If you’re like most small-business owners across the country, you probably find that you end up working seven days a week, don’t take many holidays, and feel stressed and overworked most of the time. You likely also struggle to grow your enterprise as much as you’d like, or as quickly as you wish to.
If this is the case, don’t despair. It is possible to get more balance in your life while also growing your business. How to do that? Don’t be afraid to delegate to others. If you don’t have any employees, you’ll still find plenty of service providers and software solutions that can manage regular jobs for you at an affordable price. Read on for three of the key business areas which you can outsource work from today.
1. Marketing
One of the key elements in making any business a success is marketing, no matter the industry your venture is in, or what products or services you sell. However, for many owners, trying to find the amount of time that needs to be spent on marketing, in addition to learning all the best practices in this area, can be a huge challenge.
That’s where outsourcing can come in very handy. Be aware that you don’t have to outsource every part of your marketing campaigns straight away. You can start small, and delegate just one area at a time.
As an example, content is a particularly essential part of marketing these days, both online and offline. You need to put fresh new content on your website regularly to help with search engine optimization rankings (that is, where your site comes up on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines); plus you need to post often on social media sites to build up your following of potential customers.
The right kind of content is also key when it comes to producing effective e-newsletters, promotional flyers, product descriptions, press releases, advertisements, e-books, and more. If you struggle to string a sentence together or to come up with content that actually gets results, consider hiring a professional writer to help you. There are lots of great corporate wordsmiths you can choose from who specialize in creating content that builds brand presence, increases leads, drives conversions, and boosts repeat sales.
You can also utilize great apps to help you save time on your marketing. For example, Hootsuite is a popular dashboard application that puts all of your social media into one place, and makes it quicker and easier to manage. Through Hootsuite you can do things such as schedule posts in advance, and duplicate content across different networking sites so you don’t have to upload everything one by one.
You’ll also find apps that save you time when it comes to building relationships with important people in your industry and ramping up your number of followers (e.g. Notifier); and software that simplifies the process of creating and analyzing buzz-worthy graphics for social media sites (e.g. Pablo 2.0).
2. Accounting and Finance
For many entrepreneurs, handling tasks related to business accounting and finances is daunting, stressful, challenging, and time consuming. Luckily though, there are plenty of ways that you can get help in this area.
For starters, it pays to utilize technology to streamline processes. You will find that many popular accounting programs, like Freshbooks and Xero, now have functionality that automates many tasks. They can quickly and easily generate and send out bills to your customers, as well as be set up to automatically send reminders as soon as invoices go past their due dates.
In addition, many of these programs can be linked to your business bank accounts and credit card accounts. From there, the software can handle many time-consuming tasks for you, such as generating reports, coding expenses and incoming payments, compiling expense claims, storing receipts, and much more.
Many comprehensive systems can also streamline payroll functions. Once you have inputted the details of your staff members into programs, they can be set up to automatically create and send paychecks out each period, as well as relevant tax-related documents.
If you would prefer to not have to ever stress about employee payments, benefits, classifications, training and the like, you should consider outsourcing to a PEO services firm. These companies can handle all aspects of HR and payroll for you, usually at a very affordable price.
3. Administration
Lastly, as an entrepreneur you probably find that you get inundated with administration tasks every week, and that these jobs end up taking up way too much of your time. If this is the case, it’s a good idea to outsource some of your admin work to a virtual assistant (VA).
Do some research on these types of workers and you’ll soon see that you can hire people to handle jobs by the hour, the day, or per project. This means that you can work to your budget, as well as your specific needs at the time.
VAs can be hired to look after a wide variety of tasks, such as creating and maintaining databases; handling emails and other correspondence; managing calendars, appointments and travel arrangements; conducting research; putting together presentations; and pretty much completing any other administration job you can think of that can be done remotely.
