There are, honestly, as many different types of business owner in this world as there are businesses. It is easy to take to heart the idea that there are just a few, and that you have to fall into one of those categories to really make it: the maverick who does it all their own way; the cautious one who goes by the book; the team-builder who always seeks consensus. In truth, your success in business is always going to be governed by more than your management style. Having a reputation for always retaining control, or for eternally seeking the input of others, merely means you’re fitting a stereotype rather than trusting yourself.
When it comes to outsourcing, that determination to embody one of the existing templates can be a problem. If you never outsource, then you rarely have the chance to step back from a project and observe it critically. If you outsource everything, you’re not going to gain the decision-making experience that you certainly will need if you hope to achieve success.
What decides whether you should outsource a project?
There are, in the main, two primary reasons why you would seek to outsource:
- There is a task that you, as a person or a business, cannot complete on your own.
- There is a time pressure, and addressing the project in-house would result in other important work being shelved.
If you have a tendency to seek control in all things, you might not see the advantage of outsourcing; but if you repeatedly find yourself salvaging and fixing projects that haven’t quite gone to plan, it might be worth reconsidering.
Is outsourcing an all-or-nothing step?
To get an idea for how restrictive a reluctance to outsource can be, imagine if you applied this idea of full independence to everything in your life, inside and outside of business. What happens if your car breaks down? If your house went on fire, would you turn away fire engines and battle the blaze yourself? If you need dental work, do you lock yourself in the garage with a drill and pliers? Clearly not.
While you might want to retain overall control, there is nothing wrong with outsourcing parts of a project and still doing most of the work. If you’re setting up an ecommerce store, modern CMS software allows you to do a lot of the important stuff yourself. However, if you want to give it some extra oomph, there is a lot to be said for consulting an online IT CV service and getting someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of the process to give it some extra “bells and whistles”. This will cost less than outsourcing the whole job, but still produce professional results.
It is understandable that many people will seek to resist the outsourcing impulse – and that some others will be hard-wired not to even feel it. There is also good reason why you shouldn’t be calling in outside experts on every job. But if you know when, and how, to outsource to the best effect, your business will benefit as a result.
- DISCLOSURE – This post has been written by an outside source.
