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Are You Pound-Foolish with your Time?
The Sprocket Report
Business owners wear a lot of hats to contain expenses, but sometimes our penny-wise ways are actually costing us. Consider whether it’s better for you to outsource certain tasks.
In our personal lives, we frequently outsource tasks that would be simple to do ourselves. Cleaning the house, changing the car’s oil, cooking dinner – it’s not hard to do any of these and yet many of us are more than happy to pay someone else to do them. But when it comes to our businesses, it seems harder to spend our cash than spend our time, even though our time is worth much, much more. Take a hard, honest look at the “savings” when doing these three common tasks yourself:
Payroll Taxes
Figuring, deducting and reporting payroll taxes is a non-negotiable chore imposed by our government. When you do it yourself, it only costs your time – until you forget to do it or do it wrong and then it costs a whole lot more in penalties.
There are a number of moving parts to keep in mind as the rules change, employees vary and salaries fluctuate. Also, there are regular deadlines to meet, regardless of how busy you are at work. Most small business owners find outsourcing this headache to be well worth the cost.
Website Upkeep
Even if your website mainly serves as an online brochure without a lot of active functionality, the technology affecting your site is busily updating without your input. In 2018, Google required websites to get SSL certificates to avoid the “insecure” designation and gave preference to mobile-friendly sites while WordPress released seven updates to their platform that possibly disrupted any plugins with which the site was built.
When a business owner is busy doing business, keeping up with tech updates and fixing what breaks if often overlooked. Clients may never mention it, but they are certainly seeing the glitches and forming an opinion. Ancient “news” and outdated events or specials only add to the poor perception of a neglected website.
Consider how much time it takes every month to check for platform updates, test plugins and bring news up-to-date. Now be honest – do you really update your website regularly? And when you do, does it actually take twice as long because you forgot how you did it last time? Then maybe it’s time to outsource this task.
Social Media
Outsourcing social media marketing can be the hardest decision to make because you figure you’re on social platforms already anyway, so it’s just a few minutes more. But it’s usually the last thing on your very long To-Do list which means, in actuality, it rarely gets done.
Strategic social media marketing takes extra effort to plan, prepare and schedule, so business owners will put it all aside until some mythological “free time.” Meanwhile, nobody has posted anything in a couple of months and your business looks like it’s closed up shop.
Think it through: How long does it take you to plan and post your social media marketing? An hour every week? More? What is your own hourly rate? Now what does it cost to outsource this task? You may be surprised to realize that not only does it cost less to have a pro take over, but you are gaining a good number of hours to get some real work done.
Take the British saying to heart and consider whether you are worrying about your pennies at the expense of your pounds. By outsourcing, your business chores could be professionally completed while relieving your stress and guilt and providing you with more time to focus on what you do best at your business. Do the math and see if it makes sense for you.
Sprocket Websites can’t take over all of your annoying tasks, but we can lighten the load when it comes to website maintenance and social media marketing. Just give us a call to talk over your needs. We’d be happy to help!
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Kate Gingold
I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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