Key points
- Outsourcing can balance delivering a finance function and freeing up leaders for business strategy
- Outsourcing to a firm offers the flexibility to scale up or down, and leverage a range of other experts
- A partnership is critical, ensuring the outsourced team is successfully integrated with the business
“If only there were more hours in the day.” This is the common lament of senior managers and owners of mid-market businesses.
Being across every element of your business finances to ensure you are compliant with laws and regulations can be difficult – you don’t know what you don’t know.
Outsourcing to an expert can offer a solution. – It can free up valuable time, for you to focus on driving shareholder value, business performance and customer engagement,
It can also provide peace of mind that this complicated function is being managed by a team of specialists – providing timely reporting and ensuring compliance that is critical for business continuity and decision making.
While costs are a factor to an outsourcing decision, there is value in having an external team with the depth to scale up or down as necessary. It avoids mismanagement of resources, and the likelihood of employing people who may lack necessary skills or may be underutilised for long periods. It can sometimes be a challenge for a small internal team to stay across legislative or regulatory changes and technology developments. Outsourcing to a firm can have the added benefit of access to broader technical expertise across many complementary disciplines, including taxation, technical accounting, mergers and acquisitions, and digital strategy.
It’s also important to define measures of success and what resources are necessary to drive those outcomes. For some, that might be outsourcing a non-core operation to channel efforts into business development and later taking back the keys. For others, it’s about not having to manage additional headcount, training and development and an ability to focus on driving growth and shareholder returns.
Theoretically, outsourcing provides many benefits when scaling up your business. If you need to meet reporting obligations to shareholders, investing in outsourced services meant you don’t have to worry about recruiting, training and managing an in-house team, yet all the necessary controls and processes are in place to ensure the accuracy of the financial information. This frees you up to focus on achieving strategic goals.
Above all, outsourcing works best when it is a partnership, an extension of your organisation, with a relationship built on trust that delivers value to the business. Before engaging an outsourcing partner, be clear on your long- and short-term strategic goals and growth objectives – this will ensure the outsource partner become a part of your existing team and you don’t create an ‘us against them’ scenario. Also think about what processes, practice systems and governance you want to improve, to help the outsourced partner set you up for success in the future.
