Running a business doesn’t mean you have to do everything yourself – even if you have the staff available to do it.

Skills, costs, time, and risk are just some of the important factors to think about to successfully take your business forward. This is where outsourcing can help. There are many advantages to using an outsourcing company to help you and your company, from day-to-day work, to developments over the long-term. Here are five key benefits.

Gaining access to skills you don’t have is a first key benefit of outsourcing. It can allow you to use people with experience and different levels of expertise to carry out specific projects and areas of development, when you don’t have the abilities to do that work yourself. This could include complex and technical projects, such as for your website, like using a professional service to design your web software. Other examples include a PR company to write press releases about your company news, or an agency to do your digital marketing.

Saving money is often thought of as a business benefit of outsourcing. But there are more advantages to this than some might realise, which can save on your finances right across your business. For instance, hiring full-time staff to work on a specific project can cost money, from the recruitment process thorough to training. Making the decision to hire temporary staff can also lead to disappointment – people are often put forward that don’t live up to expectation. For some projects you might also need to buy certain equipment or software to do the work well, which an outsourcing company will probably already have.

As well as saving you money, saving you time is another benefit of outsourcing. Some projects can take time to get started, due to needing hours for meetings and brainstorming sessions. You’ll also need to make time to fit them in around other tasks during the working day. It can also take time to find the right people to do such projects, or time to read up around a topic to build your knowledge, if you’ll be doing the work yourself. Whereas, when outsourcing, these projects can be started right away. Outsourcing companies will also be able to dedicate more time to the work, while their experience means they’re likely to get it done sooner.

If you choose to take on a project yourself when you don’t have the expertise, you increase the risk of it failing. But by getting access to skills and expertise you don’t have, you can reduce the risk of a project being unsuccessful. If you hand it over to a team that know what they’re doing, and have probably done that work for other businesses many times before, it’s more likely to be a success. Also, if things don’t go to plan, an outsourcing company is likely to spot the signs and react quickly.

Finally, when running a business, those day-to-day tasks that can take time, but need to be done, can get in the way of the exciting stuff – developing your company. By outsourcing such tasks, like bookkeeping and administration work, you have more time to focus on building and growing your business. This could include starting projects you’ve put on hold, expanding your services and product range, or extending your company premises.