If you’ve succeeded in building your insurance practice from scratch, you probably have your can-do attitude to thank for it. Capability and competence in a wide variety of tasks are an asset in early-stage business. Those same traits could hold you back at a later business stage.
Many times, solo business owners and entrepreneurs think we can do it all. And we can, in the beginning. But as your business grows, you could be missing out on big-picture opportunities if you hold the reins too closely. Simple and effective outsourcing can help you free up time when and where you need it so that you can focus on your strongest ideas, multiply your efforts, and grow your insurance practice. Here’s how.
Outsourcing for Today’s Small Business
Many people mistakenly think it’s only the large corporations that outsource. In truth, small businesses are a great candidate for outsourcing, whether for part-time sales support, a receptionist or assistant, or for specialized skills and expertise.
Technology has made outsourcing easy, creating new ways to find workers, interact and communicate about work, and complete work virtually and remotely.
Many sites exist to connect workers, from simple repetitive tasks to complex project management, including Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace, Upwork (formerly oDesk and eLance), TaskBullet, Contently, and others. Many of these online platforms are set up to help business owners and contract workers interact and discuss work within the platform. Some even track the progress or time card of your outsourced worker automatically.
Another common outsourcing option is to hire a firm to virtually handle some aspect of your business. Frequently, insurance practices outsource tasks like payroll, accounting, marketing, and even customer service and sales support to specialized firms.
Leveraging Your Best Ideas
All this outsourcing gives you more free time to leverage your best ideas. Have you been meaning to work on your script but can’t find the time? Interested in expanding your sales and service in an adjacent market? Work on building your book of business with a new lead source — aged leads, perhaps?
Any such plans could be the ticket to massive growth for your business. But you’ve got accounting tasks and database entry to catch up on from last week. With your current budget, you aren’t able to bring on new in-house staff. You don’t have the bandwidth to do these important (but secondary) business tasks and take your company to the next level. The answer is to outsource.
Multiplying Your Efforts
Consider this situation and how outsourcing could help. With a remote receptionist for data entry, a professional accounting firm to manage the ledgers, and you to work with clients, it will feel like there are three of you working on your business.
You have in a sense multiplied your efforts. Now that you can focus on business goals with bigger ROI, you can anticipate a boost in growth.
Still, there’s more than one way to multiply your efforts with outsourcing. Imagine you get a one-time batch of 1,000 new leads to work through. It could take too long to work effectively through the call list alone, but this is a temporary rush — you don’t need a new staff member. Outsourcing works here, too.
It’s possible to hire well-trained part-time sales help on a contract basis, working through your influx of leads only when you need it. Here, too, you can expect to multiply your efforts and see gains in your profits.
Growing Your Insurance Practice
There’s a right time to outsource and a right time to hire a more permanent worker. The choice often comes down to a few factors — specifically cost, workload, and ROI. A significant amount of steady work that comes with its own high ROI may warrant hiring a team member. However, intermittent work and work that doesn’t add to your bottom line may be better suited to an outsourced worker.
While working with a remote worker or contract worker through new technologies comes with its challenges, the opportunity for growth is huge. Your insurance practice could be the best it’s ever been with a little help from outsourcing.
Ready to multiply your efforts with a new supply of leads? Check out the high-quality aged leads today at The Aged Lead Store. You’ll find thousands of sortable aged insurance leads that are ready to go, whether your business is auto, life, health, or home insurance.
