With the flip of the calendar comes a new year of opportunities. A new year of goals, revenue targets, and challenges. A new year of growth for business owners around the world. While goals and projections for 2018 have likely already been established, as people are getting back into their offices after the holidays, the question becomes HOW.

If you’re looking to grow your business in the new year, your approach will make all the difference in whether your growth is temporary or sustainable. For example, growth can come from additional work. Maybe you spent 30 hours per week working on your business in 2017 and plan to grow by dedicating an additional 15 hours in the coming year.

For many entrepreneurs, 30 hours of work pass within the first couple days of the week so working longer hours isn’t an option. In that case, it’s imperative to work smarter. Prioritize. Delegate. Outsource.

While outsourcing services and giving up control over certain systems can be intimidating initially, it frees you up to focus on your core business and revenue-generating activities.  

Our advice? Start small. Choose one aspect of your business to outsource and continue from there.

Here are 5 things we recommend outsourcing to enable you to grow in 2018:

IT Services: Unless IT is your core business, it’s time to bring in the experts. Moving your technology to a managed hosting environment will allow you to enhance your business and minimize distractions. IT is also a key component of your growth as it often needs to grow with your company so ensuring that you have the technology and service needed to keep your business running is crucial.

Accounting: Not only will this save you time, it may very well save you money. Hiring a professional to take care of your bookkeeping and tax preparation services is an investment that often pays for itself.

Payroll Services: This is another area where an outside professional can handle a task more effectively and efficiently than you are able to.

Legal Services: If you have growth plans for 2018, you may be looking to acquire a business, start a separate business, or otherwise change the structure of your company. While you likely can file your business paperwork yourself, ask yourself if the benefits and costs savings outweigh the risks. In this field, especially, hire a lawyer to look over your business legal needs and save yourself the potential headache.

Assistance: If you’re not ready to hire a full-time office assistant, look into virtual assistance to help with smaller tasks like data entry, research, or cold calling.

Not sure where to start? Consider the tasks that require a good bit of your time and are not a core competency of yours or your business’ and start researching outsourcing options.

Outsourcing parts of your business requires an investment of time on the front end, but will enable you to focus your energy on growing your company over the course of the year. Not to mention giving you peace of mind that your trusted partners are handling your business functions while you plan for the future.