5 of the Biggest Benefits of Outsourcing Your Back-Office Operations

Front-office operations: The face of the company, where the business interacts with customers and clients. Back-office operations: The part of the business that is not client-facing, dealing with things like administration and finances. Back-office operations make the front office operations possible.

Front-office employees serve customers and clients and, in any physical (as opposed to fully online) business, must be employed in-house. You need a concierge at the front desk of a hotel, you need a housekeeping staff to clean and maintain the guest rooms. The back-office employees, however, do not need to be working on-site. 

In fact, outsourcing your back-office operations can have incredible and varied benefits.

* Benefit #1: Cost Efficiency 

Especially as you work to grow and expand your business, keeping the back-office operations growing in tandem with the front-office operations can become very expensive.

New employee onboarding, training, and maintenance can quickly begin to eat out of your bottom line. Not to mention employee turnover costs and investment in new technologies and their associated training. Developing this back-office support is expensive and maintaining it only adds to your costs every quarter.

When you outsource back-office operations to a reputable third party, you can significantly reduce the amount you spend on this portion of your business. Lower costs of labor for offshore workers and access to an existing infrastructure can save you thousands of dollars. With outsourced back-office operations, you can save on training, technology, labor, and office overhead.

* Benefit #2: Time to Focus On Core Components

Hiring, onboarding, training, and maintaining your back-office operations can not only be expensive, but extremely time consuming. By outsourcing these operations to a third party you will find yourself with more time to focus on the core components of your business.

With all of this time and money freed up you can invest more energy into your business goals, short-term and long-term. You can think more deeply and freely about your marketing solutions. You can reinvest time and money into your product or service — how can you make it better? How can you make it the best?

* Benefit #3: Gain Immediate Access to Services and Technology

By outsourcing your back-office operations to a third party you can gain access to services and technology you may have never obtained had you kept your back-office on site. Oftentimes you will be able to access service around the clock as opposed to just Monday through Friday from nine to five. This means quicker turnaround times which leads to healthier vendor and customer relations. 

What’s more, you can have access to the latest technologies in back-office operations. Instead of investing your own significant time and resources to purchase new software and hardware, you can take advantage of third-party companies which already have those technologies in place and running. You can have access to the latest technology in the field without breaking the bank.

* Benefit #4: Improved Productivity

Right now, as you’re reading this article, you have an in-house back-office team. You have anywhere from a couple to dozens of employees dedicated to tasks such as accounting, inventory management, human resources, supply chain management, logistics, and planning.

Each of these tasks can be a job unto itself. Each one requires at least one employee to handle its ins and outs, and that one employee requires hiring, onboarding, training, full-time pay, and benefits such as health insurance, holidays, and paid time off. Each employee is an investment. 

By outsourcing your back-office tasks, you can make the most of each employee’s “investment.” No longer tied down by crunching numbers and punching in Excel sheets, these employees, who are often intimately familiar with your business, are free to pursue other tasks and goals.

Your staff can now focus on business-growing ventures such as business acquisitions, marketing development, money management, and looking at the big picture — how your business can grow to be the best and most profitable it can be. Former back-office employees may have important and beneficial insights that the C-suite or front-office employees have not had the opportunity to gain.

Your productivity can rise by 100% as these employees dedicate their time and considerable talents to other aspects of running your business.

* Benefit #5: Enhanced Scalability and Managed Risk

By outsourcing your back-office operations to a reliable third party, you create room for your business to grow. As we’ve discussed, outsourcing can save you considerable money. These freed-up assets can then be used to enhance and build your clientele or production operations.

As your volume of business grows, specialized third-party companies will be able to keep up with increased workloads. After all, back-office operations is what they specialize in. It’s what they hire for. It’s what they’re looking to do. So if you grow your clientele or number of locations or volume of production or number of front-office employees, the third party company will be able to keep up.

No headaches as you try to secure office space for dozens of new employees, let alone the time-consuming hiring process each of these new employees requires. As your need for extra back-office support grows, these third-party companies can grow with you.

What’s more, the third party back-office companies can provide your business with extra security. Resource allocation, the hiring and training of employees, and maintaining daily operations takes a lot of time and money.

Each of these activities presents a risk where money could be misused, misplaced, or lost in some way. But as a third party takes care of all this, you will be able to focus on the bigger picture and lose the risk of letting things fall through the cracks.

The benefits to outsourcing back-office operations are hard to ignore. Not only can you save considerable time and money, but you can then relocate those resources to grow and enhance your company’s products and services.

Through outsourcing, you can gain access to the newest technology, most specialized talent, and even around-the-clock support. You can grow your business as you close the risks associated with having an in-house back-office team.

 

Author: Cesar Jimenez, myBasePay CEO
Cesar A. Jimenez is an entrepreneur, investor, and military veteran with over 25 years of staffing industry expertise successfully leading technology staffing organizations. His expertise in the IT industry allows him to use his experience as a thought leader for talent acquisition, staffing, IT, and recruitment technologies with a passion for contingent workforce solutions. Cesar has held various leadership roles for both a global staffing organization and technology solutions companies. This expertise has enabled him to develop alternative workforce models that provide the agility for organizations to be competitive in today’s marketplace. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with hisfamily, working out, and coaching high school baseball players.