Small business owners wear a lot of hats: operations, sales and marketing, bookkeeping, shipping and receiving, purchasing, vision casting, and more. Those who have learned they can’t do it all turn to outsourcing and hiring employees, and both are great solutions for taking tasks off your hands.
Employees are great for helping with a wide variety of tasks, where outsourcing helps business owners engage specialists for a fraction of the cost of hiring someone, especially when their tasks would likely be very part time.
Processing orders and delivering them to customers can be time-consuming and can easily become inefficient, costing money that eats into profit margins. For this reason, it is one of the tasks that could put money back into your business.
Here are 5 signs it’s time to outsource fulfillment tasks:
You are working too hard in your business rather than on it.
You love getting the orders in, but if most of your time is spent on the roller coaster – selling, shipping and sales fall, selling again, shipping again – it’s time to outsource fulfillment.
What better use of your time is there than generating the orders? That revenue generation should be the way your time is used, not dealing with processing and delivering orders. Get off the roller coaster!
Inventory control and supply chain issues
Often inventory control issues come into play when there simply isn’t a solid strategy for when to order supplies. Waiting until the last item is pulled off the shelf isn’t a strategy, especially when supply chain issues delay replacement shipments.
Sitting with boatloads of cold inventory on the shelf is also not a strategy. Outsourced fulfillment is managed by professionals who can print on demand and who are keenly aware of supply chain management techniques, so you don’t have to be. Hooray!
Rising costs
It would be great if costs went down over time, rather than increase, but that’s just not reality. However, being able to control costs by purchasing in bulk at discounted rates when they are available, and being more efficient, can all help.
Outsourced fulfillment can help small businesses capitalize on all these by warehousing and distribution methods the small business owner usually doesn’t have resources for on their own.
Decreasing efficiency
We often underestimate how inefficient a process can be until we really sit and add it all up. For example, do you know how much it really costs in time, money, frustration, and supplies every time you run to the post office?
Decreased efficiency can look like wasted materials, excess supplies, lack of space, lag time, waiting, redoing work, and more. If fulfillment is bottlenecked or wasteful, it’s likely time to outsource.
Slow response times
Along with decreasing efficiency is often slow response times. It can also be caused by just being too busy! If you are struggling to get orders out the door, or get materials delivered to prospects, current customers, vendors, or even employees, outsourcing fulfillment can close the gap.
Seeing the signs? Let Plumb Marketing help. We support direct mail printing, print fulfillment, and order fulfillment, including inventory management, receiving, pick and pack, packaging, shipping and tracking, so you can focus on your core business demands.
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