4 Frequently Asked Questions About Outsourcing Answered

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Outsourcing|4 Frequently Asked Questions About Outsourcing AnsweredFor those who are not yet on board with the prospect of outsourcing, this Q and A post shall help to quell your concerns. Below are four commonly asked questions that are often asked by business owners about outsourcing. And accompanying them, the answers to help you decipher whether or not outsourcing of some kind is a good choice for your business.

What is outsourcing?

Outsourcing refers to business owners finding and paying talented professionals (such as freelancers) and companies to do the work they don’t have the time or expertise to do themselves.

Depending on the scale of your business, there are usually multiple activities you (and your team) need to complete to ensure the company runs smoothly. For example, an entrepreneur who plans to launch their startup will need to work through the below;

  • Create a business plan
  • Build a website
  • Craft a brand
  • Set up and manage social media pages
  • Create a marketing plan to entice new customers
  • Hire, employ and train staff
  • Record every expense, income, and outgoing to ensure you have all the necessary information ready to complete your tax return

Everyone has a limited amount of time and resources available to complete business tasks, therefore attempting to adopt multiple jobs at once and do them well is near impossible. As a solution, outsourcing is often the answer to entrepreneurs’ who are short on time.

Providing numerous opportunities to outsource all of the tasks mentioned above and more, you can, for instance, outsource a trusted business partner to take care of everything related to human resources, such as hiring employees and managing the payroll. Or hire a freelance social media manager to take care of all the business’s social channels such as Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin.

What services can I outsource?

Practically each and every area of your business you can think of can be outsourced. Here are a few of many examples;

  • Sales
  • Digital Marketing
  • Human Resources
  • IT services
  • Customer services

Can small businesses outsource work?

Of course, there’s no minimum amount of employees or turnover required to outsource services, but some freelancers, contractors, and services are better suited to smaller businesses than others; you just need to research and find out what works for you.

Is there a cost advantage?

Perhaps one of the most significant benefits of outsourcing is the amount of money your company can save. If your company has been affected by the pandemic, cutting costs is likely compulsory rather than a choice.

Delegating tasks to businesses outside of your own eliminates the costs associated with hiring employees to perform a specific role.

For example, hiring an in-house human resources team to take care of every aspect of interviews, employment, pensions, and healthcare is costly. Furthermore, you need to provide the same service to the human resources team you’ve hired too.

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. – Jessica Jackley, entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs can’t do it all. If you want to cut costs, save time, improve efficiency, and concentrate on the parts of your business, you are passionate about, delegate tasks to other professionals.

4 Ways To Lower Costs and Increase Your Business Revenue

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Businesses cost money to run. As the owner, you should be looking for ways to lower costs and save money as much as possible, without affecting your staff or production rates. There are many ways to lower your costs and the earlier you are in your business, the sooner you start saving money, the more you will have to re-invest in the future. So how can you lower costs efficiently and quickly? Here are 4 methods you can look into to help reduce the money your business is spending.

StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | 4 Ways To Lower Costs and Increase Your Business RevenueLowering production costs

Have you ever considered the price of a zip tie? How many do you use when building your products? If you lowered the amount in each one, how much would this save in the long run over thousands of products? Small incremental savings like this are the key to reducing your production costs through your business’s lifetime. Lowering production costs doesn’t have to be as ruthless as lowering staff numbers but by finding ways to save small amounts that add up in the long run. Automation and time-saving techniques are easier to implement. If you need to, consider other suppliers of your products to lower your outsourcing and production costs further.

Free-licence software

Many software suites now use an expensive subscription service that adds up quickly when you start to add multiple users. However, there are other options available to you. As users became tired of paying for expensive software, well developed, managed, and most importantly free, software exploded onto the market with alternatives to almost every major software suite. As a smaller business, it is within your best interests to become accustomed to what free software is out there for you. Do keep in mind though that you must consider compatibility issues between different pieces of software. Don’t waste time forcing a square peg into a round hole, when the paid-for software will do the job.

Go digital

Newer businesses have the luxury of being able to perform almost all of their admin digitally in the modern-day, with paper or hard copies rarely being required. With widespread software or mobile apps designed to provide you with paperless, digital alternatives to paper forms and documents. Going digital means you can cut out almost all of your paper documents which removes unnecessary storage and the costs associated. Yes, at some point you are going to have to print something, but if this is rare, you also save money on expensive printer maintenance costs as you only need something small to suit your need.

Speaking to financial professionals

Speaking to tax and accounting professionals is a great way to learn about what options are available to you. You may be surprised to find out where you are overspending and what your actual liabilities are in certain areas of your business. For example, in some cases, you may be able to look into a tax segregation report to cut tax liabilities across your premises. To learn more about cost segregation click here. Financial advice can cost. But the money you can potentially save makes the initial outlay small in comparison. Good professionals are worth it so invest your money into them wisely.

5 Ways Managers Can Prepare Their Businesses for the Peak Season

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | 5 Ways Managers Can Prepare Their Businesses for the Peak SeasonIf you are a business owner or even the manager of a business, the looming peak-season can be daunting no matter what industry you work in, retail, to hospitality, to manufacturing. You will want to find the best strategies to prepare for your peak trading times and implement them while you are quiet. Perhaps you are considering how to bring your customers back once the current restrictions have been lifted. Here are a few ideas to help get you ready for the next big season.

Conduct Repairs and Essential Maintenance

The first step that you should take is to inspect your site, including all public spaces, electrical equipment, and fixtures, to ensure that they have not sustained any damage. If you find an issue, you must act quickly and conduct a risk assessment and arrange for repairs to ensure that your premises are compliant with health and safety regulations. You should find ways to conduct repairs and essential maintenance as soon as possible in the quieter periods. For instance, for those in the hotel or theme park industry, they may take this lull to conduct commercial pool renovations, such as resurfacing or installing a new filter.

Scale Up Your Marketing Campaigns

Now is the best time to revise your marketing campaigns. How can you attract new customers and spread word about your business in preparation for the peak of summer? You should check that your website is prepared for a higher amount of traffic, and ensure that your contact information is easy to find. Have you considered SEO and PPC advertising to help customers who are looking for businesses like yours? Perhaps you can find the time to evaluate your budget to incorporate this.

Review Your Rates

While you are quiet, you can take the time to review your rates and your pricing structure. Are your prices still competitive against your rivals? If you cannot answer ‘yes’ for certain, take time to have a look around and see what you can update, perhaps setting up promotions alongside your revised marketing campaigns is a viable option? Nearly everyone will appreciate an incentive such as a discount code, or a special sale, it will help to bring people to you ahead of the peak season.

Review Your Employment Strategy

Do you have enough employees for your business? Perhaps with recent events, you have had to lay staff off. Are the ones who are left skilled enough to cope with the busier periods, or would you benefit from hiring a few extra hands temporarily? Do you have an effective training plan for your team to ensure that they can handle the demands that the job and customers may make? If not, now is the best time to think about how you can help them.

Review Data from Past Seasons

One of the best ways that you can prepare your business for the upcoming season is to review the data from previous seasons by tracking the critical metrics of every business, such as sales, website traffic, and customer numbers. This will enable you to effectively predict how your business will fare.

With these five helpful tips, hopefully you have gained some ideas on how to prepare yourself and your team for the upcoming summer season. Good luck!

Tips to Improve Efficiency and Quality in Pharmaceutical Businesses

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Improve Efficiency|Tips to Improve Efficiency and Quality in Pharmaceutical BusinessesTo remain relevant and record notable growth in the pharmaceutical industry, companies need to make productivity enhancement a priority. But what does this entail? well, driving productivity in a pharmaceutical company involves seeking more efficient processes, equipment, and recruitment strategies.

More so, it is advisable that pharmaceutical companies keep track of the Standard Operating Procedures relevant to their industry and consistently match their current processes to what is expected. This will ultimately enable them to measure and know how much improvement is needed to maintain the standard. In this article, we’ll be looking at four ways to improve your pharmaceutical business’ efficiency and quality.

1. Evaluate Processes

The benefit of evaluating your processes lies in identifying and analyzing key areas in your company that need improvement. In manufacturing, this is referred to as identifying your pain points. For instance, you simply need to take a look at the flow chart of responsibilities in each department and ensure employees are aware of what is expected of them to operate at a high standard.

A good way to start this is through the implementation of process mapping. In a nutshell, this enables you to execute improvements in your process which will, in turn, improve your overall quality and efficiency.

2. Schedule Maintenance

Since a lot of things are subject to wear and tear, your equipment should be routinely checked. Go over their warranty timeframes, evaluate the equipment, and schedule maintenance in the areas it’s needed.

If you notice that any equipment needs a replacement, make sure you carry out extensive research before buying new specimens and SMC products for pharmaceuticals. This can undoubtedly be quite complicated and costly and the implication of buying the wrong one can affect your business for quite some time. In this vein, you should consider purchasing equipment with energy-saving capabilities.

3. Invest in Employee Training

It is no secret that one of the greatest assets a business can have is the people so, ensure that your employees are knowledgeable by providing training programs that educate them on processes, safety, and quality sustenance in terms of production. One important thing to note here is that, whenever the FDA carries out an inspection, they often look at the training programs offered to employees as well as quality standards to ensure that each Standard of Operation Procedure is in accordance with their guidelines.

In the case that it’s not, they may issue a warning letter or a form 483. Based on this, it is important to stay consistent when it comes to employee development programs because its a sure way to set your business up for success.

4. Promote Team Work

It takes the pooled effort from different departments working together to manufacture products and keep a business running. As such, it is imperative that strong communication across departments and between employees is maintained for a steady workflow and to build team spirit.

A good way to encourage teamwork is by incorporating team-building exercises and acknowledging good performance. This will help to boost employee morale, and high morale amongst employees does not only encourage them to perform better but it also boosts performance and brings success to the business.

Managing a Dropshipping Business Requires a Few Tricks of Its Own

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | Managing a Dropshipping Business Requires a Few Tricks of Its OwnMost people reading this probably has a decent idea regarding how profitable and hassle-free dropshipping can be as a business model, which is undeniably true. However, as it is with any type of business model, there are a few tricks to it that a shrewd businessperson needs to be well aware of if they hope to make it all work in perfect synchronization.

Evaluation of Supply/Manufacturing Partners

The whole idea of dropshipping being a profitable, hassle-free business model depends on the assurance that you have a reliable and diligent supply/manufacturing partner. Therefore, it is critical that you evaluate the companies properly, before partnering up with them. The following tips could help in getting it right.

  • Order product samples to first check the quality
  • Check their history with previous partners
  • Look closely at the company policies regarding shipping timelines and how strict they are with maintaining them
  • Go for a “loose” or trial contract for 3 – 6 months to know if they are indeed true professionals

Those that end up with long partnerships with the wrong supply partner are likely to lose business credibility, reputation, and money. Every time their supply partner makes a mistake or does not bother to conforming to the dropshipping business’s standards, it’s their brand in front of the customers that lose out in every department.

Understand that Your eCommerce Website is the Only Asset You Own and Act Accordingly

Your dropshipping site is the only business asset you own and need to manage. Due to the nature of the business model, a website is also pretty much all you should need to commence with a dropshipping business.

On the other hand, if you end up with an unreliable host or build your site on a poor eCommerce platform, the whole business will suffer. High downtime, unscalable and overly expensive plans, a lack of sufficient automation features, extra charges for even basic tools, hidden costs, insecure and buggy platform design, etc. can all add up to the failure of your dropshipping venture.

In short, pay special attention to the host, platform, and web design because they are essentially what represents the whole business. To ensure customer security and assurance, go through the PCI Compliance details here to make sure you are not unwittingly breaking any of the set standards.

Devise a Strict and Penalizing Contract

Some companies in the supply chain are pros who would not let their partners down because they know it’s bad for business in general. Not everyone is so professional and practical, unfortunately, so you will need to have a strict and penalizing contract so that there are repercussions if your business’s standards are broken by your supply partner. Consult with a business law firm to draw up the contract and if it is fair, as well as strict, chances are that your dropshipping business standards will be respected by your supply partner.

There are other measures that you can take to further boost your chances of success in the dropshipping segment, but these are by far the most important ones to take care of. So, pay attention to the basics first and the rest you will learn about in time.