By Jim Avazpour

"Good morning ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. I'm going to do my best to get you safely to your destination today, even though I'm not an expert pilot. I'm pretty sure I know enough to get us safely from point A to point B. So sit back, relax and enjoy your flight."

Granted, the above scenario would never happen. But in the business world, the equivalent occurs every day.

Smart executives at companies of all sizes understand the frustration of wearing too many hats, or trying to handle issues outside their area of expertise. If they spread themselves too thin, they risk losing focus on their core business and their bottom line suffers.

The answer is outsourcing.

Outsourcing allows businesses to concentrate on what they do best and rely on trusted partners to cover other mission-critical functions, such as information technology, accounting and human resources. In almost every case, an additional benefit of outsourcing is superior-quality service that the business would be unable to duplicate in-house due to cost and human resource constraints.

When a business retains a company to manage its IT infrastructure, for example, the external partner applies economies of scale to provide the most advanced capabilities to the client business. Such technologies improve productivity, increase efficiencies and save time, money and worry.

While hiring an outside company to manage non-core day-to-day functions is considered a business expense, the most successful business owners recognize that outsourcing actually allows a company to generate more revenue than it otherwise would.

When you handle what you do best in-house and outsource the rest, you maximize available resources. The time of company principals is invaluable. Companies thrive when business owners and their management teams are singularly focused on the heart of the business.

So if a business sells widgets, its executives and staff should be widget experts. They should analyze every aspect of their widget, develop ways to improve it and become the authority on the widget marketplace. Taking time to do anything else is counterproductive.

Outsourcing allows companies to bring in non-widget experts for tasks that don't directly pertain to widgets. Companies should rely on external partners to build and support an office environment conducive to growing their business. In other words, the only things they should have to worry about is making and selling the best widget on the market.

So instead of trying to learn how to manage a payroll or a computer network, successful companies hire experts for these areas, and focus their energy on being the best they can be in their industry. Concentrating on their line of business is the surest way to continued success for companies.
Just as in the amateur pilot example, only an expert has the best knowledge and skills for a particular job. Most businesses don't file their own taxes or represent themselves in court. Instead, they retain the best accountants and attorneys for those purposes, because they lack the expertise these professionals possess. They know that trying to learn enough to adequately represent themselves or file complicated returns would distract them from their core business, weaken their bottom line and result in detrimental, costly mistakes.

Jim Avazpour is president and CEO of Avazpour Networking Services (www.avazpour.com), an information technology consulting company in Overland Park's Corporate Woods. You can reach him at or (913) 498-8777.

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