by Leeia Ladipoh on March 18th, 2008
At some point in your career as a small business owner, you will realize that you can’t do it all yourself. There is a limited amount of profit you can make when you’re responsible for every piece of the puzzle that is your business. It may be time to outsource.
Outsourcing is finding someone else to do parts of your job, so you can spend more time moving your business forward.
Let’s take a look at what happens in a business day.
A Day in the Life
You may start the day by dealing with customer questions in e-mails. You... Read more »
by Carrie Hinkel on January 29th, 2008
Believe it or not, sometimes getting a surge of unexpected business can do more harm than good. Being out of stock, having long checkout lines or unanswered phone calls can all lead to missed sales. But the damage isn’t just in immediate dollars; a store unprepared for sudden sales might very well miss out on those customers ever returning to give a store a “second chance”. And, for every sale that didn’t take place, there was also positive word-of-mouth that never took place – perhaps leaving you with even more missed sales.
Tips for making sure your business can handle... Read more »
by Rebecca Button on January 7th, 2008
This is a great article in the New York Times highlighting how outsourcing can be beneficial for small businesses.
"Outsourcing — the practice of using outside firms to handle work normally performed within a company — is a familiar concept to many entrepreneurs. Small companies routinely outsource their payroll processing, accounting, distribution, and many other important functions — often because they have no other choice. Many large companies turn to outsourcing to cut costs. In response, entire industries have evolved to serve companies’ outsourcing needs.
But not many businesses thoroughly understand the benefits of outsourcing. It’s true that outsourcing can... Read more »
by Veronica Stone on November 14th, 2007
The business environment in the past decade or more has changed rapidly. It is now possible for a small to medium-sized business to flourish with the help of thorough market research and efficient wholesale product sourcing.
This kind of sourcing has its advantages and its pitfalls: if the source is genuine, profits are guaranteed, but if the source is defective in one way or the other, the entire business can fail. To ensure continued success in wholesale product sourcing, here are a few basics that a small to medium reseller needs to keep in mind:
Before buying wholesale, the buyer... Read more »
by Carrie Hinkel on October 12th, 2007
As e-commerce and home-based businesses continue to flourish, more and more companies are turning to outsourcing to reduce costs and make certain aspects of their businesses simpler. Outsourcing, either domestically or internationally, is the subcontracting of work to another company.
There are a variety of services that can be outsourced to another company, such as:
*Warehousing and fulfillment services
*Order taking and customer service
*Data entry
*Website design and management
*Payroll and accounting
In general, the benefits of outsourcing certain services can be great:
*Save on training costs
*Reduce overhead costs
*Gain access to specialized skills
*Eliminate staffing problems during... Read more »