When to hire a business services provider

Starting an online business is exciting, but the path to sustainable success is built on preparation, organization, and a commitment to getting the details right from day one. You need to establish a solid foundation by putting the right people and tools in place. 

Few entrepreneurs launch a business with dreams of setting up lines of credit or managing payroll, but these behind-the-scenes tasks are crucial for growth. 

After all, it’s no fun to miss a sales tax deadline or forget to file your business license renewal.

Are you ready for the help of a business services provider? Where do you start? Let’s take a look. 

Business services is a broad category that involves anything related to setting up, structuring, and running a business. Often, these services take care of things an owner could do, but shouldn’t because their time is best spent in higher-value areas. 

The goal of utilizing one or several business services is to operate more efficiently, comply with local and national laws, stay up to date on taxes, and scale faster (and more successfully). 

Business service providers help you:

Become more cost-efficient

Business service providers are highly specialized and take care of very specific tasks in a fraction of the time it would take you or an employee. 

For most businesses, human resources are their biggest expense. Utilizing business service providers allows you to minimize these costs. 

Reduce burnout

As your business expands, more tasks and challenges will come your way. This is a good thing — it means you’re growing! But it’s also easy to feel overwhelmed as things pile up. 

If this goes on too long, it can lead to burnout. It can get exhausting to always feel like you need to gain more knowledge and skills in yet another aspect of business operations. 

By selecting business service providers that address your greatest needs, you can offload important tasks to outside professionals and focus your energy on running your business, or even (shocking!) take a break. 

Save time

Getting things done is good. But getting things done faster — and at equal or higher levels of quality — is better. With business service providers supporting your efforts, you’ll get more done in much less time. Beyond simply growing in size, the ability to consistently find ways to do more with less is a cornerstone of scaling a small business. 

Increase professionalism

Your customers, vendors, and employees will all notice when you begin implementing business service solutions that work. People can tell when things work better. 

Avoid unhappy surprises

When it comes to issues like compliance and cybersecurity, everything can look bright and wonderful until, all of a sudden, it doesn’t. The government comes knocking. Your website gets hacked. Customers complain and threaten lawsuits. 

Challenges may arise, but a business services partner can help you navigate through uncertain times and manage the stress of a difficult situation. 

Let’s take a closer look at some of the most commonly-needed business services, and how they can help new and established ecommerce businesses.

Financing

Depending on the prior knowledge and experience of the business owner, a new business will have a fairly steep learning curve in establishing healthy financial habits. This includes monitoring expenses and costs, and understanding sales and other forms of income. And, of course, there’s lots of work around taxes, investment opportunities, lines of credit, and much more.

You first need to know what to track, and then you need a way to track it. Then, you need systems to help with reporting via financial statements and documents. Financial service providers offer an array of tools to help new and established businesses fund business investments and manage their finances and accounting. For example, Tento Financing offers fast access to working capital, credit lines, and equipment financing, and Found Business Banking enables you to track taxes, create statements, and ensure your bookkeeping is in order.

Industries with in-house manufacturing or production may need to invest in new equipment or get funding for storage facilities. These companies need different financial services than an ecommerce business selling print-on-demand items. 

Communications

A major challenge for new small businesses is managing a business phone number. Carrying two phones isn’t ideal, but using a personal number for business isn’t always practical either. At the same time, staying accessible is essential.

Services like Grasshopper allow business owners to secure a business phone number that will have its own greetings, voicemail, and other features — like SMS marketing — but it will work on their existing phone. 

By creating a different ringtone, you’ll know when to answer in your “business voice.”You can acquire other communication services for email and analytics (like Klaviyo), enabling established businesses to communicate more effectively with more customers, leads, and vendors.

Legal

Setting up a new business correctly means taking care of a few legal issues. It’s best to do this right from the start. For example, how do you want to classify your business? Most new ecommerce businesses in the United States decide to become an LLC — limited liability corporation. You don’t have to do it this way, and there are reasons to consider other business formation options. But, LLCs offer a variety of benefits and make sense for many small businesses.

Services like ZenBusiness LLC Formation help structure new businesses properly right out of the gate. 

For established businesses, you may encounter other legal issues such as dealing with vendors, competitors, or unhappy customers. Laws may change and you have to adapt or adjust. LegalVision offers ecommerce companies help with legal issues common to their industry.

Compliance

Compliance issues encompass legal and financial services, depending on the type of compliance being discussed. You have legal compliance issues related to business licensure, remaining in good standing with government entities, and meeting whatever other requirements may exist for your industry. 

Then you have financial compliance, which usually means staying current on things like tax obligations, financial statements, and employee compensation. If you have employees, there may be other forms of compliance you must meet, such as human resources (HR) laws. 

Insurance

Different industries need different types and levels of insurance. Know what insurance options are out there and how they can protect you in different scenarios.

For instance, companies that manage their own inventory might want insurance to protect it in case of a natural disaster or some other incident that causes it to be lost. Companies selling food may want insurance to protect themselves in case of a food safety issue that might require you to dispose of large portions of inventory. 

The more your business grows, the more you need to protect yourself from unforeseen catastrophic losses. 

Technical and developer services

This broad category encompasses everything from setting up social media accounts to building websites and integrating various software systems with your customer relationship management tool (CRM).

The more your business grows, the more resources and solutions you’ll find to aid your business operations. Some help improve efficiency. Others cut costs. Some do both. 

Some businesses seek out software development professionals to help them create more unique websites and ecommerce stores that represent their brand and can adapt to changing business climates and the needs of customers.

Small businesses often don’t have as much capital as established ones, and have to start off doing a lot of these things on their own. They write their own content and create their own online assets and ecommerce stores. 

But even new businesses can automate or delegate some of these tasks, freeing them up to focus on other business-growth activities.

Service providers like Codeable Developer Services and Woo Agency Partners offer expertise in areas many business owners would rather avoid. They enable small businesses to grow and help established businesses to scale faster.

For ongoing assistance, stores should consider WooCommerce Premium Support. This provides priority access to Happiness Engineers with a ten-minute response time during live chat hours. 

Design

Web design and graphic design services help ecommerce businesses far beyond creating attractive and functional websites. They may be responsible for designing product packaging, customizing shipping materials, and other printed business and marketing assets.

Security

Cybersecurity for ecommerce will continue to be a major challenge in the online business world. Cyberthreats aren’t going anywhere, so you have to proactively protect your assets.

There are a whole host of online cybersecurity services. Some protect websites from being spammed with fake comments and dangerous links. Others work to stop viruses and malware attacks.

And along those lines, you can revisit the insurance question by exploring cyber insurance. For established companies, this is something to look into because even billion-dollar companies have encountered serious troubles from cyberattacks.

For security, consider speaking with a Woo Agency Partner or using a pre-built tool like Jetpack Security. 

Productivity

Productivity services generally fall into one of two categories — support software and organization management.

On the customer-facing side, support software includes things like chatbots and other providers such as virtual assistants. Within your own business, the more technology you use to power your ecommerce store, the more support you personally may also need. 

Organization management solutions include anything that helps you do your work better, faster, or smarter. For some, this means tools like Trello, Monday, and Asana, which enable your in-house team to work together more effectively than if they just used email or SMS. 

CRMs help businesses organize and automate numerous other business tasks that need to be done but that can be difficult to manage if you try to piece it all together with spreadsheets and random documents. 

So, how do you know if you should hire a business services provider? It all comes down to putting a value on your time and rating the importance of accuracy in the task under consideration. If you struggle with numbers, it’s probably a good idea to consult a financial professional to help with accounting and taxes. The stakes are high. 

A mid-stage business owner should be spending a lot of time finding and training talented new team members and very little time filling out paperwork and fulfilling orders. If you’re generating a fairly healthy revenue and find yourself starting to miss deadlines, it’s time to offload some tasks to free up time. 

If you’re making a fairly healthy profit, but you’re starting to get tired or you’re enjoying the business less, you’re headed for burnout. It’s time to find a business services provider to offload your least favorite tasks (even if it doesn’t save you much money!)

If you have lots of funding and a short window of opportunity? Find a business services provider. 

In other words, unless you have very little startup capital and lots of time on your hands, there’s probably a business services provider that could help you achieve a lot more in a lot less time. 

There are two ways to think about this question.

First, you could explore what’s out there and you may discover better ways and more effective tools. 

The second (and better) approach is to list out business operations challenges you’re currently facing that are outside your areas of expertise. Then, go look for business service options that can address those specific needs. 

Look for areas of need

Are you struggling with customer service? Are response times slow and customers complaining? A chatbot might be able to reduce some of this burden and more effectively meet customer needs.

Perhaps you’re spending far too much time creating new product pages and landing pages for your ecommerce site. You could look for a business service provider that creates web pages and uploads content so you can remove this task from your schedule.

Look for outside expertise

Managing financial books and records can be a cumbersome task. Perhaps you did it all yourself when you first started the business, but now you’ve grown and there’s a lot more to keep track of. There’s a good chance you could use some bookkeeping help from someone with expertise and experience. 

The same is true for legal, insurance, cybersecurity, and business support services. Use expertise that already exists. You don’t need to learn everything. Give yourself a break, and let professionals handle these tasks.

Look for efficiency upgrades

Productivity solutions can make a dramatic impact on your ability to scale by simplifying or automating tasks.

LawDepot Online Legal Documents, for example, allows you to create customized legal documents in minutes. You might be spending hours and hours creating all the various forms and contracts you need to run your business. How much time might a service like this save you?

There are numerous business service providers that address tangible needs and challenges that online business owners face. 

New business operations and support services from Woo

The good news is that Woo has partnered with an array of industry-leading business service providers in a variety of areas that could instantly improve your operations. 

Check out the brand new product category in the Woo Marketplace designed to help ecommerce businesses find the help they need. You’ll find reliable resources for financial, legal, productivity, compliance, development, and other business operations and services.

Check out the new Business Services tab in the Woo Marketplace.