100 Small Business Tips and Tricks for Effectively Outsourcing to India

February 15, 2008 from HR World – Small businesses need not be hampered by the lack of funds, staff, expertise, other resources or time to engage in work projects that can make them grow to the next level. Why not outsource: hire someone outside the company to take care of mundane yet necessary work? How about engaging someone new to provide a service that no one inside the organization has the expertise to perform? This includes “personal” or one-person organizations. And it’s easier and cheaper to do this now than ever before.

These days, outsourcing is a great way to engage in growth activities without investing scarce capital in fixed assets or some other kind of pricey infrastructure. Offering a new product or service can be done on a totally variable-cost basis: manufacturing, promotion, sales, warehousing, distribution, and billing of a new product or service can be totally outsourced. Contract manufacturers can build products for small businesses on an outsourced basis. Warehousing, distribution and shipping logistics can be handled by the major courier companies, Amazon.com and others. Amazon.com provides much of the infrastructure needed for warehousing, billing and so on.

This allows entrepreneurs to widen their spheres of influence: while they must still know their businesses, they will no longer be required to have deep knowledge of all aspects. This will free up their time to use their skills where they are most needed: in running the company rather than doing all the jobs in the company.

180 View (Written by Esther Friedberg Karp) - Outsourcing can be as simple as getting a virtual assistant for call handling, being a webmaster or executing a promotional mailing. It can get into bookkeeping, payroll, artistic design and branding, and fulfillment as described above. Naturally, different areas of expertise will call for different outsourced experts. The key is to look at the options and the costs vs. the funds available. On one hand, it’s a good thing to save money and do as many tasks as possible in-house, especially in the company’s start-up phase. On the other hand, once businesses grow beyond the stage of scrimping, outsourcing to outsiders with expertise frees up the entrepreneur and any employees to concentrate on their “core competencies” and get more revenue-generating work done.

Spending in-house time and resources on functions that are beyond the business owner’s (or the employees’) areas of expertise will result in less work done in the areas of core competency. This will lead to errors and an unprofessional image, as work is postponed and procrastination to avoid doing jobs “we’re not good at” becomes standard operating procedure.

While this article concentrates on outsourcing to India (yes, small businesses here can outsource to India – it’s not just for multinationals anymore), keep an eye on the outsourcing references at the end of the article and look for outsourcing companies on this side of the world as well. As an example, Mom Inventors Inc. will “develop, manufacture, and sell quality Mom Invented–branded products” so that only the idea is needed; Mom Inventors will do the rest.