We speak to a lot of entrepreneurs like you every day. One of the questions we like to ask is – “What’s keeping you up at night?”
Roughly one in five tell us that their biggest worry is getting their product or service to market before the competition can react. Another fifteen percent or so of startups say their biggest concern is getting their adoption rates up high enough to break even on their fixed costs.
Yet these founders, as well as many others with similar “this needs to get done or we’re toast” problems are still doing everything in house!
Outsourcing for startups is about growth
The most common look we get when we start talking about outsourcing is confusion. Most people think outsourcing is for big companies, big budgets, and big projects. The other thing people think of when they think outsourcing is cutting costs.
When it comes to startups these are the wrong things to be thinking about, you’re missing the big picture, and you’re on the wrong side of the income statement!
If you find the right partner, it’s all about speed, growth, and profitability. Outsourcing benefits startups in very different ways than it benefits more established companies. Specifically it helps startups:
- Bring experts to the fight quickly. Whatever it is your doing – certain people have done parts of it before and have the scars to show for it. Finding the person with the right skills for a full time position may be overkill because you don’t need them for that long. It’s also hard to find someone with the perfect skill, experience, and cultural fit to bring into the office. By handing this job off to a team with access to the right kinds of talented individuals – you can leverage that today!
- Increase your team’s size & power. By partnering with a firm that helps solve the kinds of problems you need solving – you’re leveraging their size & the fact that they can bring people onto your project as soon as possible. Contrast that with hiring your own staff, which can take months to hire just one new person.
- You’ll get a better product sooner. Chances are, if you staff up this project internally, you’re going to hit some unforeseen road bumps in your business. These cause delays. You may ask your programmer to help you install your new Exchange server, or ask your marketer to help you figure out which social networking sites are the best fit for you. Whatever it is – your internal staff will get distracted from the task at hand easier than a professionally contracted firm. Often the difference between a product that is ready for the market, and one that is behind the market, is the difference between how long it takes you to get the project finished.
- Minimize your vulnerability to unforeseen events. One of the most commonly overlooked issues startup companies have is when something bad happens to derail the entire project. What if someone on your team gets sick for an extended period of time, takes a new job, or their computer’s hard drive crashes? These are all issues that startups generally don’t think about or recover from well. If you’re working with a partner who does this for a living – you generally get all of this as part of the service.
- Allow you to focus on the big picture. There are many aspects of making a real business work. Even if your business is a simple website, there’s a lot more to worry about than coding up the website. You have to work with vendors, do some pre-selling, figure out your PR strategy, worry about payroll, wooing new hires, putting the investor presentation together, and how it is you’re going to spend the money once is starts coming through the door. If you get yourself involved with the details of putting any piece of the business together – you’ll find yourself less capable of managing the forest from the trees as problems arise (and they always do!).
I’ve never met you – but I know you need to outsource more
With all the growth, time to market, and time to profitability benefits to outsourcing for startups – your business should probably take a good look at outsourcing. Outsourcing is just one more weapon today’s startups have to compete head-to-head against the big boys. With access to the same resources and talent pools of a large company, why not take advantage of it today?