How Smaller Businesses Can Use External Services to Grow

[This article was written by Meghan Belnap.]

Countless entrepreneurs go into business for themselves only to learn that their plans on paper rarely translate to real world scenarios. Before they realize it, these business owners are in way over their head and need help to advance forward. Never is this truer than when it is time to push a business to expand to become something more than what it presently is. Fortunately, the chaos that comes with this kind of change will be best managed by offloading burdens to external, third-party businesses that symbiotically help the parent business to grow and emerge in their market.

Outsourcing Customer Service

When it comes to expanding a business, few small businesses have the in-house staff to handle their patron’s customer service needs. Fortunately, there are external businesses who specialize in providing this kind of service. By outsourcing to allow a third-party company manage inbound customer calls and concerns, this frees the limited staff of a young, growing business up to focus on other important areas of its daily operations and growth.

Business Development Agencies

The fact that so many startups fail by the time they enter a growth phase suggests that more entrepreneurs should take advantage of outside education and consulting services. This is to ensure that their business has a fighting chance. When something is going terribly wrong with how a business is being run, it might be time to let someone with more experience operating and repairing businesses take a look. This is essentially what a Business Development Agency does for companies in danger of going belly up. Of course, even if a company seems to be doing just fine, it never hurts to employ the services of a business development agency to get a second opinion. There might be simple unforeseen changes that could turn a decent business into a well oiled machine: changes that improves customer volume, sales and other issues central to the long term growth and stability to the company being analyzed.

Advertising Services

Marketing a business is often one of the hardest areas for entrepreneurs trying to grow their business. It is not that they fail to grasp the value of marketing, but it can be difficult to know how to market effectively in a given area. Fortunately, there exists external advertising services that can leverage demographic studies and do market research to help a growing company isolate what their target customers are. Plus, these advertising services will also know how to reach these target customers through using a variety of effective ad campaigns across diverse media platforms.

Project Planning Services

A company might want to engage in a project that will help its growth. A project has to be well planned, coordinated and ultimately executed correctly. Often this requires more expertise and man-power than an entrepreneur of a small business can dedicate to the task. This is why project planning services exist that help to fill in the gaps where a business is experiencing problems or deficiencies with in-house resources to pull a huge project off the right way.

When the right tasks are delegated to external, third-party service providers, this helps a growing company to more effectively balance its load. In addition, choosing to outsource procedures to these service providers will typically be far more cost effective than hiring on new employees to pick up the slack. The end result is that a growing company will have the support of other businesses and experts helping them to maintain the efficiency and pace they must operate at to be a strong competitor in their industry.

Author Bio:

Meghan Belnap is a freelance writer who enjoys spending time with her family. She loves being in the outdoors and exploring new opportunities whenever they arise. Meghan finds happiness in researching new topics that help to expand her horizons. You can often find her buried in a good book or out looking for an adventure. You can connect with her on Facebook right here and Twitter right here.