Veronica Haze, Negosentro | 5 Business Services Startups Need to Consider Before Growing | Life as a startup is stressful, but compared to life as a small business, startup entrepreneurs have it easy. When it’s just you and a couple others holed up in a co-work space, you don’t need to think about many of the major expenses businesses incur or the services they need to survive. As a startup, you bootstrap and borrow your way to success; as a small business, you have to start investing in more permanent solutions.
As you transition into a long-term small business, you acquire assets like private office space, equipment, machines and a large, experienced staff. All these things will help your business grow big and strong – but they need support to be effective. Here are a few services your business needs:
IT Support Services
All businesses rely on a bevy of technology, but larger businesses often struggle to organize their tech effectively and maintain optimized tech performance. As a startup, you likely used a few personal devices and some simple digital tools, but as you expand, you will add entire networks and vast suites of software. While you might consider yourself tech-savvy, you will be too busy running your enterprise to address every tech issue. Therefore, you will need IT services.
Outsourced IT support services can offer 24/7 assistance for all your tech-related needs. If software isn’t functioning properly, if your tech needs patches and updates, if you want additional digital security, and if you need answers to any tech-related questions, IT support should be able to provide, day or night.
Communications Services
How do clients, suppliers, and others contact your business? Like most startup entrepreneurs, your answer was probably, “my personal cellphone number.” Unfortunately, as your business expands, you can’t have clients contacting you directly; instead, they should be able to reach the appropriate staff in sales or customer service. That means you need comprehensive communications services that connect your internal workforce with one another and the outside world.
It’s difficult to predict what communications services you’ll need when, which means you should opt for providers that can scale with your expanding business. Cisco distributors offer a range of coverage options, so you can establish professional communications services as you need them.
HR and Payroll Services
It doesn’t matter whether you have two employees or 200 – you need human resources. Unfortunately, the field of people operations is complex, requiring experienced and effective staff that typically come with a high price tag. To save money on HR, you absolutely should outsource many of their functions, including payroll and benefits administration.
Demanding precise work every week, payroll and benefits administration is a tedious job that eats up embarrassing amounts of staff time. Professional HR providers have systems in place that drastically reduce the effort necessary to get payroll and benefits right. Thus, third-party people operations can offer much lower prices than in-house staff, keeping your costs low and your efficiency high.
Social Media Services
There is a pernicious myth regarding social media marketing: that it is free and easy, so anyone can do it effectively. However, if you have put any time into a social media marketing campaign, you have quickly realized that this tactic is exceedingly expensive, egregiously time consuming, and as far from easy as marketing can be. While the early days of social media might have been wonderful for perceptive, agile businesses, social media marketing has grown into a complicated field fit only for experts.
To avoid wasting your efforts on a mediocre social media marketing campaign, you should outsource the work to a professional social media services firm. These service providers will create and manage your social media presence, generating and scheduling posts, curating content, and engaging with your community, allowing your marketing team to focus on bigger, bolder campaigns – or helping you eliminate in-house marketing altogether.
Cleaning Services
There is something significant about moving into your own office space, but with great premises come great responsibility. When you are working in your home or a co-work space, the tasks of cleaning and maintenance seem less important for your business. If you want to keep destructive critters and noxious odors out of your private office, cleanliness should be a top priority.
It’s a mistake to assume your employees will naturally keep your office tidy. Even if you do employ particularly sanitary staff, grime naturally accumulates over the course of weeks and months. The only solution is to hire a cleaning service to vacuum, dust, wipe, and otherwise clean your office space at regular intervals. Then, your organized office will bring organized growth.
