Breakfast Leadership Breakfast Leadership

3 Business Tasks We Recommend That You Outsource

When it comes to your business, you must be doing everything in your power to see success. Sometimes, this will mean admitting that you need help and cannot do everything on your own. It’s a harsh realization, but you must come to it sooner rather than later to push your business toward further success. In this article, we will look at some of the tasks we recommend you outsource and why, so if you are interested in discovering more, read on.

Cleaning

The first thing that we’re going to say is that you should outsource the cleaning of your business office. Of course, you can hire in-house cleaners, but honestly, there isn’t much of a point. To ensure that there is always someone there to cover what needs to be done, maybe hire one person who goes around each day to do the surface level cleaning and ensure that any spills, etc, are cleaned up. However, a professional commercial cleaning company is the better option overall. They will be able to clean your office to a high standard, ensuring it can maintain a strong reputation and isn’t let down.

Payroll

We also think that it’s a good idea to outsource payroll for your business. This can be a nightmare to manage, and countless companies have had issues with it. It’s an integral part of your business, and you need to ensure it runs smoothly as much as possible. For this reason, you should be looking at the payroll-isolved offers or similar companies. It takes a lot of pressure off you and ensures you get professional help to make payroll as easy as possible without constant delays. 

Service

Last but not least, have you thought about outsourcing customer service for your business? It might not seem like something you should do, but handing it over to the professionals rather than allowing potentially untrained or unpredictable employees to handle it is the better option. Some companies provide the customer service services they need, ensuring that they take care of customers properly in a way that reflects well on the business. It can be hard to outsource such an essential task because customer service is critical to business success, but it might just be the best decision you have ever made.

We hope you have found this article helpful. Now, see some of the tasks we recommend that you outsource. We know that some people still struggle with outsourcing and allowing an outside company to take on tasks for your business, but sometimes, it is for the best. We wish you the best of luck and hope you can see higher levels of success this way.

 

Please stay connected with us! For more insights and valuable content, don't forget to check out the following resources:

- **Breakfast Leadership Show Podcast**: Tune in to our podcast and get inspired by leadership lessons and success stories from top industry leaders.

- **Breakfast Leadership YouTube Channel**: Subscribe to our YouTube channel for video content on leadership, personal development, and more.

- **Hire Michael D. Levitt to Speak**: Looking for a dynamic speaker for your next event? Hire Michael D. Levitt, the founder of Breakfast Leadership, to share his expertise and insights.

Follow us on LinkedIn for the latest updates. Remember to share this article with your network!

Read More
Breakfast Leadership Breakfast Leadership

The Top Advantages of Using Offset Printing

Offset printing is a time-tested process for large-scale, high-quality print jobs. Discover what makes this approach so popular after more than 100 years.

The Top Advantages of Using Offset Printing

Printing and packaging are anything but one-size-fits-all. In these industries, there are a variety of techniques to choose from. Offset printing, which transfers ink from a plate to rubber to the final substrate, is a classic option that has stood the test of time. We’ll take a closer look at the top advantages of using offset printing, why this process has endured for over a century, and why, even with modern digital technology, it remains one of the most widely used techniques today.

When Quality Counts

You always want your product to look its best. With offset printing, you get the professional, high-quality print results you’ve seen all your life. The process uses the CMYK—cyan, magenta, yellow, and “key” black—ink model to create a full-color image. This yields images that are sharp and vibrant, with a level of detail that other printing techniques can’t match.

A Substantial Range of Substrates

Even high-quality laser printers can’t print on every surface. One of the top advantages of using offset printing is that printers can deploy it against a wide range of substrates, including paper, cardboard, and even plastic. This means that businesses can choose the right substrate for their print materials based on their specific needs. Offset printing is also able to print on irregularly shaped substrates, providing even more flexibility when it comes to design options.

Speed That Doesn’t Sacrifice Quality

Even if you’re not paying premiums for rush jobs, you still want your printing partner to get the job done as quickly as possible. Offset printing is remarkable for its high production speed. Once a print shop creates the plates, the rest of the printing process is quick and efficient. This makes offset printing an ideal choice for businesses that need to print large quantities of materials in a short amount of time.

Affordable in the Long Run

Anyone with a warehouse membership and a family to feed knows the value of buying in bulk. Printing in bulk is a value proposition, too, and offset printing makes it possible. Offset printing’s efficiency makes it an affordable option for businesses that need to print large quantities of materials. As the quantity of materials you print increases, your cost per unit decreases. At the right scale, that’s favorable math—and a key difference between offset and digital printing.

Consistency Is Key

Whether it’s packaging or business cards, you want uniformity in your products. The offset process ascertains this by evenly distributing ink across the printing plate, ensuring that each print is identical. This is particularly important for businesses that need to print large quantities of materials.

With the versatility of materials, precise color-matching, cost-effective large orders, and reasonable turnaround times, offset printing could be just what your small business needs for its next print order. It’s time to get rolling.

Read More
Breakfast Leadership Breakfast Leadership

Choosing The Right Outsourcing Partners For Your Business

Image via DALL-E

There are a lot of reasons to outsource services for your business. You might be trying to save some money by downsizing your team; you might be looking to make your business more flexible and agile, and you might even use it as a growth tool, freeing up resources you can use to expand. Choosing the right outsourcing partner will always be critical regardless of what you’re outsourcing and why you’re doing it. As such, here, we’re going to look at ways you can narrow your options down to the partners most likely to suit your needs.

Make sure that they can be trusted

First of all, you should take the time to narrow down your options to a few potential partners. This is because you’ll want to take the time to look at them a little more closely, what they offer, and how much their services suit your needs. However, you will also want to look closer at their credentials and track record. Look at online review sites to ensure that their customers have good things to say about them, see if they have any industry recognition to speak off, and look for things like trust badges on their site.

Be specific in your needs

If you want to ensure that you get off the right foot with any outsourced service provider, then you will need a clear idea of what you want from them and what goals they should help you meet. One of the best ways to do this is to write a scope of work document that breaks down, in detail, your specific needs and the solutions they offer that might be the best fit for them. Your provider might want to talk to you about options they can use beyond what you might consider, and it’s a good idea to listen to them, as they may have more experience in this field than you. Still, you should ensure that whatever you select sticks to your goals, avoiding unnecessary budget growth.

Ensure that they are investing in customer service.

No outsourcing provider isn’t going to promise you that they will deliver excellent customer service. However, the reality is that some will fall way below the average regarding customer satisfaction. However, there are metrics by which you find out how effectively they do what they say. Their net promoter score, which you can learn more about online, is an objective metric used to calculate how effectively they can provide customer service. If they are unable or unwilling to provide their NPS, it might be a sign that you should look elsewhere instead.

Consider going with industry-specific outsourcing partners.

Aside from making sure that the company you choose is reliable and trustworthy, it would be best to consider how well-suited they are to the specific needs of your business. How effectively can you communicate your goals and what you want to outsource? How well do they understand your market, customers, and general processes? Suppose you outsource any processes with specific circumstances your partners must cater to. In that case, you should learn more about industry-specific outsourcing, such as hiring an insurance process outsourcing service if you’re running an insurance company. Otherwise, it can take more work and some trial and error to help a more general provider deliver the services suited to your needs, which can undermine some of the benefits they’re supposed to provide.

Ask about their stability.

There are few business owners who want to admit that their company isn’t stable, but you shouldn’t stand on occasion. You want to make sure that you’re able to rely on them to stay open and operational enough to keep providing the services that you need, to make sure that you’re not left scrambling to cover if they close their doors overnight. You shouldn’t be embarrassed about asking for proof that they’re able to commit in the long term and any professional outsourcing service provider will understand that. Depending on whether you intend to use them for Long vs Short Term Placements, you might require a higher or lower level of proof. Suppliers and partners that you only intend to use for a few months will be less important than suppliers you want to use for years. You should also ask about their supply chain and downtime. You can tolerate some downtime, but you want to make sure that you get warned ahead of time when services might be interrupted.

Mind how you protect your data and processes

You want to ensure that any data you share, or any information on the working processes of your business, is protected and that your new outsourcing partner doesn’t leak anything they shouldn’t. This isn’t just a matter of whether or not they’re trustworthy, but also whether you both put the practices designed to protect in place. For instance, you can learn more about contract confidentiality clauses by having them sign them. If they’re accessing any valuable data, you can also ensure they access it directly from your server rather than sending it wholesale to them. You control who accesses what, how they do it, and when they can do it.

Consider whether they’re a cultural fit.

It might sound a little less important than whether or not they’re able to meet the practical needs of your business, but the cultural fit of any partner should be well considered. You want to ensure that any company you work with, especially in the long term, is aligned with the core values of your business, understands and respects your priorities, and is willing to work to meet them. If they don’t share any of your company cultures, they may not be the right fit for a strategic partnership, as they might have priorities that can clash with yours when push comes to shove.

What you outsource and how you do it will largely depend on your business's specifics. However, you should always keep the above points in mind when you’re evaluating service providers.

Discover insights and strategies for success with Breakfast Leadership — your go-to source for leadership articles, shows, and more. Subscribe today to stay informed and inspired! 

Read More
Breakfast Leadership Breakfast Leadership

Functions That Small Growing Business Should Be Outsourcing

Image via Merlin

Outsourcing is one of the most cost-effective ways to grow your business. It’s a fantastic in-between service that companies take full advantage of before hiring employees. It gives them plenty of extra workforce to carry out specific business tasks, but the costs are much lower than you’d expect to pay a new staff member.

So here are some of the most common functions you should outsource if you want to grow your small business.


Sales

Sales is something that can easily be outsourced. While it’s preferable to have an in-house sales team that understands what you’re selling, it’s not a huge deal to outsource this as long as you plan to upgrade to an in-house team soon. External sales services can help you find plenty of customers and clients while you focus on improving your products and services. It would do your business good to take a look into the meddpicc sales methodology as well, so when you have upgraded your in-house team, you can go all in with your sales and achieve the output you need.

Accounting

These days, many businesses use cloud accounting software to help them manage their finances. However, you’re going to need an accountant sooner or later for when your income increases along with the number of transactions. Accountants can also help when it comes to tax-related laws and restrictions and ensures that you’re filling all of your financial responsibilities as a business.

Administrative tasks

Administrative tasks can include a lot of different things. It could mean answering the phone, booking meetings with clients, responding to emails, and so on. Many of these tasks are fairly personal for a business so it doesn’t make much sense to outsource them. However, as you start growing and administrative tasks take more of your time, it can help to offload some of the responsibility by outsourcing them.

Human resources

Human resources is a complicated subject that involves many different functions. From hiring staff members to dealing with internal disputes, you’ll find that your HR department is extremely important for keeping your business operating smoothly. Human resources is something that can be outsourced with help from services like syndeohro.com. However, as with many functions, it’s eventually something that you’ll want to manage in-house if you have big aspirations. But for now, outsourcing human resources as a small business can bridge the gap between a small business and a large corporation.

Marketing

Many people confuse marketing with sales, but in terms of outsourcing, you can think of marketing as the department that thinks up promotional campaigns and designs lots of unique content to draw customers in. Marketing is extremely important for attracting various audiences and is something that you should definitely consider outsourcing unless you already have an in-house marketing team.

Design

When starting a business, you shouldn’t worry too much about how your logo or branding looks because you’re more focused on creating a unique product or service that people want. However, as you grow, it can help to establish a better brand image by redesigning things. From your logo to picking colors that represent your company’s image, there are loads of different ways to express your brand’s personality through design. This is something that can easily be done with the help of outsourcing.

Subscribe to our newsletter and Explore insightful conversations on workplace culture, burnout, and leadership at the Breakfast Leadership Network, ranked Top 20 globally. Join us to thrive in the modern work environment.

Please stay connected with us! For more insights and valuable content, don't forget to check out the following resources:

- **Breakfast Leadership Show Podcast**: Tune in to our podcast and get inspired by leadership lessons and success stories from top industry leaders.

- **Breakfast Leadership YouTube Channel**: Subscribe to our YouTube channel for video content on leadership, personal development, and more.

- **Hire Michael D. Levitt to Speak**: Looking for a dynamic speaker for your next event? Hire Michael D. Levitt, the founder of Breakfast Leadership, to share his expertise and insights.

Follow us on LinkedIn for the latest updates. Remember to share this article with your network!

Read More