Contractors vs. Vendors: Figuring The Right Strategy

Outsourcing business processes is one of the smartest ways to optimize your time and money. However, identifying what work needs to be outsourced and allocating the right resources to the task is extremely crucial in making outsourcing work for your business. Also, identifying the right method to get the work done plays a key role in making sure that the outsourcing doesn’t take its toll on your business as opposed to easing things out. What strategy would work for your business? Would a freelance contractor fit the bill or do you need a vendor who provides all the services under one roof? Consider these before you make the decision:

Reliability:

Freelance contractors may come at a cheaper price but the reliability factor is shaky. Post 2009, nearly 20% of small business setups are having trouble due to loss of loyal customers; you don’t want undelivered results to hamper your company’s performance and become a part of this statistic. If you have a vendor, who risks serious damage to their goodwill due to inability to deliver on time or to a certain standard, you can always expect them to be on their toes to give you consistent and timely high quality results.

Service Level Agreement:

SLAs are very important in ensuring guaranteed responsible, high quality work. These can be legally binding (formal) or informal. Establishing these with individual freelance contractors is tedious if you have multiple assignments going out. It is also difficult to know if a freelance contractor will honor the same. The game changes, however with a vendor. Since it is a professional setup, they tend to be more accountable and they have a market opinion to safeguard.

Managing Time:

If your business requires a wide range of work to be outsourced, assigning work, supervising and collating it, followed by coordinating payments for each freelance contractor might take up most of your office hours. A small business setup needs to make sure that the work outsourced leads to better time management. By finding a reliable vendor, who can take care of all your work, you have a one-point contact and you can always setup a system to pay a fixed amount for a particular period. This ends up being far more efficient than chasing after multiple vendors. In addition, you can be sure of service continuity in case people leave or new people join in the vendor company.

If you strategically work towards finding the right vendor who delivers high quality work, at the right price within the right timeframe, it becomes an efficient method of handling time and boosting productivity. After all, that is the prime motive for which companies seek to outsource, don’t they?