Thirty years ago, I was managing Christopher’s Restaurant in Coleman. My sister owned the place and we made a pretty good team if I don’t say so myself. One day at 12:30 pm approximately 50 classic cars rolled into the parking lot for lunch! It was an exciting afternoon to say the least. As we were waving goodbye to our car-loving visitors, we both “remembered” that today was the day our federal tax deposit was due and we had missed the deadline. Ugh – that feeling of impending penalty over-shadowed the elation of the day.
That was it – we needed to outsource our payroll. We spent multiple hours each week translating timecards and then adding them and then confirming they were punched into the correct department. It was a nightmare and we rock – paper – scissored each pay period to see who had to do it.
The best business decision we ever made was to outsource, which is the process of shifting tasks to a third party instead of managing them yourself. Companies who outsource don’t have to invest in recruiting and training new employees, instead, they outsource the work to professionals who already know how to do the job.
The benefits of outsourcing include:
- Keep up with competition – a small company can appear much bigger with a professional 3rd party managing certain projects.
- Finding new talent – if your employees are lacking certain skills necessary for your business to grow, a 3rd party can fill that gap
- Better technology – an outsourcing company usually has the best of the best equipment and technology
- Professional – 3rd party companies focus on certain aspects, payroll, HR, graphic design, etc
- Focus on other areas of business – determine whether your payroll person can take those 15 hours and use them to help the company grow instead of doing non-strategic tasks
- Risk reduction – if you choose the right company – they will use their experience to guide your decisions and keep you compliant with the IRS, etc.
For us running the payroll wasn’t the big problem, it was the time we spent away from our customers and the inability to find employees who knew how to run payroll and keep us compliant. We liked the idea of outsourcing payroll so much, that when my sister sold Christopher’s we called our payroll company and told them we would be interested in purchasing their company when they were ready to retire – that was 2005 and we haven’t looked back!
