Outsourcing and strategic consulting partnerships became a highly popular business strategy back in the late 80s and early 90s it was seen as THE thing to do for companies who wanted the best solutions and avoid rising labour costs in an increasingly global marketplace.
In many cases today, the benefits of looking to partner with a skilled organisation is no longer an optimisation strategy – it's a necessity.
Often the only sensible way to grow your business, launch a product, or manage operations is to outsource certain tasks to a specialist company.
Finding the right strategic partner offers a number of compelling benefits:
1. Focus on your core business process
It’s been shown time and time again that it makes way more sense to focus your time and attention doing what you’re good at. If you’re a marketing agency, you should be focusing on your clients. If you’re a consultancy, you should be advising and coaching your clients. If you sell digital products, you should be constantly creating.
By partnering with an organisation to take the lead and deliver your projects and products, you have more time to focus on the important things like motivating staff and generating profit.
2. Smarter budgets
When you make the decision to outsource a project, you can begin to convert a fixed cost (a full-time salary) into a variable cost (“pay-what-you-need” service). This frees up your cash flow for investment in other projects or lines of business.
Ex CO’s and Senior Management can then look to realign that money into improving your products or running marketing programs. This is really helpful at the early stages of new projects, like launching a new product or reaching into a new business vertical.
Also if you have any investors, they’ll be pleased to see lots of room in your cash flow to invest in revenue-generating activities.
3. Reduce your Expenses
Hiring and training staff is expensive, especially for short projects, and you can rarely produce the high-quality work you need in such a short time frame.
When you partner with a company who can manage your solution externally, you can instantly convert fixed labour costs into variable costs, meaning you only pay for the services you use. This gives you staffing flexibility that just doesn’t exist with in-house employees.
Another thing to consider is your overheads — for every employee, there is a need to assign or purchase equipment, desk space and a whole host of other costs — ones that don’t seem like much at the start but that all add up over time. Looking at a part or fully outsourced model could save you an immense amount of money.
4. On-demand, in-demand Talent
Hiring a new team member often involves costly recruiting and training processes. You have to teach them your workflows or develop special processes just for them. You may also have to invest in their education, so they have the right skills for your business.
However when you look to partner with a specialist company, for example with Aquent, we assume these costs. With our roots in talent acquisition, we have a unique access to in-demand, highly qualified talent who possess skills and experience that is costly to hire on a full time basis. All of our experts are across industry changes and trends, they are constantly learning new techniques, and are always developing their skills.
For example, let’s say you have a designer on your team who only has print expertise. Sure they can design a great brochure, but they may not know much about digital products.
When it comes time for a new website, your designer won’t be much help. However if you outsource your design work to us, you’ll have access to designers with a broad range of skills like UX, UI Design, Coding, Accessibility standards, and much more.
5. Risk mitigation
Employee turnover is painful. But not as painful as when businesses engage contingent workers incorrectly.
Working with specialist partners not only builds a level of consistency in your business, but it mitigates your risk when it comes to compliance and engagements. You’re also able to determine the best engagement model for each project and budget, and this means you can focus on what's important within your business.
If any of this resonates with you, or you are looking at your upcoming projects and contemplating how you are going to move forward, please feel free to get in touch for a chat.