Outsourcing has become the new buzzword in business. These services come with a range of benefits to businesses big and small, and it is about more than the bottom line too. The benefits outsourcing elements of your business can bring to your balance sheet are obvious, but outsourcing has much more to offer besides better profit and loss statements. Here are just a few of the many ways switching to outsourcing can benefit your company and help you to grow your business. Access To Premium Services Small to medium-sized businesses used to struggle to compete with the more prominent brands and names in their industry. They did not have access to the same resources and services as their larger competitors, which would affect their bottom line and their ability to retain clients. Thanks to outsourcing, this has changed. Now, even start-ups can have access to premium services without having to absorb the expense of an in-house team. Translation services are the perfect example of this. Translators are high-skilled workers who can command a lot of compensation if you are hiring for an in-house translator. Outsourcing this task is much more cost-effective. Take a look at Rosetta Translation’s website. Their translation services provide suitable London based options and can save any business a considerable amount of money while supplying high-quality translations for legal, medical, technical and marketing documents. This gives businesses access to a premium quality resource without having to cover the costs of a full-time translator or translation department. Outsourcing Buys Time When you begin to use outsourcing services for your business, you will have more time to concentrate on what matters. Growing your business and finding new clients to expand your customer base should always be the focus of a manager or owner, but handling the day-to-day demands can get in the way. By outsourcing, you give yourself more time to look at the bigger picture and focus on developing your business and expanding its reach. Outsourced services can grow with you. This makes planning for the future easier, as you know you can service more clients and expand your customer base without a drop in the quality of the products or services that you offer your existing consumers. Many businesses can struggle to expand to handle an increase in demand. With outsourcing, you have a team ready and waiting to take on an increase in workload. The costs are scalable too, making it easier to budget for growth. Outsourcing Gives You An Advantage Every industry is competitive. Even if your business serves a niche, there will still be other companies out there challenging you for market share and trying to grow themselves at the expense of your business. Using outsourcing for many different elements of your business gives you an advantage in a competitive marketplace. You have resources that you can tap into quickly that other companies may only dream of. This allows you to move forward confidently, offering a standard of service that your competitors cannot. Having the edge over the competition is key to growth. Outsourcing allows you to expand your market share and take on new business without slowing down your momentum or suffering from bottlenecks in production or administration. This makes your business more flexible and adaptive, while your competitors are stuck and unable to accommodate demand increases. When you are challenging for new customers and a greater share of the market, your outsource allies have your back and will be there to help facilitate your expansion. They grow as you grow. Cut Down On Hardware Investment One of the biggest drains on any business balance sheet is buying and servicing equipment. Maintenance costs can be prohibitive, not just from the price of the infrastructure itself but also the manpower needed to monitor and maintain it. By switching to an outsourcing service, you remove these costs from your balance sheet for good, freeing up funds that you can invest in areas that get you a better return. This can be incredibly beneficial in Information Technology services, for example. New computers, devices, and IT infrastructure like servers can all be very expensive to buy or rent. For a startup or small business, you may not have the money required to make these purchases and maintain the equipment that can prevent your company from growing and succeeding. Outsourcing your IT services is a great way to save money, improve the level of service you offer, and grow your business. The benefits outsourced IT offers should not be underestimated or go overlooked by businesses. This is a great way to boost your balance sheet while improving standards of service. Reduce Costs Across The Board The balance sheet can make or break a business. Even if you operate a successful company, a high level of regular outgoings can cause problems. Lots of profits mean little if you have a lot of losses to absorb. Switching to outsourced services can make some huge reductions in labour costs, as well as the expense of many consumable items. It also saves time, which is as valuable as money in any business. Outsourcing can be addictive to businesses for this reason. The money saved can have a massive positive impact on your balance sheet, and give you more capital to invest in expansion or the research and development of new products and services. Getting better value for money from your business offers your customers and clients more value too. This is the best way to attract new business and retain your customer base. Saving money across the board on a variety of regular outgoings gives you the room you need to undercut the competition and offer the same high quality for less. These are just some of the many advantages outsourcing offers a business. By making the switch soon, you can begin to focus on growing and expanding your business and take on new clients and customers with confidence. Start looking for ways to save money and improve the quality of service your business offers by finding opportunities to outsource today.

A £5.4m training centre to boost green skills and create thousands of jobs in the low-carbon construction sector is set to be developed through a partnership between West Nottinghamshire College, Nottingham Trent University and Ashfield District Council. The pioneering project will see the College, University and Council join forces with leading construction companies to develop a flagship training centre and demonstrator site for low-carbon building methods and retrofit of existing homes to help achieve net-zero. It comes after they secured a £1.5m government grant to kick-start the ambitious scheme. The funding boost, from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), is part of government investment to support economic development in the D2N2 (Derby, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire) region and was awarded through its devolution deal. The facility will be based at the College’s existing Construction Centre, off Lowmoor Road, Kirkby-in-Ashfield, which will be extended to provide 250 sq m of additional training space and high-tech equipment, and through the creation of a new Civil Engineering Centre in empty premises on 3,500 sq m of adjacent land. These two sites are also set to receive more than £6m from the Ashfield Towns fund – bringing a combined investment of more of £7.5m in construction training facilities for the D2N2 region. Meanwhile, adjoining land will be used for training in water management and carbon sequestration – the capture, removal and storage of carbon dioxide from the earth’s atmosphere – through the development of wetland and woodland. This will provide demonstration projects and ongoing support for landowners, helping them respond to changing policy from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to encourage increased environmental management of land. The project, which has been developed in collaboration with the D2N2 Local Enterprise Partnership, is aimed at driving the early adoption of low-carbon technologies to make construction firms and their supply chains more competitive and productive, which will help grow the economy. It is anticipated to support almost 100 businesses and create 3,200 jobs at qualification levels 2 and 3 over the next decade, including five jobs at the centre itself. In addition to increasing the number of skilled workers able to work on modern methods of construction and low-carbon technology, the scheme will support D2N2’s contribution to the government’s target of creating 300,000 new and affordable homes every year by 2025. According to labour market analysis, construction represents the D2N2 area’s sixth-largest sector, employing more than 23,000 people – and local leaders say this latest scheme provides a significant opportunity to grow well-paid, skilled jobs in delivering new-build homes and retrofits to support the move to low-carbon. The investment from DLUHC will fund research equipment and demonstration facilities in water harvesting, water management and drainage, carbon sequestration, solar electricity generation and heating, heat pumps, electric transport, and construction plant and machinery. The project will enable the college to enhance its construction curriculum to further meet local skills needs – complementing its existing provision in areas including rail, heating, mechanical and electrical, plastering, brickwork, and carpentry and joinery. It will also enable NTU to broaden its Higher Education offer in construction, including new higher technical qualifications, and undertake research into the effectiveness of retrofit and new construction methods to inform future development. All elements of the scheme will provide training, work experience, research and collaboration opportunities for students from the college and university. Work on the facility is expected to get under way in summer 2023, subject to planning consent. The DLUHC grant comes on top of funding from the Ashfield Towns Fund, the Education and Skills Funding Agency, D2N2 LEP, NTU and the College. Andrew Cropley, principal and Chief Executive of West Nottinghamshire College, said: “It is excellent news that the devolution deal for D2N2 has already released this funding to enable us to invest immediately in technology and skills to respond to the construction industry’s transition to low-carbon and meet wider ambitions to achieve net-zero. “A common issue faced by employers is the need to access more workers trained in green skills in new and emerging areas, such as rail and drainage infrastructure, heat pumps, and modern on-site and off-site construction methods. “This investment will boost skills, earnings and economic output in a critical growth sector, and support house-building across the region. Not only will it provide enhanced training opportunities for local people, employers across the region will also benefit from a ready-made pipeline of new talent.” Professor Richard Bull, deputy dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Built Environment at Nottingham Trent University, said: “This is a fantastic opportunity to further our reputation in the area of low-carbon construction and retrofit, and enable us to deliver high-quality education to enable the low-carbon transition in Mansfield.” Cllr Matthew Relf, executive lead member for regeneration and corporate transformation at Ashfield District Council, said: “This is excellent news that more funding has been awarded for Ashfield to support one of the projects from the council’s £62.6m Towns Fund. It is an exciting opportunity to create state-of-the-art learning facilities in the area to complement the existing offer. “When the new centre is up and running it will provide fantastic opportunities to give young people future-proof skills, ensuring they can secure employment in the sector. With a focus on low-carbon construction, the new training centre will be leading the way for the East Midlands.”

It’s that time of year, when Business Link Magazine invites the region’s business leaders to offer up their predictions for the year ahead.  It has become something of a tradition, given that we’ve been doing this now for over 30 years. Here we speak to Scott Norville, Managing Director of Silverstone Leasing. After a turbulent three years of trading in the vehicle leasing industry, I believe things are looking up for 2023. While there will be an element of people being hesitant to lease in personal contract hire due to all the current cost of living issues, I think we will start to see a bit more movement in production, and the stock coming into the UK will be plentiful. Manufacturers will have to be mindful of the current market and bring in discounts so they can carry on moving products and keep customers on side. Sadly, following one of the most volatile periods of trading for our sector, some businesses will be forced to close if they don’t focus wholly on customer service. The introduction of the Consumer Duty, expected in July 2023, will enforce all retail businesses to ensure they are conducting themselves in a certain manner, treating the customer fairly, and having the right procedures and processes in place to ensure affordability and put the customer at the very forefront of all transactions. All businesses will have to focus heavily on customer service. It’s not going to be a volume driven year, it will be about quality, not quantity.

It’s that time of year, when Business Link Magazine invites the region’s business leaders to offer up their predictions for the year ahead.  It has become something of a tradition, given that we’ve been doing this now for over 30 years. Here we speak to Donald Ward, operations director at Midlands-based metal recycling and waste management specialist, WARD. There’s no doubt that we are living through some of the most turbulent times in recent history. The aftermath of the pandemic is bringing even more new challenges, with rising inflation and ongoing economic uncertainty. There is a sense of getting through until the Christmas break, that everyone is ready for, and this is potentially providing a period of delay before tough times start in the New Year. Unfortunately, there will be some businesses that won’t survive and inevitably there will be some really challenging times ahead. Energy costs are the major issue for business, with prices rising over 300% for most on 2021 levels. It is impossible to absorb dramatic rises like this without making costs savings elsewhere, in either labour or materials or operations. Ultimately doing more with less. The energy crisis reduces margin and therefore any ability to make profit, and pushes up the cost of doing business for everyone. Once the Government removes the cap for businesses it will be telling. We are keen to see what additional support will be put in place, as businesses will fold and there will be job losses if Government does not step in, which will have a wide economic and social impact across the country. Running businesses through Covid has taught us all resilience and those businesses that have been able to get through it have done exceptional things to stay on an even keel. Through investment and forward planning, we managed to secure the plant and equipment needed early on to support our growth plans for bulk metal recycling operations in 2023 and beyond, however, it is difficult to find the right people to support this growth. There is a significant skills shortage post-Brexit and a shift in the available workforce. Like the rest of industry, we are short of qualified and experienced drivers. We also need to address the wider skills gap and the way that people want to work. We need less people with better skills who are willing and able to work on site. Employers need to look at flexible employment packages that fit around family life, rather than just providing a job. As a business we are determined to remain positive and still have plans to grow our metal recycling sites and waste management service offering. We are also planning a programme of wellbeing and charitable activities to smash some goals in 2023 and keep the team momentum going.

It’s that time of year, when Business Link Magazine invites the region’s business leaders to offer up their predictions for the year ahead.  It has become something of a tradition, given that we’ve been doing this now for over 30 years. Here we speak to Jennie Holland, Managing Director at Jennie Holland PR. Putting to one side the current economic challenges, I want to focus my 2023 predictions on that of the business owner. Everyone I speak to is incredibly busy and has been for what feels like a long time, and while we don’t know what the future holds in Q1, Q2 and beyond in 2023, I think we have a good idea of what might be to come. However, it’s not all doom and gloom, there is so much good that we take for granted. Business owners, and the teams that they lead, are accustomed to change, to adapting, to being agile – we learnt all about that during the global pandemic and some of those changes we made at that time continue to play their part in businesses. I predict that business owners will face what’s to come head-on and with a can do, carry on regardless attitude, because that’s what they do and have done before. They will keep their focus on their business strategies and goals and always with a positive mindset. So, whatever the economic weather in 2023, I know that with business owners at the helm of our East Midlands economy, we are in the strongest position we can be.