The last weeks for many companies and start-ups have been a clear sign that they need to invest more in the network presence, find new ways to reach customers and ways to survive the protracted lockdown. How to reconcile investments with the need to save and reduce company costs?
The solution for both large companies as well as for micro enterprises and self-employed is outsourcing.
What is outsourcing?
The definition of outsourcing is simple: it separates some functions or tasks in a company and delegates them to others.
With this solution, the company or its departments can focus on what is their most important goal. In practice, this means not only a better use of employee capabilities, but also savings on training and introducing employees to new responsibilities.
Let’s consider this on a simple example: your company has not been present on social media so far and you want to make up for it. So you can outsource your profile creation, content creation and promotion to your marketing department. This will involve training employees, longer order processing time and an inevitable stage of learning from one’s own mistakes.
You can also outsource the care of social media to a freelancer or company who specialize in their use and have both relevant knowledge and experience. This solution saves you time and resources, but also provides a higher level of service than the one achieved by an employee with other competences, hastily “trained” to new responsibilities.
If you don’t work with a marketing specialist and you feel that you need it to work better as a company, opening a job and bearing employment costs may be beyond your budget.
In this situation, outsourcing also turns out to be a good solution. You don’t have to learn the secrets of social media from scratch. The time saved in this way, you can spend on what is the goal of your business and what you are good at, by outsourcing social media marketing to a freelance specialist.
Worldwide outsourcing has been present since the 1980s. The current economic situation may cause that entrepreneurs will also start to outsource those jobs that previously required to open a full-time job.
What are the types of outsourcing?
Outsourcing can be divided in terms of:
- places of delegation
- the level of delegation of tasks
Thus, according to the place of delegation, you can outsource work to an external company with whom you sign the appropriate contract (contract outsourcing) or a daughter company (capital outsourcing) separated from your company.
You can also delegate tasks to varying degrees. Here we distinguish full outsourcing, which means that you delegate specific works entirely to an external entity, and selective outsourcing, in which you outsource only part of the activities from a specific area.
So you can outsource comprehensive care over company profiles in social media (full outsourcing) or have individual work done – e.g. graphics on social media – while a dedicated employee takes care of the sphere related to content, its publication and content management (selective outsourcing).
Outsourcing: what types of work can you outsource?
Until recently, outsourcing was associated mainly with accounting and logistics. The scope of work you can outsource, however, is much wider – from outsourcing of individual services to employee outsourcing.
This flexibility is the biggest advantage of outsourcing. You can outsource almost any order without signing expensive contracts and organizing a new job. What’s more, thanks to the option of accounting for individuals on a VAT invoice that Useme.com gives you are no longer limited to choosing contractors only from among companies.
One of the most frequently chosen services is IT outsourcing. This is the solution chosen by those companies that do not need full programming care, but only specific tasks, e.g. building a website in one of the popular technologies or setting up an online store.
You can also outsource work in such areas as graphics, webdesign, animation and video, copywriting, translation and SEO, and so all those works that require specialized competence and knowledge.
Outsourcing for business: to whom and why it pays off?
Traditionally, outsourcing is associated with large companies, for which it is profitable to outsource work instead of using the skills of employees.
Meanwhile, outsourcing can also be a salvation for small and medium-sized enterprises, micro-enterprises and self-employed, i.e. those entrepreneurs who cannot afford or do not need to open a job and recruit an employee.
This solution is particularly profitable right now, when entire sectors of the economy are affected by a decrease in turnover and loss of customers. Thus, outsourcing becomes the golden mean between optimizing employer costs related to employment and investments necessary to maintain its position on the market.
Outsourcing for business: summary
Outsourcing, i.e. outsourcing of work to external companies or freelancers, is gaining popularity among entrepreneurs around the world – it allows you to optimize company costs. At the same time, it provides services at a level difficult to achieve for a full-time employee who may lack specialist knowledge and experience.
You can outsource both individual jobs and entire tasks, usually associated with opening a new job in the company. The subject of the order depends only on your needs: it can be any job from IT to accounting.
Contrary to appearances, outsourcing is not just a solution for large companies. It will also benefit small and medium-sized enterprises, micro-enterprises and self-employed freelancers who are looking for immediate help in running their business. Thanks to commissioning services, they can focus on achieving the company’s goals, leaving additional work to the specialist.
Outsourcing does not require complicated legal solutions. Thanks to Useme.com, you don’t have to limit yourself to outsourcing work to companies with whom settling is easier. On the website, you can also order and settle jobs for natural persons, collecting a VAT invoice for services rendered.
