Establishing and running a small online business is a costly and time-consuming exercise. With all the different aspects of keeping it afloat and making sales to consider, it is important to embrace outsourcing to relieve the pressure and financial strain that trying to do everything yourself, or the expense of employing people full time, can bring. Below are a few areas where small businesses can cut costs and stress by bringing in outside expertise, without sacrificing quality.

IT Support

IT support is a business function that is either rushed off its feet or twiddling its thumbs. By outsourcing to freelancers or a specialist company, your business will save money on wages, as well as the space required to facilitate them and the equipment. If you have just a few computers and you are somewhat technology confident, then your need for an IT professional beyond the more complicated planning and infrastructure tasks, is probably close to nil. It is more cost-effective to bring in an expert when you have a major project to work on, such as implementing a new online payment gateway, or in an emergency of something goes drastically wrong.

People

Freelancing is becoming more and more popular among the workforce, not least because businesses are seeing the value of temporary staff. Using freelancers has a number of benefits:

1. When there is less work to do you don’t need to pay wages
2. They can work from home, which eliminates the need for a larger office space
3. Your business can bring in talent it couldn’t afford on a full-time permanent basis
4. You can try several different freelancers before settling on the ones that understand your business and brand

Marketing and advertising

Unless your business is marketing and advertising, then you probably aren’t an expert at it. Outsourcing to a specialist company can save you time and a costly learning curve, while ensuring your marketing campaign is professional and effective. The sheer number of channels and platforms on which businesses can sell products and promote themselves means that attempting to effectively cover every aspect is not feasible for small businesses. Rather than simply ignore certain channels, outsourcing gives you an expert marketing department at a fraction of the cost that having it in-house would incur.

Delegation is the key to success

For a business to grow and flourish it is important that you know when to let go and use the knowledge of an expert. The role of a business owner should be more overarching and getting stuck in the details will often result in some things being missed or neglected. By coordinating a combination of fulltime staff, freelancers, and specialist companies to take care of certain functions, you can maintain a successful business without excessive overheads.