Small Businesses Owners: Outsource These Tasks to Grow Your Business

Small business owners have hundreds of tasks on their to-do list at any given time. It’s impossible for anyone to tackle them all by themselves. Even if you are a super human and can take care of these tasks yourself the question still remains – should you? Are you better off spending time on tasks that are directly tied to your core business instead of the ones that can be taken care of by others? Based on interviews with number of small business owners and opinion of experts the answer is unequivocal YES. By focusing on core competency and letting others take care of non-essential ones you will be able to focus on and grow the business. So what tasks are better suited to delegate to others? Here are few that easily come to mind.

• IT support – Technology has become an essential part of every business. You simply cannot operate business without computers, network routers, storage, etc. Maintaining these IT systems is not something that anyone can do. You are better off finding a company that can provide support for IT systems rather than doing it yourself.
• Real Estate Maintenance – Maintaining a building is another job that not everyone is suited to do. There are any number of things that can go wrong with the building. Finding a company that can send the right handyman to take care of them is a better approach than having someone on your payroll all the time.
• Landscaping – This is another area where an external company can help. Whether you are looking at lawn care or shrub maintenance or tree trimming the landscaping company will have the right equipment and people to take care of them. Why have someone on the payroll?
• Accounting – This is one of the important functions any business has to perform. The problem is not every business owner is knowledgeable in this area. The result of doing something wrong, even unintentionally, can result in financial loss or even government inquiry. Hiring an expert accountant not only frees up your time to focus on core job, but also saves you from the trouble later on.

• Marketing – Marketing is a somewhat tricky task to outsource. On one hand you need to make sure marketing is aligned with your business and target customer. On the other hand, you don’t want to get bogged down on tactical marketing tasks. The best approach is to combine outsourcing with your in-house expertise. You should use internal expertise to figure out strategic marketing and seek help of external companies to take care of tactical items. By combining internal and external expertise you can get the best value from marketing.

As you can see not all tasks are suitable to outsource for small business owners, but by surgically looking at your day-to-day activities and outsourcing non-essential tasks you can focus on core competencies and grow your business.