Last Updated on Mar 12, 2020 by James W
For many Americans, “outsourcing??? is an evil word, but American companies know better. Outsourcing saves businesses money in all sorts of ways, which allows companies to give their valuable, American employees higher salaries and better benefits.
Additionally, contrary to popular belief, outsourcing doesn’t have to mean employing companies overseas; in fact, most outsourcing by American companies goes to other trustworthy, high-quality American companies. There are a variety of services American companies can outsource to save money and increase efficiency, and a wealth of true American companies to employ.
Payroll
If you have fewer than 50 employees, you can probably keep track of each of their paychecks. If you have more than 500 employees, you can probably afford a huge human resources department with a special payroll office to manage everyone’s pay and benefits. However, if you’re somewhere in between, it just isn’t economical to organize employee payroll in-house.
Payroll is an extremely delicate task that must be completed regularly, and any mistakes could bring your business to a halt. The small HR departments of medium-sized business would need to devote a significant portion of their time to ensure paychecks are distributed on time and in full every two weeks, preventing them from completing other duties. Additionally, any mistakes or delays in payroll taxes will be your company’s responsibility. In outsourcing the service, you gain experience and professionalism, so you can trust paychecks will go out right the first time — and if they don’t, someone else will fix it.
Recruiting
With the recent emphasis on the importance of workplace culture, it may seem odd to take the act of adding new workers away from department heads who know the workplace best. However, even if department heads understand how their office works, they definitely aren’t the experts in what their office needs. Outsourcing the recruiting process brings a professional, keen eye to a position’s candidate pool.
Professional recruiters can spot valuable qualities in resumes and interviews that the current employees in your workplace might not notice. Thus, you’ll acquire top-tier employees without taking productivity from your managers. Plus, you can usually find recruiters with similar goals to your company’s; for example, if you use a staffing agency in Kansas City, you’re using a local company to find local candidates.
IT Services
As easy as technology has made business, it sure can cause serious problems. Sometimes, computers crash, servers fail, and restarting just doesn’t resolve the situation. Unfortunately, these issues are virtually unpredictable, and keeping on a full-time IT professional to service the infrequent network error is unnecessarily costly.
Instead, you can keep costs down and actually increase the IT knowledge you have at hand by outsourcing IT to a service provider. Like a subscription, you’ll keep IT workers on retainer; whenever you have a technology failure, you can give them a call, and they’ll remedy the situation. Additionally, because IT is their full-time industry, you can trust that they are staying up-to-date on the latest tech news.
Marketing
For most of the 20th century, marketing was pretty standard: Print and television were really the only media companies could use to disseminate their name and message. Now it’s the 21st century, and print and television are old news. The Internet has opened myriad marketing paths for companies to follow (social media, blogs, Web design, search optimization, and more), making the practice confusing and difficult. Still, marketing is essential for any business’s survival; no one will buy your product or request your service if no one knows you exist.
Unsurprisingly, marketing agencies are exceedingly knowledgeable about marketing. Finding and attracting the right audience to your company is more difficult now — no regular employee has time to write and schedule so many social media posts — but marketing agencies understand the ins and outs of every available medium to get your company name out there. Marketing isn’t just a one-and-done activity, and it requires cultivation and dedication to produce any real results. Instead of putting in half of the effort and seeing none of the rewards, trust your marketing to an outside group who understands your market.
There are so many essential services companies can outsource. Those listed above are perhaps the most costly activities for small and medium-sized businesses to perform in-house, but there are plenty of other tricky or expensive activities taking up your employees’ precious time that could be done more efficiently and effectively by an outside vendor. Size up your internal activities and see what you can outsource to a professional local company today.
