Owning a small business brings with it a great many challenges and one of those is how to go about spending money for the business. Every cent must be scrutinized before it is spent and that can often lead to owners not investing where they should. I most certainly fell into this boat in my first couple of years and it actually began to cause me an issue. Our business, much like many others, relies heavily on computer systems and network hardware, and as much as everyone would tell me to outsource this, I felt that we just couldn’t afford it, but I was to be proven very wrong.
The Inevitable Day
The day eventually came that the systems crashed and our business was simply unable to operate at all, as much as we tried in-house we couldn’t get things back up and running. Acting fast to avoid hemorrhaging money I contacted a local firm here in Florida called Abaram Network Solutions, a company who helped me then and who still now look after our IT infrastructure in the business. This was the moment that the penny really dropped for me, and I would say that this disaster actually saved the business.
Saving Money
Although I was no prepared to invest in outsourcing areas of the business such as IT, I quickly realized that this was in fact an efficient way to spend money, and an investment which offers a healthy return. The money that we would have lost had our systems stayed offline for more days could have easily put the business in financial straits, which is why the comparatively small cost of outsourcing this to the experts makes so much sense.
Better Service
We now outsource our IT infrastructure and our marketing and the results of both have been that we are now able to offer a better service to our clients. There are two main factors behind this, the first is that we have handed these areas over to the experts who are able to deliver far better than we could in-house, and the second is that owing to what we have done we have freed up more time for the staff to focus on doing what they do best and not additional tasks which they weren’t hired for.
Focus
On a personal note one of the biggest benefits that I have found since outsourcing the business is that I am able to give 100% focus to the daily operations of the business. I have no doubt that this is because I now don’t have to worry about various things in the business because I know that they are being take care of, allowing me to give full dedication and concentration on how the business is running and what we can do to improve and to reach goals.
This was a mistake which almost cost me my business, and one which I have certainly learned from.
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