If you want to start making more in your local business while having more time off, it’s crucial to outsource, delegate, and systematize different parts of your business. Let’s face it, it takes a lot to make your local business a Local Client Attraction, but even more so if you’re doing it all on your own.
Back in the day when I had my local business, I served Canadian local business entrepreneurs with outsourcing services in accounting and payroll. It was a task within a business that was critical to ensure all employees where paid on time and their paycheques met all government regulatory deductions.
It was also a very important task within a local business that could create a job for someone. But was that a position that a company would want to create within? There where so many consulting companies that provided such a service that it would seem more economical to hire them vs creating a position within. Why? Well for several very important reasons. Costs and government legislative updates.
Whether I was marketing or selling my services, I always presented to prospects the difference between creating a position in-house vs outsourcing. And in most cases the outsourcing won by far. Extremely lower labour costs and time, lower hardware and software costs, reduced frustration and overwhelm with ongoing and up-to-date training to meet government legislation rules, eliminated implementing banking regulatory processes for direct deposit and not to mention the accounting journals where professionally created that balancing was never an issue.
There is no doubt that working in-house costs time and money and the overuse of business resources stretches their effectiveness to breaking point. But when is working in-house vs outsourcing effective?
As a business, you juggle at lot of balls in the air at any given time. The more you grow, the more there is to contend with. And hiring more staff isn’t always the answer. For some, this is where outsourcing steps in and in this new 21st century economy, outsourcing is much needed today than ever before as much of our tasks these days depend on digital mediums especially when it comes to marketing and advertising.
Much like the owner of a law practice or chiropractor clinic the entrepreneur is dedicated to a specific area of expertise. Outsource firms are also dedicated to their area of expertise, like social media marketing or call centres. But how do you decide when to outsource and when you should keep the work in-house?
Save Money
The whole purpose of your business is to generate revenue, and when you have to spend a large portion of that to keep the ball rolling, it might be time to explore cheaper alternatives.
It’s always nice to create jobs but by creating positions in-house can be costly to set up and maintain for many businesses. But by outsourcing an online digital marketing team, they help keep your brand alive 24/7 and you get a rhythm and system going. Even major media outlets – like HBO – outsource their social media outreach. If it’s cheaper, then consider keeping your costs down by outsourcing.
Save Time
Some tasks just take up way too much time, whether you’re in a small or large local business. Secretarial duties or customer service can eat up an entire day if you’re self-employed, while adding new departments in your business can tie up even a lot of time from executives who oversee their operational systems.
Outsourcing tasks will give time back to various in-house positions and allow much more focus on the other tasks that contribute better to the bottom line growth of the business. While even the minutest operational detail can have a domino effect on the flow of work, if you can afford it and have trustworthy and capable outsourcing resources, outsourcing smaller tasks is a great way to streamline your business’s efforts and save time.
Save Resources
Working in-house costs money and the overuse of business resources in this capacity can stretch the effectiveness to a breaking point. Whether it is your equipment, offices, supplies, qualified employees, added government costs such as CPP, EI, WCB etc., all of these things are being used, limiting your overall productivity and taking a huge chunk from profits. Outsourcing will free up all these “high burden” resources affecting the productivity process within your local business positively.
Keep Your Valuable Employee
Outsourcing work will mean replacing employees. It is an unfortunate reality for any employee that their position may not last forever. You may consider the human element before outsourcing but at the end of the day you may have to decide to outsource to increase profits.
I always asked this question to myself when I needed to create a new task or sharpened my bottom line. “Which position would be better effective for my business – outsourcing vs in-house? The bottom line is king! Will the fact of having more internal control and taking the costs from profits benefit my business. And which staff will it affected and can I afford to lose them?” Another question you may want to ask yourself is, “Do you have any valuable team players who are worth more than their salary?” It might be worth keeping their work in-house for the time being.
Outsourcing can be great for business, but it may mean you have less control over the work being done. If the work is essential to your business, then you might prefer to keep it in-house, where you have more control.
But overall outsourcing vs in-house will always primarily come down to three decision breakers: costs and profits, internal control, and expertise.
Keep Your Money
There is no doubt that outsourcing vs in-house processes can save time and money. But there are times that outsourcing may not be cheaper. Be careful that you don’t get so excited about the time, money and resources you will save, that you forget to measure the risks and hidden costs. Sometimes they are not immediately apparent, so be sure to think it through.
It might be cheaper to outsource one department while productivity is reduced in others, now that inter-department communication is more difficult. Small changes can have big effects, so be sure that the benefits outweigh the costs.
As we are now in the 21st century of the informational and digital age, you may want to re-evaluate or merely do some restructuring of work-flow processes within your local business. Online digital marketing and advertising is essential to any growth of business these days so you may want to consider outsourcing these tasks as it will keep your brand alive where consumers are hanging out.
However, from speaking with hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs over the last couple of years, the biggest reason why they procrastinate and not pull the trigger with outsourcing for digital marketing and advertising, is because they really don’t have a clue what tasks they would outsource in this new digital age! Many local businesses are still using so many older methods and if they just embraced the current (digital) methods, it can no doubt save money.
Keep Your Priorities Straight
Digital marketing is important for all local businesses these days. It is certainly the catalyst that will spear business growth. Does your entire business’s survival depend on older style of tasks still? If so you may want to take a look at outsourcing some tasks to get your local business rolling online.
Tasks an Online Digital Marketing Manager provides:
1. Email Management/NewsLetter
2. Setting up Autoresponders (Aweber)
3. Following up with clients/customers (sending thank you and happy birthday emails)
4. Call Tracking (responsive calls)
5. Client database building (eg. updating email or contact lists on your CRM)
6. Video Management
7. SMS/Texting campaigns and management
8. Transcription (transcribing voicemail, video or audio, podcasts etc.)
9. Blogging
10. Creating and blending offline/online marketing and advertising systems
11. Set-up, maintain and manage Social Media Accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube)
12. Creating devising strategies to drive online traffic to company’s local business or website
13. Manage your Blog (Basic WordPress Skills)
14. Tracking conversion rates and making improvements to the website.21. Publish posts on your Blog (content you provided)
15. Utilizing a range of techniques including paid search, SEO and PPC.
16. Utilizing a range of techniques for advertising on various citation sites.
17. Developing and managing digital marketing campaigns
18. Blog commenting and creation (to increase links to your site)
19. Overseeing the social media strategy for the company.
20. Managing online brand and product campaigns to raise brand awareness.
21. Managing the redesign of the company website in today’s 21st century
22. Improving the usability, design, content and conversion of the company website
23. Responsibility for planning and budgetary control of all digital marketing
24. Evaluating customer research, market conditions and competitor data.
25. Review new technologies and keep the company at the forefront of developments in digital marketing.
26. Create, generate leads in all aspects of mediums online
27. Create, manage PPC, SEO, SEM and Affiliate programmes.
28. Create and manage strong understanding of current online marketing concepts, strategy and best practice.
29. Manage e-commerce, SEO, PPC, Email marketing, and social media.
30. Manage company’s reputation online across all mediums
31. Create and manage QR code strategies and tactics
Your Local Client Attraction Assignment
Based on some tasks listed above , take out a pad of paper and make a list of specific things in your business that you could outsource or delegate to someone else:
• Stuff you’re not good at.
• Stuff you don’t know how to do.
• Stuff you don’t have time to do.
• Stuff someone ELSE will be better at.
• Anything outside of your brilliance/genius
Make another list of your strengths and then one of your weaknesses (it’s OK, we all have ‘em). Begin to focus on delegating your weaknesses and anything that’s not Local Client Attraction and client work. You’ll begin to see a MAJOR difference in your revenues, often as early as within a couple of weeks. When you see more money coming in, you’ll want to outsource ALL you can and it’ll become a game really worth playing. You make more, play more. Everyone wins. This is one of the many secret sauces that online business entrepreneurs do that make them so much money online. And you have the same too!
That said, you may be wondering WHERE to begin finding people to outsource to so you can make Local Client Attraction a priority and market your business in a way that’ll give you the most returns with little effort on your part. Follow a step-by-step system that feels easy and authentic to you. The Local Entrepreneur Academy™ gives you the most important things to do to set up simple, solid systems, so that you consistently fill your pipeline and continually get new clients. It’s all step-by-step, nice and easy 20 min. “coffee break” videos and resources….not a big mishmash of things. So, you do step one of the system, and when you’re done with that, you move on to step two, and so on. All the tools, scripts, templates, and examples are handed to you on a silver platter. Easy. If you have a singular location you can get it at Local Entrepreneur Academy. If you have a multi location brick and mortar business you can get it here.
Great Reading Resource:
Chris Ducker’s New Released Book – The best amongst the online business entrepreneurs. I would recommend this read for local business owners. When Chris launched this book a few months ago I certainly took him up on his offer to purchase five copies. I am now only down to one as I have given the rest away.
Wonderful read!
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Cheryl is an Online Digital Marketing specialist for local business. She specializes in working with car dealerships, real estate and medical professionals. She has over 25 yrs experience as a successful local business owner and in 2010 she started speaking and mentoring local business entrepreneurs with her own products, programs and consultations to increase sales and clients with technology advancements in the “new economy”. Book your FREE 15 minute complimentary assessment today at http://meetme.so/CherylLynn
If you are interested in having Cheryl speak are your next event please click on the following link to learn more: http://www.cheryllynninternational.com/speaking