Everyone wants their business to grow; that’s nothing new.
The problem is that while you want growth in customers and revenue, growing your business is often synonymous with additional hires, complications, and overheads. No matter how smart you are, these difficulties always seem to multiply the deeper you get into the process.
Unfortunately, if you want to grow, adding more capabilities is essential. You need to expand your offering to give clients what they want.
That’s why a strategic plan for outsourcing both deliverables and production is the best way to go.
Hiring outside services streamlines your processes and enables you to do more with less fuss.
This post provides a roadmap for growing your business using this strategy without headaches. By the end, you should understand more about the value of outsourcing and how it can help your team.
After all, micromanaging everyone at your business is tedious and stressful, and what is the point of exciting business growth if your costs and pains skyrocket at the same time?
Streamline Your Processes
The first step is to streamline your most tedious tasks, outsourcing them to either technology or external personnel.
For example, developing a custom API integration to speed up customer report production might seem like a waste of your tech team’s time, but how many times a week do you deliver those reports? Think about how many person-hours are sunk into little tasks like that, and the value of streamlining the process will be evident in no time.
Use virtual assistants for more complicated or fiddly tasks, like scheduling and meeting booking. These external professionals can better understand nuance and manage your calendar proactively.
Of course, AI can also help streamline certain tasks. For example, if you currently use humans for content moderation, you could find AI tools to assist. Similarly, if you have a customer service arm constantly dealing with the same client questions, you might want to use AI chatbots to pre-screen for common questions.
Don’t blindly turn everything over to AI—the human touch will always be needed—but done right, this can help ease the burden on your team and prevent them from burning out on small tasks.
Once you offload tedious tasks to virtual assistants and AI, you can maximise your staff’s client-facing time. Employees can focus on what truly matters – relationships with customers.
The advantages of outsourcing in this way can be substantial. Benefits include:
✅ – Happier clients who appreciate more one-on-one attention
✅ – Greater customer loyalty
✅ – Higher sales and revenues due to increased rapport
✅ – Improved employee morale and engagement
✅ – Reduced burnout
Expand Your Services
Once technology and external teams take care of tedious tasks, you have more space to expand your services. Presenting a more comprehensive suite of options improves your offering and helps you land new clients. You can be the go-to source for everything your clients need, keeping them in your ecosystem and the profits rolling in.
You also get more time to consider how you can leverage third parties to increase output further. Freeing up staff gives you more opportunities to search the market for services that could help you grow even faster.
For instance, you could use extra free time to identify areas where your business is failing and could benefit from external expertise. Staff can spend more time researching the best services for your business model and how to integrate them. In so doing, you might find specialised services that can augment your internal processes or help you add value to clients.
When outsourcing to grow faster, you have two main channels. You can either:
👉 – Outsource tasks that staff would usually complete
👉 – Directly buy deliverables that you can resell.
For example, suppose your company offers copywriting and wants to develop a Blog-to-video product.
You could do this in-house if you believe you have the expertise, but do you already have video editors, voice talent, or animators on hand?
In-house might seem the way to go to keep control of everything, but by the time you make that many hires and introduce more overheads, many firms get better results by outsourcing specific processes to specialists. These individuals often have more expertise, allowing them to move faster than if you tried to do everything yourself. They’ve also already established their processes, made their equipment investments, and will have lower overheads for that specific product due to their own economies of scale.
It’ll just save you so much overall.
You can even outsource service delivery. For instance, if you are an SEO agency and suddenly get a big order from clients, it is often cheaper to pass this on to a firm that can meet the demand instead of doing it in-house. You can simply lean into their capacity instead of frantically trying to hire people to carry out the work.
Furthermore, if the outsourced services are white-label, you can resell their output as your own. For example, you could get an agency to write articles, blogs, or infographics for you and pass these on to your customers as your own, taking a margin for yourself.
At FATJOE, we’ve obviously set ourselves up to deliver the services that are then resold, and that works for us. However, we’ve seen so many agencies flourish by deciding to resell our white-label SEO services with their own add-ons and healthy margins.
The benefits of this approach are immense:
⏰ – Save time. Outsourcing or even reselling third-party services means there’s less for you and your team to do in-house. Once you start outsourcing, staff no longer have to waste time on low-value tasks. Instead, you free them up to build customer rapport and work on projects that will expand your capabilities further.
💰 – Save money. You also save money by reducing complexity and siphoning off tasks to specialists who can work on them efficiently and productively. Outsourcing makes it less likely that you will endure wild gyrations in the number of staff you hire to produce the same output.
⬇️ – Reduce workload for your team. Cutting down on tedious tasks improves morale and reduces the risk of burnout. Staff feel more empowered to do engaging work.
Focus On Sustainable Growth
Lastly, you want to focus on sustainable growth when expanding your business. You can grow your agency fast, but trying to climb too high too soon could lead to dynamics that damage your brand and prevent future success.
Sustainable growth means prioritising steady, manageable increases in your output instead of explosive bursts. Growing your core team at a constant rate prevents overwhelming your team and minimises the risk of burnout.
It also helps you stay flexible. Steadily expanding lets you adapt to changing market conditions, testing the waters as you go. You can simply change tack if you encounter an issue with your long-term strategy or a bottleneck in your standard operating procedures.
Other benefits of sustainable growth include:
💪 – The ability to make more sensible investments for the future, including investing in things that allow you to improve your processes (such as outsourcing) and create innovative new solutions
💪 – Building stronger client relationships based on mutual trust and respect
💪 – Improving your brand image and avoiding expansionary practices that might hurt your public reputation
Lean on outsourcing to help overcome periods of explosive growth while growing your core team more sustainably.
Done properly, outsourcing can scale up and down as needed, letting you ride out the good times and the bad while developing the in-house team at a steady rate without burnout or fear of having the rug pulled from under them.
Wrapping up
Ultimately, when you prioritise the long-term health of your business over short-term gains, you ensure that it can thrive for years to come. Clients are happy, and employees are more likely to trust that you can provide stable employment.
The optimal way to do this is to outsource both deliverables and production. Passing tedious tasks to third parties frees up your time and enables you to explore additional opportunities to improve your standard operating procedures and focus on the customers and staff members that are the core of your business.
About the Author
Daniel Trick is the Head of Content at FATJOE. He manages the in-house FATJOE writing team and coordinates their informative blog and video content for SEOs, agency leaders, and marketing managers.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-trick-036475141/