There comes a time at every growing agency when the workload becomes overwhelming. When you’re staying up late, working on weekends, and realize you haven’t taken a proper vacation in months (years?). This is generally when the agency owner starts thinking about solutions in the form of questions…

• Who should they hire to help with the workload?
• Can they afford a full-time team member?
• Would it make more sense to simply outsource a service or two?
• Will your quality be impacted?
• Will your brand suffer?
• Where do you even begin?

Kronda Adair, founder of Karvel Digital was in this exact place a few years ago. For her firsthand perspective on how outsourcing WordPress maintenance and support helped her owner establish scalable business practices that enabled her to take her first vacation in years, check out our case study with Karvel Digital.

If you prefer to listen to your content, you can check out her podcast episode Alternatives to Hiring Full-Time Employees, where she discusses her experience.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at the different signs that can signal it’s time to look into outsourcing work.

What is outsourcing, exactly?

Outsourcing occurs when a business pays an outside supplier to provide goods and services, rather than doing the work in-house. It’s an effective strategy to reduce your internal cost structure. Outsourcing is an attractive solution when the cost to buy goods or services from an outside vendor is much lower than the cost to deliver the service or manufacture the product in-house.

Let’s start by determining if you can relate to any of these telltale signs. Almost always, the journey to outsourcing starts with a frustrated agency owner. They are on the cusp of burnout and at a crossroads: Throw in the towel or figure out a way to scale their business. It’s a good problem to have. While one path is to give up on the dreams of growing your agency, the other path leads to a growing, scalable, successful business model — it just requires some work up front.

In the digital agency world, outsourcing comes in all shapes and sizes. In many cases, the agencies themselves are outsourced solutions for the businesses they serve. Those business owners identified skill gaps in their business and went looking for outsourced solutions. Those skill gaps include website development, marketing expertise, online growth strategies, and all the other services digital agencies like yours provide.

As an agency owner, you know that your clients are also looking for services you may not specialize in. How have you handled these requests in the past? Perhaps you refer them to another agency you know can help at the risk of losing all their business to that referral. Or perhaps you partner with that other agency that offers complimentary services. This way you keep their business and pay the other agency a cut for the work they provide. Or maybe you have the budget to hire a contractor or a new team member to help you deliver the new services being requested.

So now that we know what outsourcing is and how it often manifests in the digital agency world, let’s take a look at some of the telltale signs that it’s time to look into outsourcing at your agency.

Four Signs you should consider outsourcing to grow your agency

1. Does your current team fall short in certain areas?

Oftentimes when you’re experiencing growing pains, the areas where you fall short will become glaringly obvious. Sure maybe your website build-outs are chugging along great, but you could really use a copywriter to help get effective copy on the pages. Or maybe your leads are drying up and you’ve started considering hiring a sales consultant to help bring in more business. Or maybe the work you’ve always done is piling up because you don’t have enough hands to tackle the growing workflow.

The possibilities are endless, but if you’ve found yourself weighing your priorities and where you fall short in hopes of determining where to grow your team — it may be a good time to start thinking about outsourcing.

2. Is your budget stretched thin?

Once all the bills are paid, are you barely turning a profit? There are plenty of agencies out there boasting of 6-figure revenue streams without mentioning their annual profits. That’s because it’s not easy to deliver services with the correct profit margins worked in.

Deep dives into your numbers and spreadsheets are critical for growth and profitability, and if you don’t have the time to get that together, it’s not going to happen for you. As an agency owner, you need the time to focus on the profitability of your business and to have the right data to help you make the right decisions.

If your budget is barely covering your expenses, it’s time to consider outsourcing.

For a practical example, take a look at Waypoint Creative. This agency has a growing team but still needed some auxiliary help to scale growth and deliver services. But with several full-time team members, there wasn’t a ton of wiggle room in the budget. Paramount to Waypoint’s concerns when looking into outsourcing, was standard of quality and ensuring their work or brand wouldn’t suffer. They found that with a GoWP Dedicated Developer.

“GoWP sees me as a partner, not just a paying customer. It’s been wonderful to have a partner like GoWP to help us be better at what we do,” Founder Jason Ake said. “I’ve done some outsourcing before with other white label agencies and there are always so many limitations. I need someone to really be a team member, and with GoWP Dedicated Developer, that’s what I get. We couldn’t be happier!”

Read more about Waypoint Creative’s outsourcing success here.

3. Are routine tasks eating up your time?

Do you start each week with big plans of putting strategy into place? The intention to work on improvements in workflow, to work on getting more business, to work on growth — only to hit Friday afternoon and realize you didn’t achieve any of what you set out to do?

This is because when agencies are at the crossroads of growth, it’s also when the most fires pop up. It’s when the weak points in the structure of their business start to buckle under the pressure and it’s often enough to cause agency owners to buckle under pressure too.

If you’re spending your working hours (and then some!) helping to put out fires and deliver on routine tasks just to keep your business afloat, it’s time to see how outsourcing could help.

At GoWP, we help hundreds of agencies outsource their routine maintenance and support tasks. Oftentimes, outsourcing these tasks is the first time an agency levels up and establishes a foundation for scalable growth.

Take Bobby Kircher at Papaya Search, for example. Papaya Search is an agency that specializes in SEO and SEM strategy, but clients also need help with updating their sites or the burden of ongoing maintenance. For these services, GoWP takes on the burden 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Read more about how outsourcing works for Papaya Search in this case study.

Or check out this interview with founder Bobby Kircher:

4. Is your current team overloaded?

Maybe you already have some full-time team members and you think between the lot of you, growth shouldn’t be so hard. Unfortunately, everyone has their limit. And when your business is to provide services, that requires people to do the work. That’s not to say you can’t improve your processes and workflow to increase efficiency — but who has time to establish new processes when everyone is busy delivering on services for clients?

It’s the cyclical nature of growth and that is why building and growing to scale is vital. If your team is too busy to take on more work, it’s time to reassess how you’re growing your team and where you need help. This is where outsourcing can help.

In the case of Anna Butterfield, founder of Help Me Net. There was a time when she took on all aspects of a client’s needs — from website design to content writing to page support and more. As she took on more clients and responsibilities, she did not feel confident, however, in growing her team or hiring the right people. She performed all of the duties alone and lacked the time to fully implement the systems and processes she needed. After mounting exhaustion and much consideration, she turned to GoWP for help.

To discover how a GoWP Dedicated Developer helped Anna turn her business around and get her the time she needed, check out her case study here.

Is it time to look into outsourcing for your agency?

If any of the above scenarios resonate with you, now is a good time to look into outsourcing work at your agency. It’s never too early to start making connections and establish relationships with partners who could help you augment your services down the road.

As we learned, one of if not the most important aspects of outsourcing is ensuring that your quality of service does not suffer. This is something you can only be sure of by getting to know the different providers, talking to their current customers, and reading their reviews.

Ready to take the first step?

If you’re ready to take the next step in your outsourcing journey, GoWP is here to help! We have a team ready to learn more about your agency and what you’re struggling with. If you’re ready to find out how our services can help you scale your business, grab a time on our calendar — we look forward to talking with you.

We also have a wonderful community of partners, many of whom are valued customers, in the GoWP Digital Agency Owners Facebook Community. We’d love to have you join us there. It’s a great way to learn from successful agency owners who have been in your shoes and to share your experiences and insights with others.