Hiring vs Outsourcing for Entrepreneurs

“The first hire constitutes the single biggest growth event facing any growing firm—it effectively corresponds to the challenge to solo entrepreneurs to double their workforce.”

(Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11187-016-9748-3)

“I struggled -- a lot. But when I started hiring out more and more tasks, I began making more and more money.”

- 4 Steps That Prove You Can't Afford Not to Hire Your First Employee (https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/271185)

What do both articles have in common? Both emphasize the fact that you cannot do everything yourself. You need to put in perspective to how much you can do in your day. There will be tasks that only you can do to grow your business. Then there will be tasks that someone else can do for you, probably better than you would since your skills might not be for all the areas of running a business. Certain functions within any organisation with always be routine but necessary such as accounting and bookkeeping. Is it worth your time and effort to keep working on activities related to accounting when someone more expertly skilles might be able to do the same and more in lesser time?

If you will not value your own time, who will? Staying in charge of a growing business also means you never let go of the hawk-eyed perspective of growth. Staying on top of how each department is effectively growing is essential for any entrepreneur. Will it be easy and quick for you to spot where you can you save costs and how you can optimise your business processes to save more money? An entrepreneur must know when to ask for help. We believe that is one of the key lessons an entrepreneur must learn early on in their journey. Hiring full time employees for processes that do not have enough work to justify might not be a smart thing to do in the early stages of your business or when you are scaling up. Now you don’t need to pay for a salary and other hiring costs when you can work with a specialist that will have more experience and can either work full or part time by allocating their own internal resources in such a way to ensure the work is taken care of.

Your finance department is one such function. Hiring early on might be a mistake if your business is not producing enough work for them. Even looking at the other extreme, if thing are very busy and they are over-worked because the business is growing, they may tend to lose sight of financial analysis and get stuck in the mundane accounting processes of basic record keeping rather than goal focussed reporting and anaylsis. This will again be harmful for the business since nobody then has an eye on costs, savings and investments. Make no mistake – the finance department is ideally placed to drive the business forward by analysing performance, asking questions and providing suggestions for improvement.
A partner in your business, an invested collaborator will always work with you to achieve your goals and targets.