Outsourcing: A Cost-Effective Alternative to Hiring Full Time Staff

Many small businesses are faced with the problem of not having sufficient funds to hire full time staff to handle various tasks within the business and outsourcing is definitely a cost-effective alternative.  

Outsourcing vs. Full Time Employees 

Hiring full time staff comes with a whole host of problems, including having to pay for vacation time, sick days and so on and so forth. Additionally, you are unlikely to find a single person who can handle everything you need done. For example, the chances of finding a web designer who can write and take customer service calls are minimal. This means that you need to hire two or more people to handle everything. 

Then, there’s another problem. You might not have enough work for them all the time so you’ve got people who aren’t doing anything. In other words, you are paying people for standing around or browsing the web. Let’s not forget that you also have to provide a place for people to work as well as the equipment they need. All this costs money.  

However, with outsourcing these issues are no longer a problem. First of all, you outsource on a project by project basis, meaning that you only pay for the work you need done. It also means that you can hire different professionals for the different projects you need completed. You also don’t need to worry about providing them with the equipment they need or a place to work.  

So, while at first outsourcing might seem more expensive than hiring full time staff, if you sit down and work out the figures, you’ll find it’s a much more efficient solution in the long term.  

In fact, you will find that many large companies have let entire departments go because they have found outsourcing to be much more effective. They don’t have to deal with employee problems, they can pay just for the work they need done and they don’t have to hire five people and pay them on a continual basis even if they only need a certain skill-set for a single project. 

For example, you might need to put a website up. It would mean hiring a web designer but if you were to hire them full-time, you’d have to find something else for that person to do once the project was complete. If your business is not centered on web design, then that could be a problem. On the other hand, you could simply outsource the project, have your site up in a few weeks and never have to worry about it again. 

Outsourcing has become the ‘go to’ solution for most companies when it comes to getting certain projects completed and it certainly is one of the most cost-effective solutions for small business owners to expand their operations. 

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