Don’t know for sure if you should outsource or hire someone traditionally? Here are 3 cases when picking outsourcing is the best decision for your business.

More than 300,000 Australian entrepreneurs have been outsourcing jobs for years. Europe has quickly caught on, favoring the Philippines for outsourcing. 68% of US companies choose to outsource over local hires with more than 37% of small businesses outsourcing at least one part of their business process.

Over 1.5 million Filipinos are registered on freelancing networks, from SEO, web development, content creation, and graphic design to administrative tasks. That’s a huge pool of talent, and a huge chunk of the overall 1.57 billion registered members of the biggest and most trusted freelancer site.

So when should you outsource? There are pros and cons of outsourcing, same as anything else, but virtual assistants are gaining a reputation for their superhero style: go in, get the job done. Finished.

Keep them on or finish the contract as you see fit. After you part ways, you only need to flash the bat signal when you need them again.

Here are the scenarios where you should definitely choose outsourcing over traditional hiring:

1. When you need a skill or talent you currently lack in your existing team.

Or perhaps you’re an entrepreneur doing it lone ranger style and it’s been going nicely enough from the beginning, but now you’ve reached the sought-after, most-envied part: small business expansion.

19% of small businesses with 251 to 500 employees outsource primarily for business scaling. Virtual assistants can provide support to make their business valuable to customers.

Or you wish to speed things up in getting there by focusing your attention rather than spreading it too thin in taking care of everything, learning everything, doing everything, sometimes happily and sometimes not.

26% of small businesses outsource mostly to work with an expert. 18% of them say that working with a professional is their main motivation for outsourcing.

You’re a baker. You are skilled in fondants and buttercreams but not in social media, graphics design, content writing, or digital marketing.

You won’t have time to learn and do social media, design graphics, and write content. You and your partner are probably writers but you don’t have the resources to apply SEO. And you may be experienced in social media–but you don’t know web development, graphic design, WordPress plugins, etc.

Outsource it.

Hire skilled virtual assistants. That’s what they do. They do things you can’t or would rather not.

You’re a baker. A startup bakery bakes–someone else has to make the website, someone else has to do the social media, someone creates graphics, and someone has to write the content. You and your partner are probably also writers but you don’t know SEO. And you may be experienced in social media–but you don’t know web development, graphic design, WordPress plugins, etc.

Outsource it.

2. When the skill or talent you need isn’t permanent or at the core of your service

You bake. After the website is made, the web developer and graphic designer have done their jobs. Your bakery can now downscale back to its core employees, and also expand to a writer or two to do the blog and manage the social media.

You do also rehire your previous web dev for updates, security maintenance, and bug fixes that come up. And your graphic designer again for some new materials for promotions.
It’s that easy.

Outsourcing can support several business functions, especially non-core tasks. The most commonly outsourced services in 2022 include:

• • IT Services
  • Digital Marketing
  • Legal
  • Finance
  • Development, and;
  • Customer support

With this flexibility and economy, your small business has the room and funds to grow big partly through virtual assistants and freelancers who thrive in an as-needed work environment–no need for an office even when you discover your bakery’s mountain of receipts now needed to be put in order for your financial health!

Outsource it.

3. When you’re launching something new or simply launching your company

A launch is HUGE. It’s not an opening, although an opening by itself is nothing to sneeze at either. A launch is a grand leap, with that towering steel platform, rocket noise, and an audience ooohing and aaaahing.

What you use as your platform, rockets and jets are up to you and the nature of your startup. To quote from the film, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (incidentally, the sequel to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which they deal with expanding the Marigold),

“It takes teamwork to make a dream work.”

Outsourcing helps make it all happen.

Your bakery is a huge hit. It revolutionized cronuts. Demand has produced five branches in three cities, and now it’s launching Cronutso– a shopping, creativity, and gaming app where customers can design their cronuts, order them, and use their points in the cronut crush puzzle to get discounts or freebies.

You and your bakers don’t know the first thing about making an app. Outsource it.

You and your bakers don’t know the first thing about advertising the app. Outsource it.

You and your bakers don’t know the first thing about press releases, social media marketing, and other techniques to increase your online relevance, beyond making noise about the shop and the app. You outsource it to a virtual team skilled in tickling a target audience.

The result? A real launch. Far-reaching rocket engine noise. An audience oohing and aaaahing. More publicity. More demand for cronuts. More branches! Huge earnings.

Outsourcing to skilled freelancers is one of the best decisions (and investments) entrepreneurs make.