Starting a new business can be daunting. There will be many challenges along the way, and it will take determination to uncover and get through all of them.
But it’s worth it, right?
Yes, it absolutely is - but it may not be ‘worth it’ to personally perform every single task required to get your business going!
More often than not, these tasks get in the way of your vision and mission and can better be performed by others. That’s where outsourcing comes in. It allows you and your small team to sincerely focus on what makes you great - whether that’s sales, creativity, providing services, teaching, and so on. By doing so, you won’t need to become an expert on everything involved in running your business.
While there are many opportunities to outsource and increase your productivity, outsourcing technological tasks is particularly useful. This is because technology is integral to most businesses - and their abilities to succeed. Therefore, many small businesses decide to use an outsourced IT support company like Mustard IT to handle many of these fundamental tech tasks.
5 IT Operations Your Small Business Can Outsource
1. Maintaining Cloud Data and Presence
Utilizing the Cloud is an important way to modernize your business’ use of technology.
Relying on your own servers is not only dated, but it can make certain issues harder, like potential data loss or updating your software. Plus, investing in large servers isn’t conducive for small businesses. It makes more sense to take advantage of the system of pooled resources that the Cloud provides for the benefit of its users.
In fact, Cloud providers can inspire you to use newer tech that they continually update. With pay-as-you-go services, you can also test out certain software and packages - and then remove them if they don’t suit your needs. Further, this allows for future scaling of your business.
2. Web Design and Maintenance
Some assume that creating a website - perhaps even with the help of a website builder - is simple enough to do.
It’s not!
The aesthetics behind designing an appealing-looking web page take professionals years of education and training to learn. What’s more, clients or potential customers these days usually look to your website before hiring you for services or purchasing your products.
Often, viewing your website is one of - if not the first impression - clients will get about your business. They often decide right then and there if they feel they trust your business on an emotional level. This gut reaction absolutely affects your success. If it doesn’t look visually appealing or professionally done, you’ll miss many opportunities.
3. Graphic Design
This goes hand-in-hand with web design and hopefully, you can hire a person or agency to handle both at the same time.
An outstanding logo, clean graphics, and impactful imagery are important, especially when your business is competing with others who already have these visual branding strengths. The designs must be original, stand out, and represent the essence of your brand.
It’s not something you and your sales buddies can achieve with Paint.
A new business needs a creative, yet tech-savvy graphic designer.
4. Social Media Manager
The nature of marketing has changed significantly within the past ten years.
Social media has become a priority for most businesses, and they need to catch up quickly. Luckily, if you’re just starting a new business you can begin with the right strategies in place to give it a great boost. Whilst most people know how to utilize social media today, what you really need for your business is a social media strategy.
A social media manager will help you develop this strategy with professional expertise and knowledge to back them.
Remember the website you invested in?
Social media strategists will direct people to that website and generate leads. Additionally, social media presence is a factor considered in SEO rankings. It’ll get the conversation going around your business in a way you can both influence and learn from (what your customers like, want to see more/less of, etc.) At the same time, you build trust with your target community and start to build brand loyalty.
Social media experts can help you stay on track and analyze the effects of your posts so you can gain more followers and get customers to act as brand ambassadors.
5. On-Call IT Support
There’s nothing worse than when you’re in the middle of your workflow and a tech glitch suddenly disrupts it. Well, perhaps it is worse when your client is using technology to interact with your business and it glitches!
They can’t purchase your product.
They can’t input their information.
Their information is lost.
These issues and their consequences vary in how drastic they may be, but the solution is the same. You need a tech expert at your fingertips to immediately help you resolve them.
Company downtime can cost much more than simply lost profits, and it’s stressful when you may not have the knowledge you need to fix the problem efficiently. Some companies offer on-call IT support on an as-you-need basis, and others offer packages. Some IT support providers can handle this along with disaster recovery, IT relocation, networking, and cybersecurity.
Conclusion:
Outsourcing may seem like an extra task that’s intimidating, but it will simplify your life.
It’ll free up your time and energy and allow you to use experts without paying for their full-time costs. To know if it’s wise to outsource any particular business function, you just have to consider if it is simply time-consuming and doesn’t require your expertise, or if it requires expertise that you lack.
While an IT provider may not be able to do all the above tasks, they can certainly cover many of them. By hiring such a provider, you can get most of your tech needs met and then cover any gaps using freelancers.
Why do it all when you can do more of what you do best?
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