Consider the classic suburban paradox: you need a car to get a job, but you need a job to get a car.
Scaling a startup can feel a little like that. There are a whole host of chicken or the egg conundrums to solve. Personnel and time are limited, but hiring, onboarding, and training quality talent takes time (and personnel) to do right. You need an influx of capital to grow, but you've got to grow to generate capital.
Paradoxes like these push a lot of founding teams into wearing too many hats as they try to do it all themselves. That approach isn’t sustainable at scale, and it leads to fatigue, inefficiency, and burnout — all predictable startup-killers. Quality and precision suffer when everything is fighting for your limited attention.
If expansion is overtaxing resources that are already stretched to capacity, it’s time to get help. Outsourcing isn’t a universal solution, but it does alleviate many of these problems. It’s like a cheap subway ticket: let someone else handle the commute while you focus on the work.
Businesses of all stripes outsource, but startups are extraordinarily well-positioned to reap the benefits. That’s because VC startup scaling is a juggling act. You start with three bowling pins, but more keep getting tossed into the mix as you grow — accounting, human resources, legal counsel, advertising, data analysis, customer service...the list goes on. Jobs you could handle simultaneously at first now need whole departments and increasingly complex skill sets outside your specialty (and your core business).
You can outsource virtually any of these new, non-core business tasks. And most growing companies do — 90% of firms cite outsourcing as crucial to their growth. If you’re still on the fence, these are some of the many benefits of outsourcing for startups in the growth stage: