Today it is common knowledge that a business must outsource if it is to stand any chance of of keeping up in its market. A business must sometimes look externally, rather than internally, to get a job done. A business owner must sometimes hand over the reins to outside forces, despite how they feel about doing so. Now that’s cleared up it’s time to face another challenge in this field: ousting bad outsourcing.
If you are a business owner it is not only imperative that you outsource your jobs, but that outsource them to the right people/services. When you outsource a job, first and foremost, you want whomever you outsource it to to hit the ground running with it. To prevent the alternative, an external service doing your business a disservice, you have to do your homework. To oust this problem you must perform as much background research on the matter as possible. A good first port of call is to try and find any examples of recent work that the proposed company or service you are outsourcing to has done. This may be an easy task: for example, the HR outsourcing company Hunter Adams display an extensive list of their recent assignments on their website in order to showcase their abilities. Or this may be a difficult task: you may have to do some real digging in order to find out information. If this case it may be even be prudent to take to cross-checking the company by contacting past clients of theirs. No matter how far you have to go to find the information you must be willing to go that far. You want to know right off the bat that the service you have put your trust in can in fact be trusted. You don’t want your business to end up on this outsourcing failures list, do you?
But if you do ever find yourself in the midst of a bad outsourcing dilemma then there are still ways to retrieve the situation. You can identify a bad outsourcing partner right from the very beginning of your work together, in fact. If they offer you a quote very quickly then this may show that they lack in diligence and don’t pay attention to detail. You can tell if something is wrong if they won’t give clear and concise updates on the matter. And you can most definitely tell if something is amiss if they miss a proposed deadline. If you experience any of these things then you should take them as warning signs that you should think about either withdrawing your custom or demanding your money back.
It’s not a question of whether to outsource or not, it is a question of making sure that the outsourcing you do do is done. It’s a question of ensuring that the jobs you do outsource are optimised. It’s a question of ensuring that all the jobs you hand out return to you completed perfectly. If they don’t then you have every right to send them back. And that is the golden rule when it comes to ousting bad outsourcing: if you’re not happy with a job then send it back and ask for it to be complete again.
