When you are running a business, it can be tempting to think that the only way to truly improve your company is by investing in the skills and capabilities of your workers and the equipment you hold. However, sometimes it is more beneficial in business to invest in the skills and equipment of individuals outside your business – and this article aims to highlight why.
One-Off Costs vs. Consistent Payments
When you are trying to decide whether or not you should outsource a particular aspect of your business, one of the most important points to consider is the cost to your business. Is it going to be a one-off cost or a recurring issue.
If you will only ever need to deal with this problem once, then the decision is easy. Outsourcing is always going to be cheaper for one-off services. Rather than paying employees to develop skillsets and spending money to acquire tools, you can instead hire a professional with the right skills and tools to handle your issue immediately.
However, if you anticipate that you will need to engage with the service in question more than once, it then becomes harder to determine whether or not outsourcing will be worthwhile. You will have to consider other questions, such as:
- How often will you need the service?
- How expensive will the service be?
- How expensive would it be to acquire and maintain the tools and employees necessary to handle the problem yourself?
Plenty of variables are in question once you enter the realm of repeated payments, and often, you need a better understanding of what you are asking.
Expensive Tools and Skills
First and foremost, you will have a tough time determining which option is financially better for your business if you don’t truly understand the expense of acquiring the right tools and skills:
The Costs of Tools
Tools can be incredibly expensive to businesses for two reasons. First, they can be very expensive to acquire – particularly if they are high-quality and exceptionally useful tools like a Vacuum Booster Pump.
However, tools can also be expensive to a business because they generally have a cost to maintain. So, if you have to acquire a whole set of niche tools to complete a task that you would otherwise outsource, it may be worth simply outsourcing the task to avoid the maintenance cost that those tools would bring.
The Costs of Training and Experience
There are two primary factors that will determine a worker’s “skills” and those are their training and their experience. These aspects of a worker’s skillset make them both desirable and expensive.
The best option is to have a well-trained, highly experienced professional to do the work you need. However, if that worker is your employee, then both their training and experience level will reasonably add to how much you need to pay them to keep them on staff.
Therefore, if you need an incredibly difficult, high-skill job done regularly – and that work isn’t a part of what you offer as a business – then it is often better to outsource that work. This is because the cost of maintaining an ancillary skillset like that is often greater than the cost of simply hiring the outsourcing company whenever those skills are needed.