the most essential ones. Outsourcing these tasks will allow you to focus on running the business, and it will likely relieve you of a little stress along the way.
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