As a small business owner, you have a ton on your plate, there’s so much to do and so little time. Outsourcing certain tasks can be a great way to reduce your workload and increase efficiency. This can help you save time and focus on growing your business while taking care of your customers and having time for yourself, family, and friends. As a solo professional or small business owner it can sometimes be unclear what tasks you need or can outsource and which ones you can tackle yourself. Here are some tasks that you may consider outsourcing:
- Accounting and bookkeeping: Outsourcing your accounting and bookkeeping can help ensure that your financial records are accurate and up-to-date. Keeping everything in order now can save you a lot of time now, later, and after-tax time. This is definitely an outsourcing task for me! ✋🏽
- Administrative tasks: Outsourcing tasks such as data entry, answering phone calls, scheduling appointments, managing email, and bookkeeping to a virtual assistant can free up time for you to focus on growing your business while providing stellar service to your clients.
- Social media management: Outsourcing social media management can help you maintain a consistent and engaging online presence. A social media manager can create and post content, engage with followers, and run advertising campaigns on your behalf. 🤔
- Website design and maintenance: Outsourcing website design and maintenance can ensure that your website is visually appealing, user-friendly, and up-to-date. There are other things worse than a broken link but this can be a missed opportunity for a visitor. And the best part? You don’t have to spend time learning how to code or maintain your site.
- Graphic Design: Outsourcing graphic design projects can help you create professional-looking logos, brochures, and other marketing materials. A designer can also help you create a brand that showcases and helps to differentiate your business – which is an extension of you.
- Content Creation and Copywriting: Outsourcing content creation and copywriting such as blog posts, articles, sales pitches, and videos can help you maintain a consistent content schedule while providing valuable information to your customers. This is hit or miss for me, content I can create but copywriting is not a part of my strongest skill set. 😁
- IT Support: IT support can help you troubleshoot issues, ensure that your systems are running smoothly, and provide back-end maintenance and support for webinar and Zoom meetings. This can be a big issue for most people. No one wants to spend too much time figuring out how to make the printer do its job or try to figure out why the PowerPoint slide is not working as it should.
- Human Resources: Outsourcing human resources tasks such as hiring, onboarding, and payroll can help ensure that your employees are properly managed and compensated. It can also save you time and effort with employee concerns if ever needed.
Ultimately, outsourcing certain tasks can help you save time, reduce stress, and help you to focus on growing your business. Remember, outsourcing will not always be the best solution for every business. So be sure to carefully consider the benefits and costs of outsourcing and what tasks to outsource before making any decisions. 👍🏽
Things I Can’t Live Without: Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe Creative Cloud is like a trusted friend to me, it does pretty much everything I tell it to do. Of course, it cannot make me breakfast or prepare my favorite dish or even do my laundry (that would be nice 😁) but it can do a lot with the images of those tasty dishes and nicely folded laundry.
Illustrator can do a warp, a bulge, 3D, glowing edges, bevel and emboss, and so much more. There are tools like the magic wand, mesh tool, distort and transform, and an effects gallery. And, there are many other creative and editing tools that I’m sure to get around to using one day.
Photoshop can take care of all my photos, images, and sketches and clean, sharpen, lighten, darken, speckle, 3D transform, blend, and enhance, to look their best, and again, it can do so much more. I can bring all my Illustrator images into this bad boy and convert them to a jpg, png, or gif file to use in any online media or convert to pdf, and layers to files and paths to Illustrator.
InDesign can take all the Illustrator and Photoshop items and seamlessly incorporate them into a beautiful document. One page, two pages, or twenty pages, it helps you carefully curate colors, images, and text into a symphony of eye-catching bliss – oops, I mean document. 👏🏽 🥰
There is also Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Premiere Pro, and Bridge, just to name a few more. Adobe Creative Cloud, my go-to design package, it’s my bandwagon. Do you know your bandwagon? Go on, jump on it! 👏🏽
