By: Rinika Paul

Why should early-stage Startups outsource services?

The budding entrepreneurs with the enthusiasm of being a part of the next big thing give birth to many Startups. Starting a business is a lot harder than you think with a lot of challenges on the road. From the backseat, everything seems fine but when you’re driving, you realize how much effort it takes to prepare the company strategy, plan the product development, build a prototype, raise money, and hire the right talents to make it all happen. Rarely is a business so in tune with its niche that it grows with the flow. Most of our business books focus on the success stories of entrepreneurs. But the harsh way of success is always the Failure and Struggle stories. Listing down some of the struggles startups face, let us figure out how we can make things better.
Starting a business from scratch is an off-road adventure by itself. A business involves many things apart from just investing money and coming up with a plan and then operating. For it to sustain, reliable people and all other things are necessary to bring the business up the ladder. It needs a workforce to work on areas like operations, marketing, sales, and human resources that involve lots of paperwork. Most of the time workforce spend up time strategizing and documenting than concentrating on the deliverables. Hiring a workforce to develop different domains may lead to additional cost for a startup, and times these employees are only required for few months during the development stage.

Outsourcing is Necessary

Does your startup needs help in certain areas of your business, but doesn’t have the money to hire for these positions in-house just yet? Employees in a startup indeed do multitasking. Now you reached the point where the quality of work starts tapering off because people are performing tasks that they are not qualified to perform. This is when you know it’s the right time to look into “Outsourcing”.

In simple words, outsourcing is the practice of getting certain operations done outside a company. It is a contract agreed by two parties, the business owner and the outsourcing provider, where the business owner gives specific tasks to the outsourcing service provider for a specific period. In exchange for the services, the business owner can either pay the service provider or offer other services, depending on the agreement. At the end of the day, outsourcing is just another business strategy. Especially for those that are not yet financially capable of hiring and keeping an in-house employee, outsourcing provides great alternatives for cheaper costs.

Why Do Companies Outsource?

Being able to effectively outsource certain roles and administrative processes can create great advantages for startups and small businesses. There are a lot of explanations as to why a business might opt to outsource specific business purposes. A few of the most frequent reasons include:
 
  • Decreasing and controlling operational costs
  • Improving business concentrate
  • High Expertise
  • To stay ahead in the competition
  • Freeing inner funds for other functions
  • Focus on core processes
  • Streamlining or raising efficacy for time-consuming purposes
  • Maximizing utilization of outside sources
Now that you are crystal clear about why startups usually outsource certain services, knowing what to outsource and what not to makes an impact.

Every business is unique in its own way, but there are essential processes that every startup needs to outsource. Perform a detailed analysis of your organization and identify what tasks make the most sense for you to outsource. I will list down some general processes that need to be outsourced.
1.Data Management :- One of the most common business processes that can easily be outsourced. It takes a lot of time to enter and manage data. You need specially-trained data entry professionals to efficiently sift through, sort, and analyze the data. This is a time-consuming process that might shift you focus from the actual goal.

2.Digitization Services :- In this digital age, an online presence of your business is an important factor to gain the trust of the customer. 97% of customers use web to search for local businesses and the services they offer.

Website is the face of a company. The moment you hear about any startup the first thing you google is the website of the company. Marketing your brand on your website, social media accounts, and other digital channels can save you a lot of marketing rupees. Digital marketing involves a lot of serious content creation to establishing the brand online. Outsourcing your digital marketing services will save your company a lot of time and money and you will get creative result. Outsourcing Digitization and Content Creators will help you stand out from others.

Once excellent solution in “Invincix” a software engineering and product development firm focused on quality and usable engineering developments that meets expectations of the customer. They are specialized in end-to-end enterprise product and application development, mobile application development, data analytics, and cloud independent deployment.

3.Human Resources and Payroll :- Hiring top talents is considered one of the most time-consuming challenges of early-stage startups. Employee retention problems, lengthy and expensive recruitment cycles, difficulties in the proper evaluation of technical skills, paperwork and their onboarding, best solution is to outsource. If you run a smaller startup, HR software for small businesses has become really affordable and can help a single person or small team to efficiently manage your HR records and processes.

4.UI/UX Design :- As a founder, you don’t have to bother about the pixel-perfect designs at all. Outsourcing agencies bring UX and UI designers on board and make sure that both the visual and coding specialists work together to create a unique profile.

Outsourcing has been a long practice for most companies, but the onset of the Internet has allowed it to bloom and become bigger as the years go by. If you want to be on the advantage when it comes to your business, finding the right outsourcing company who can provide you with extra help is the perfect idea.