To outsource or not to outsource, that is the question

The business life-cycle, and the different stages along it, each brings their own set of unique problems to overcome. When you have just started a company, most of your time and resources are spent on simply keeping the business alive. We’ve all heard the stats of how many new businesses fold within the first couple of years etc. However, once you’ve overcome this stage, you are likely to be at a stage where your company is growing substantially.

This period of growth is of course a wonderful time, and something you should be extremely proud of. However, you can’t put your feet up yet, this new era brings about its own problems and decisions to be made. In this article, we will look at the concept of outsourcing. In short, this is the process of moving key processes within the company and entrusting it to another company.

When your company’s growing, outsourcing a lot of the time is linked to new processes that arise, that your company might not be properly prepared for. For example, brand tracking is a way in which you can see a snapshot of how your brand is performing at a macro level. During the early stages of your company, this is something that would not bother you too much. However, as you grow, your brand becomes a stronger asset to your company. Therefore, it’s vitally important to know what the public perception of your brand is.

The resources needed to accurately report back how something such as your brand is performing can be huge. In terms of both money and time. Outsourcing to a market research specialist can be the perfect solution. The upfront costs may first appear high, but when you calculate the opportunity cost of moving resources to do this in house, it is often the cheaper option.

Finally, it’s important to keep in mind the quality of what you’ll receive when you outsource a certain process. Returning to the example of brand tracking, it is probably completely possible to do this in house. For argument’s sake, let’s say in this specific scenario the cost is the same, in house or otherwise. However, a market research company, specialises in this type of information, day in day out. Therefore, the overall quality of this research is likely to be of a much higher quality than anything you could produce by starting the process from scratch.