We get it. When you’re a small business owner, you want to be careful about where you spend your hard-earned money. After all, isn’t it best to keep investing directly in your business if you want it to grow?
While it’s certainly a good idea to keep investing profits into the business, it turns out that investing in external help from a business process outsourcing (BPO) company is also a smart way to help your company grow. Here are four ways BPO can help maximize your operations.
1. BPO Lets You Focus on What You Do Best
It’s true that companies need to pay attention to payroll, IT, and other administrative matters in order to survive. But to thrive, companies need to focus as much as possible on creating products and services that perfectly align with their target market.
For small business owners, this means that there’s always a need to balance competing priorities. With limited staff and a limited budget, should you focus your resources on providing the best customer experience possible? Or should you pull away staff to make sure you file your taxes on time?
You could always ask your employees to do more, but that’s a recipe for burnout and failure, especially when you’re asking employees to do something outside their expertise or job description.
Working with a BPO is the ultimate way to have your cake and eat it too. Instead of worrying about who can take care of the administrative tasks of the day, you can dedicate your employees’ time and attention to providing stellar products, services, and customer experiences. The BPO can handle the rest.
2. BPO Helps Lower Costs
Part of being a great workplace leader is making the most out of limited resources. And as any small business owner knows, money is often the limiting factor in any strategy or decision.
How much does it cost to hire a full-time employee? In addition to salary, how much does a new employee cost in benefits, vacation, sick time, and payroll taxes? What’s the value of the time you need to dedicate to hiring, training, and supervising a new employee?
Most importantly, what will you do when your new employee takes a vacation or is unexpectedly sick? What happens if they quit unexpectedly? If there’s no one else who knows how to process payroll or troubleshoot your sales database system, how much would it cost to hire an emergency temp?
The cost of bringing on a new employee is much more than just their starting salary. There’s real risk involved, especially when you’re hiring a specialist with a unique skillset.
Working with a BPO company is a great way to manage the risk and cost of a specialty hire. Most BPOs charge a flat subscription fee in addition to a smaller per-employee or per-use fee, depending on the service you need. But whatever you pay the BPO company, you can be sure that the money is going toward the actual service — not training, sick days, or other overhead costs.
And when your usual BPO account manager isn’t in the office, you don’t have to worry. The BPO company will handle the responsibility of finding someone to work with you in the meantime.
With the money that you save from BPO, you’ll be able to invest more into your business and grow more quickly.
3. BPO Helps Boost Workplace Productivity
Being part of a small business means wearing multiple hats. As the boss, you’ll need to stay on top of human resource (HR) matters, team management, financial tasks, and your own leadership development — not to mention your core business. Meanwhile, your employees may need to shift roles, perhaps between customer service and administrative tasks like data entry or bookkeeping.
With so much to do in so little time, it’s natural to master the art of multitasking just to keep the business afloat. But research shows that we’re not as good as we think we are when it comes to getting a lot done at once. In fact, there’s really no such thing as true multitasking. When we try to do two (or more) things at once, our brains are quickly shifting attention from one task to the next. As a result, it’s more difficult to filter out distractions. There’s also a slowdown from task switch costs — the mental effort that comes from constantly switching between different things.
Multitasking also has a negative effect on the brain’s executive functions — the parts that help us decide when, how, and in what order to perform tasks. Multitaskers are also more likely to make mistakes.
In other words, multitasking makes it harder to set effective goals and do a good job at work. If you and your employees are at the point where multitasking is becoming the norm, BPO is a great way to relieve some of the workload. You’ll likely find that the financial investment will pay for itself in higher productivity and faster growth for your business.
4. BPO Lets You Surround Yourself with Experts
On the one hand, every business owner wants the best people possible working for them. As entrepreneur and record executive Russell Simmons put it, “Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you.”
On the other hand, how can you pick out the experts from a pool of dozens or even hundreds of job applicants? Sure, you know what to look for when you’re hiring someone to help with your company’s core business. But unless you have direct experience in HR or IT, how do you know you’re making the right hiring decision when you need an HR specialist or network administrator? And when you do find someone with an impressive resume, can you afford to hire them?
When you work with a BPO company, you don’t have to worry about hiring the best bookkeeper or the most competent IT manager. They already work on the BPO team.
Just like you know what to look for in a good employee for your core business, BPO companies know exactly how to put together the best teams of experts for their core business, whether that’s HR services, accounting, or cybersecurity. Since business and administrative functions are the core business of BPO companies, these companies can justify spending more to attract top experts in their fields — experts who were hired specifically because of their experience and knowledge working with businesses like yours.
When it comes to picking the best people to work for you, BPO is a classic example of the “work smarter, not harder” principle. And the more talent you can bring to your business, the better the chances that the company will thrive and grow.
When You Want to Grow, Think BPO
While working with a BPO company might seem like a luxury for big companies, the truth is that small businesses have a lot to gain by outsourcing back-end business tasks. By following the right BPO strategy, you’re giving your business and employees the best chances for growing and thriving. At Confie, we understand how BPO can help bring out the best in your business and your people. To learn more, get in touch with us or give us a call at 714-252-2500.
