Starting and owning a small business is one of the toughest things any entrepreneur will face in their lifetimes. But, keeping it running and staying in the black is even more difficult and as statistics show, a majority of them won’t even make it past their fifth year anniversary.
One of the main reasons startups fail is because the owners try to have a go at it alone, or undertake too many tasks at once and thus overwhelm themselves. No single person can undertake all aspects of a business and be successful at achieving all set targets; somewhere down the line one or another part of the business will suffer.
Even if (and that is a big “if”) they were able to keep all the balls in the air, focusing their attention on a dozen supporting process when they should be giving their all to their main one will not be fair to the business. A financial whiz should be concentrating on giving good and sensible economic advice instead of having to worry about how their website is set up or how many visitors are arriving on the homepage.
In other words, small business owners should seek to have their non-central tasks and assignments delegated to a concerned third-party so they can pool all their resources and attention to focus on their main purpose – creating and delivering their goods and services.
One task that can easily be outsourced is website maintenance. Apart from the reason mentioned above, there are a few more:
Lack of Expertise – unless the business itself is a website design or maintenance company, it can be safely assured that there will be a certain lack of technical expertise to ensure the site is maintained and kept under optimal conditions. Technology, and especially internet technology, is a phenomenon that keeps changing every day. Unless someone dedicates their career to keeping on top of these advancements there is a high chance they will quickly find themselves outdated and working on websites will make them a liability to the site’s (and hence the owner’s and their clients’) security. It therefore makes much more sense to hand the job over to a business that knows what they are doing.
Ensuring Good Image – a website is the digital face of a business that the whole world gets to see. Visitors will notice everything from design (colors, fonts, navigation, etc.) to processing (online purchasing, data retrieval and submission, security, etc.) and judge that business depending on what they experience. Having a poorly designed site might put some potential customers off, but arriving at a site that is down most of the times will certainly turn away more of them while a security breach or loss of data will certainly kill any prospects of ever having any clients at all.
Hence, making sure the website is maintained by professionals will project an image of a business that knows what it is doing, and that it is doing it well.
Cost Cutting – one way a business can make money is by not spending it or by cutting expenses. A good way businesses can do so is by getting rid of the overhead they don’t need or that isn’t part of their main business process. An online shoe merchant shouldn’t need to have an IT team sitting by when the job can be outsourced to a management company. Why pay salaries? Why spend on overhead and gadgets for support staff when there is a cheaper option? Simply handing the job over to outsourcing companies takes care of all problems with one sweep.
Peace of Mind – what most people don’t realize is that owning a website isn’t just about working on pages and dealing with matters on the front end. There is a lot of work and, for the unlucky ones, haggling that goes on behind the scenes. Web hosting providers, domain hosts, marketing companies, affiliates, advertisers, social media platforms, and lots more become an integral part of a business that latch on as soon as the site starts to take shape. Dealing with all these entities and streamlining it all so they can complement one another instead of being obstacles in each other’s paths is a big task. No business should need to worry about setting digital things straight unless it directly affects their main business process. All these nitty-gritty tasks can be handled by an outsource website maintenance company.
Dedicated Customer Service – depending on the agreement between the business and the outsourcing company, a dedicated customer service or helpline can be established to deal with clients directly. This means, clients calling the helpline won’t have to deal with the business’ staff (who might not be experts in web technology or even have a clue about it) but rather with those of the outsourcers’ who will be able to help them more effectively.
Finally, the main thing to consider here is that a business should be doing what it is good at while leaving the rest to those who are more capable of handling it. Therefore, the answer to whether or not a small business should outsource its website maintenance is a “yes.”
