By Guest Blogger:

Luke Todd, Partnership Manager

Bottomline

It’s late into the evening, and your phone has sounded a notification to say you’ve got a new email. You look to answer one or two and before you know it, it’s past midnight.

Sound familiar?

A membership manager typically wears many hats during the day (and evening), from salesperson and accountant to marketing and HR manager.  It can often leave you time poor, which has a negative impact on your work life balance.

Reducing your workload

Finding ways to reduce your workload without sacrificing your output can be challenging.  Outsourcing is one option to help achieve this.  It involves paying either a third party company or tapping into a cloud-based service so that you don’t have to do all the work yourself.

Outsourcing allows you to get things done more quickly, access specialist expertise and ultimately do a better job.

When should you outsource?

Ideally, all organisations will have a plan in place as to which parts of the business you will retain in-house and which parts you could potentially outsource.  Trust is a major factor, particularly if it involves outsourcing a member touchpoint.  But outsourcing usually delivers value back to you allowing you to get more done in less time and usually to a better quality; especially if you have limited staff resource.

Member facing teams simply can’t be an expert in each and every single area of running a business.  Imagine trying to keep up with the latest tax regulations whilst still putting in a full day.  That’s where an accountant can help.

Don’t be put off by the cost involved in outsourcing.  A good way to look at things is to put a value on your own time.  Think about your hourly rate.   If you outsource something that saves you three hours, then the sums for seeing if you are better off, really start to add up rather quickly.

Put it this way, it is noted that businesses can spend upto three hours a week chasing late payments. Which is why you would choose a collections method, such as Direct Debits to collect payments automatically, on-time, every time.  After all, what’s more important than getting money into the bank? Not to mention making payments of fees easier for your members. Outsourcing the management of payments and Direct Debits can save you time and be more efficient at boosting your cash flow.

Letting go

The best way forward is to take a long hard look at your own strengths and weaknesses and learn to let go.  If you or a member of your team has a background in HR or legal, then it makes sense to keep those activities in-house.

However, if the thought of setting up a new IT network, getting your employees on it and staying safe from hackers fills you with dread, then this is the perfect function to outsource to an IT specialist.

Common areas to outsource

Look for time-consuming tasks and let others do it for you or use cloud based services to free up your time to focus on the important stuff.  Like growing your business and engaging with members.

Look out for activities that require specialist knowledge.  Take Google advertising.  This is a cost-effective way of boosting traffic to your website and generating new business leads.  It takes minutes to set up an account.  But to get the most out of it, you need to set up an optimum bidding strategy, write compelling ad copy and create a landing page designed to convert traffic to leads.

Depending on the size of your organisation, other popular areas that are ripe for outsourcing include setting up and running a website, preparing your accounts, calculating and making the payroll, branding and design.  The list goes on. Done well, the outsource provider can become an extension of your own organisation.

Finally, you may wish to consider the services offered by Association Management companies.

If you want to learn what not to outsource, simply click on this link to learn more.

We enable your business to improve cashflow, reduce costs and increase customer loyalty, so that you can focus on growing your business.  Our core objective is to continually drive customer success and exceed expectations.  We can help process your recurring or one-off payments and make your collections smarter, faster, regular and secure.

 

For more information on how we can help your business, please call a member of our team on 0344 826 6700 or email [email protected]