your say ...

Posting up articles on the web is a great way to generate inbound links to your website and drive traffic to it.

If you'd like to submit an article for publication on Women at Work, email it to jane@womenatwork.co.uk

Why not attach a photo of yourself too.

articles

the benefits of back office support

If, like me, you read tons of books about starting your own business before you started yours, you will have noticed that they all say that time is the most important commodity that you have. You can always get more money, but you can never get back your time.

These books also said that one of the most important things to do is not to recognise what you are good at, but to recognise what you are NOT good at, and then find people who are good at those things.

Take me - I am very good at finance and organisation but I am VERY bad at design and writing. It has taken me 3 weeks to write this article. Because I am bad at these things, I take more time doing them than a professional would and the result is never as good as if I had someone else do them for me.

In some cases, I did not even try doing it myself. For instance, I immediately went out and found a designer for my logo, business cards & letterheads. I then tried to write my own web site copy, but after days of wasted time & effort, I realised that I needed to get a professional to do it for me. It took her about 5 hours to do what it had taken me days to do, and she also did it better than I ever could have done, no matter how much time I had put into it.

Lesson learned. I now consistently do the things that I am good at myself and always outsource the things that I am not so good at. Consequently, I am much happier for it, and I now spend all my time doing what I need to do for the business - getting and retaining more customers!

Luckily for me, the things that I enjoy doing (and that I am good at) are things that most people do not enjoy doing (and are not very good at). These things are all the back office support things - bookkeeping, IT support, financial analysis, sorting out Companies House reporting, looking into tax questions, setting up filing systems, etc. This makes for a good business as all small business owners need these things to one extent or another, but do not like to do them themselves.

What things do you not like doing? I bet filing and bookkeeping are near the top of your list. Maybe dealing with employment legislation? Finding a fulfilment house? Entering data into spreadsheets? Most small business owners spend more than a day a week doing non-core activities. What could you be doing with that time if you paid someone else to do it for you? Getting on with doing the business you are in, for one thing! What about driving up sales or getting more customers?

But is it worth it outsourcing these things? Are you getting value for money? There is only one way to answer that question. Would you make more money with the time that it freed up than what you are paying someone else to do it? If you figure out what your time is worth (this could be as simple as what your hourly charge out rate is) and then work out how much time it takes you to do those things, then you can afford to pay someone else any amount less than that and you will be saving money!

If your daily charge out rate is £300 and you can pay someone less than £300 to take the back office support off your hands, you have just made money! That is, of course, if you use that newly freed up to do more work, rather than sit back and do nothing with it!

The owner of a residential property development firm was wasting 5 hours every week trying to do repairs on his properties himself, thinking that he was saving money by not paying someone else to do it. In reality, once he paid a professional to do it, they were only spending one hour a week, and he was able to focus on the strategic side of his business - he set up meetings with his mortgage brokers and saved himself thousands of pounds a month in reduced mortgage costs!

The co-owner of a fashion accessory retail business was spending more than one day every week on entering data into her sales & inventory system. She contacted us and we built her a new system in Excel that did most of the work for her, so it now only took one hour a week instead of one day. That extra day she has now is spent on the strategic development of her business instead of the day-to-day running of it.

Article by Heather Darnell

If you would like to reclaim some of your time, then contact Back Office Support Solutions on
0207 727 1129 or email us at info@ask-the-boss.co.uk
More information can be found at www.ask-the-boss.co.uk

back to articles