When businesses start out or take steps towards scaling, they inevitably encounter some growing pains. These typically involve an increased workload along with increased complexity given their new, larger scope.
During this critical time, businesses can hedge their risk while attaining the professional agility needed to respond to the unexpected by outsourcing much of their expert labor needs. Outsourcing experts, like IT support, can provide these companies with nimble, easily mobilized resources along with the following benefits:
No Hiring Risk
The biggest expense for most businesses is labor. While outsourcing contracts still essentially pay for labor, they represent a much smaller, shorter-term investment compared to onboarding an employee. Companies are also able to customize their service offerings in response to fluctuating needs.
For example, a small company of five employees wants to expand their services to goods distributors in the region. They are now going to need someone to run numbers on all of these extra accounts. They could hire an accounting team, but what if it turns out that they need a different type of accounting knowledge than they expected? Also, what happens if the venture fails? They would need to fire several employees they just took on, meaning money is lost in training and also through any applicable severances.
Outsourcing eliminates the need for both training and the need to commit to a single set of labor resources. Companies can adjust their outsourced staffing levels according to changes in their immediate needs, including the need to back out of a venture as they start to lose money.
More Flexible Capabilities
More so than concerns about hiring and firing new staff, businesses may face issues when it comes to getting the right type of expertise they need. The team they thought they wanted at first may become obsolete in several months’ time as the business discovers more about their new market or new program.
IT support provides an excellent example. A company that intends to double its resources may purchase several dozen on-site servers as well as new networking technologies. Since no one in the company knows how to operate the new tech yet, the company may hire people with basic knowledge of networking, databases, any applications used and all common user-level troubleshooting concerns.
However, that company may quickly attain competency for those new systems. Therefore, fewer and fewer users are having problems that IT needs to respond to. In the meantime, back-end concerns reveal that all incoming data has become hopelessly disorganized. In this moment, the business realizes they should have hired IT staff with data expertise rather than general networking and end-user troubleshooting knowledge.
If that company happened to hire permanent IT staff, they will now need to let half of them go and onboard a few with extensive knowledge of data architecture. Or, they could have simply outsourced basic-knowledge IT staff as needed and then brought in the heavy guns as more severe problems emerged. Outsourcing thus allows organizations to be agile and adjust to issues as they occur rather than taking several weeks to sort HR concerns out.
Outsourcing Experts Means Less Fixed Labor Costs
Worker’s compensation, unemployment insurance, SS contributions, healthcare — line items like these add up quickly for every employee. When outsourcing, these costs are either baked into service fees or negated entirely.
For this reason as well as the others listed above, outsourcing your IT department or other expert areas can lower costs and make your company more nimble while allowing it to focus on what it has done best from the outset.
You can learn more about the benefits of outsourcing IT by reading our services page and then contacting us today.