Businesses all face the same dilemma when it comes to allocating resources for tasks: complete in-house or pay to outsource? Let’s look at the benefits and issues with both, as it’s far from a one-size-fits-all solution.
Time for a break down. The good type, not the ones you have when excel crashes. Outsourcing is a great way to access a constantly evolving talent pool, something you could miss when your in-house team is consumed by the monotonous monster known as day to day. Sometimes that rare flair can be something you never knew you needed on a project. The out of house approach can also help you to compartmentalise projects in your business, so if you find yourself being distracted from your company’s purpose or goal, then this method of focusing in on your core business functions could be valuable to you too. Too many cooks spoil the broth so keep it lean! Having a smaller, core team could allow for a more driven business, with low personnel numbers allowing for less administrative attention and to put it bluntly – you can care less about staff and more about vision; if that’s your thing. Besides, having a constantly changing team could help your business stay fresh.
Uh oh, reality called. Time to see the dark side of outsourcing. Quality is something that every business aims to champion, so it’s a valid concern when most outsourcing opponents bring up lacking quality in externally completed tasks.
There are ways to try and mitigate these quality issues, by using trusted providers and having close contact with the out-of-house team, but then it begs the question, at that point why not just use your own team? It’s also no secret that management can be a proverbial pain, and communication not being a patch on what it could be internally.
After ripping the idea apart, oops, let’s look at the alternative: in-house operations. It gives you ultimate control over the direction of the task, with little delay between instruction and action. Nothing says understanding like a team meeting, with people you’ve worked through thick and thin with. It’s often the case that as a business, you also invest directly into the development of the people you work with; this long-term working relationship can be invaluable. Although it’s hard to quantify some of these advantages as numbers on paper, the tangible advantage it can give your business can certainly be written on a spreadsheet. Worst comes to the worst, if you have a cohesive, skilled team around you that can’t complete some task – outsource it! Although that sounded a little counterintuitive, in laymen’s terms, you can have an in-house team with the option to outsource, but not the other way around.
So what’s the catch you’re asking, well again we have to factor the human aspect of having a team, meaning rather great expense, ranging from office space, equipment, training, and everything else you need to keep a team together – basically you have to contend with responsibility, both financially and in terms of those you guide. People are people, meaning you will have to contend with absences and every other gruelling form of micromanagement.
To get the inside scoop of this dilemma, we spoke to Joel Rush from AsOne. A common catalyst of this headache is when companies look at branding and image: “It is rare that companies should have their own in house marketing team. Small teams concentrating on one subject can often be jaded and blinkered with a lack of exposure to other clients and sectors.
Compare the salary for a marketing manager vs using an agency. For example, our agency’s team can fulfil all the needs of most companies for about £2500 + VAT per month. While a decent marketing professional will cost about £3,000 per month when tax, pension contributions, and other expenses are taken into account. An employee also needs to be paid while they are on holiday not producing anything and depending on the company, when they are sick and not contributing.
Even if it was not for the costs the owner of the business usually has little knowledge of what good results should be and therefore cannot properly manage, set targets for their employee or have any quality control or oversight as they are blinded with jargon they don’t understand.”
So I think it’s time for a definitive answer. Well it doesn’t exist. Again we’ve reached that point in business where I have to say you should stick to the things you’re good at, the areas where you pride yourself in providing a great product or service. This is how we can start to build a template for approaching our initial dilemma. When it comes to services that may be operational and not necessarily unique to your project (think receptionists and cleaners), then this calls you to look into outsourcing in my opinion, for the factor of ease and cost. Similarly, some tasks are more specialty (think Joel’s example of marketing), and they can call for outsourcing too if it’s not your company’s focal point – don’t just try your best, do justice to what you do well. Yes a more speciality form of outsourcing may incur greater cost, but it’s my opinion that it doesn’t warrant tarnishing your quality to save small amounts – it’ll just cost you later. But this is a hybrid approach, you still need a quality team to be the foundation of your business, I think it’s almost impossible to run a viable company from pure outsourcing; at the least you’d have very little hair left at the end.
This should be tailored to your needs, It’s impossible to recommend a percentage based system for in-house to out-of-house, but the next best thing is this: each time you have to decide between the two, picture the task being completed – what do you envision? Does it need to be a perfect representation of your business’ values? Does it need to take the world by storm? Does it need to just get done? When you have your end goal in sight, refer back to the benefits and costs of each solution. I think that if you’ve gotten this far in business, common sense will be able to match up the dots and show you the way forward. Also be mindful of the resources available to you and the frequency of the task. If you realise that marketing (for example) will soon play a large part in your business’ success, then look into investing in a permanent team, but if you need just one design for just one product there’s no need to hire an artist to sit and twiddle their thumbs for the next year after the initial project is complete.
In the end, you should be meticulous yet honest in assessing your company’s strengths to find the perfect balance between solutions.
A huge thanks to Joel from AsOne for help writing and researching this article. With nearly twenty years experience in the industry, and many large businesses flourishing with their help, there’s no doubt they have the expertise and knowledge your business needs. Head over to their website to start the discussion of how they can help your business in development, marketing and most things digital.