If you’re an entrepreneur who has just started a business, or you’re an established small business player looking to expand your business, you know that you are required to handle a number of back office tasks and responsibilities which can be tedious and overwhelming.
As your business grows, there will eventually come a time when there’s no feasible way for you to handle everything on your own, and hiring full-time employees is not just expensive and time consuming, it doesn’t give you the flexibility you need as you would still be required to spend time to monitor their work.
The recommended solution to this situation, for almost all entrepreneurs, is finding a reliable virtual team to handle their back-office tasks and responsibilities.
The Benefits Of Using ‘VIRTUAL TEAM’ For Back-Office Tasks
A Virtual Team can offer several benefits to all levels of entrepreneurs. A few of them are:
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Cost Savings
As a business owner, you know that the real cost of hiring an employee is significantly higher than what you agree to pay them as their base salary as you will also have to account for taxes, office costs, equipment costs, and in most cases, benefits. Collaborating with a Virtual Team would certainly mean saving money, which can then be used to expand your budget.
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Flexibility
If you are managing your back-office operations in house, you’re constantly worried about hiring concerns in short span if time. Virtual teams give you the flexibility to scale up and down as and when needed. It also gives you the flexibility to focus on increasing your business instead of focusing on non-productive tasks.
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Quality
With an experienced and reliable partner to handle your back-office tasks, you can always be certain that you will get the right resources with equivalent experience and expertise as your in-house team. This ensure quality of work. For example, keeping a track of company’s finances can be difficult in early stages as even a single error in accounting can cost your business. A professional accountant within your virtual team will get the work done more accurately.
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Time Savings And Focus
One of the most important aspects while growing your business is to manage your own time. Every time you’re invested in non-core back office tasks is a time that could have been spent on planning the future of your business. Virtual team gives you the time and focus you need for growth than sustainability.
5 Most Important Back-Office Tasks To Outsource
Let’s look at some of the most important back-office tasks that a Virtual team can handle for you:
- Accounting and bookkeeping
- Marketing and advertising
- IT and technology
- Customer service
- HR and payroll
Putting a reliable team responsible for these tasks, you can focus more on growing your business.
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Accounting And Bookkeeping
In a philosophical way, Accounting and bookkeeping are “Yin and Yang” of your company’s finances. Bookkeeping is the process of tracking day-to-day expenses and income, while accounting is more of high-level strategic planning while keeping company bottom line at check.
Let’s look at few of the reasons why we recommend Virtual Teams to be the best option for accounting and bookkeeping, even more than some of the other back office tasks on this list.
For starters, and to say the least, finances are high stakes. If you make even a single mistake on your taxes, it could result in heavy penalty causing loss to the business. At the same time not keeping accurate track on your cash flow would ultimately result in not just losses but the collapse of your business.
There are more reliable and experienced people in this area than you, so it’s important for you to trust them—and avoid the risk of committing errors causing loss of valuable revenue.
Secondly, accounting and bookkeeping is a tedious task and takes up a lot of time. Bookkeeping, especially, is something that can take away hours of your day that could very well be better spent on higher prioriti
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Marketing
Marketing is one of the most important aspects for the success of your business. You surely wouldn’t want to rely entirely on word-of-mouth and your own first-hand efforts to increase your brand visibility and grow your customer base. The trouble is marketing can be expensive, complicated and time-consuming.
As a business owner, you may have the vision and ideas for growth, but if you’re not experienced in marketing, you may not be able to craft a campaign that is perfectly aligned with your product / service offerings and company values in order to cultivate a profitable return on investment (ROI). As a matter of fact, if your work in not convincing and your brand is misrepresented, this low-skill effort can negatively impact your business.
Skilled and reliable Virtual teams with right expertise will help you discover and understand marketing techniques you might not have considered. Plus, this will also reduce the overall expenses on your marketing budget.
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IT and Technology
Though the needs of IT and technology varies depending upon the nature of your business and the industry in which you operate, in almost all cases, you will benefit from working with a technology expert. It’s also important to have an expert technology team to ensure you’re investing your cost in the right equipment and proactive maintenance.
There are several responsibilities that could fall under this category where Virtual teams can help, including:
- setting up and maintaining your network connection
- sourcing and managing cloud services
- setting up and managing local servers
- improving your cybersecurity
In today’s digitized world, you can very easily become a victim of data breach (loss) and cyberattack. The average cost of a data breach is now $8.19 million, that’s a risk no one wants to accept. Hence, it is very important to have a structured cybersecurity strategy.
Since, IT infrastructure and technology require ongoing attention and maintenance, partnering with a Virtual IT team becomes the best option.
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Customer Service
If you’ve just started your business, you probably can talk to your customers individually to help them with their problems. This is a good strategy for customer retention, however, as you grow and the number of customers grow, it will almost be impossible for you to give individual attention to each customer and this approach will very quickly begin to fail.
The amount of time you will spend doing customer service will take away your valuable time for business expansion. It is important here to understand that partnering with Virtual Team not only gives you the freedom of time, it allows you to maximize your customer retention in the smartest and most efficient way.
In almost every business, acquiring a new customer costs five times more than to retain existing customer as long as you have the right practices in place. An excellent customer service team placed virtually will not only give you the cost advantage but will also help you ensure proper service to your customers for better retention.
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HR & Payroll
Managing employee records is mandatory but non-productive task that every organisation, irrespective of the size must do. As your business grows and you hire in-house resources, you will need a reliable team to ensure you have sufficient staff to handle the growth.
Payroll is another task that becomes mandate here. Whether you consider it an HR responsibility or Accounting function, it needs to be maintained not only for compliance with laws but for employee satisfaction as well.
Recruitment is also another critical and time-consuming tasks in an organization. Virtual team can help you handle all your HR related functions very smoothly along with recruitment.
Whether you’ve just started, or you’re on a growth spree, its almost impossible to get everything done with full-time employees and your own effort. In order to save time, save money, and improve your work quality and efficiency, you must partner with a reliable virtual team.