How Startups Can Benefit from Outsourcing

The typical startup consists of a very small team and in some cases may be just one person. The crucial initial stages of your company’s life are an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ scenario. Without the determination and dedication of everybody on the team, business opportunities can pass you by and leave you struggling to survive.

Startups need two critical elements to achieve growth: time and money. Unfortunately, there never seems to be enough of either, which can put a sting in anybody’s tail. You have to find these elements rather than waiting for them to come to you.

Reducing an Unmanageable Workload

Finding help can be tricky, especially with a budget that never seems to increase. Hiring staff may not be an option, leaving a mountain of tasks to complete and not enough time in the day to go about all of it. What’s more, this is all time that could be better spent getting your business’s name and image out there.

That’s where outsourcing can be of great help for startups. By delegating certain activities to an offsite facility, newly formed companies can shrink that ever-increasing to-do list and save time and money to boot.

Time Better Spent on Growing the Business

Duties such as data entry and invoice processing can swallow a big chunk of the day when done manually and can often return very little in terms of real value to your processes and functions. Outsourcing menial tasks allows you to focus on money-making and brand-building activities instead.

Outsourcing gives you back time you’d previously been not technically wasting but hadn’t been putting to good use. Now that the reams of paper files and the headaches of wondering where to start have gone, it’s time to drive your business forward. You’ll be able to schedule more meetings, network more efficiently and have time to explore which avenues can give your startup exposure or a financial boost.

Outsourcing your business processes won’t be free, of course, but it will still produce a monetary gain, even if it is indirectly from a source of your expenditure.

Reducing Errors in Critical Data

It’s not just the productivity and economic sides of your business that can benefit from outsourcing. If you still perform data entry yourself, an error in manually reported entries can be devastating. Fatigue and a lack of concentration can play a part, and one wrong keystroke can massively skew data. For example, a simple decimal point in the wrong place turns $1000.00 into $100.00 or $10000.00, which you certainly don’t want masking the real profitability and balance of your startup.

Staff and technology employed by dedicated outsourcing companies, however, can boost accuracy rates to between 94 and 99.9 percent in most cases. This ensures that data is protected against misinformation.

No Need for Cramped Workspaces

If you have a small workplace, you’ll know that every available inch is vital. Unfortunately, storage furniture such as filing cabinets and drawers can be bulky and take away from the area you need.

If you outsource paper documents for scanning, there may be an option to store them electronically. These newly reformatted files can then be made accessible to only those to whom you grant permission through password encryption in a Web browser or secure FTP.

Looking Forward to a Bright Future

Running a startup can be a difficult and quite often thankless job. With no clear plan of action, or the time to make one, getting up and running is more often than not a long, drawn-out process. Outsourcing provides you with a starting block to break out of a potentially difficult time and take your business to new heights.

Andy Morley works for UK Data Entry. The company helps startups by offering outsourced data entry and document management systems to keep the office organized and as productive as possible.