What Are Professional Services And How You Can Benefit From Them?

Sometimes, completing projects and accomplishing certain tasks is challenging for small organizations. While hiring a few employees is practical for larger companies with more resources, their smaller counterparts need to go about it differently, especially when money is tight.

In many cases, it’s just more feasible to work with a company that offers professional services. 

In this article, we’ll define what these companies are and what they’re offering, as well as explore whether there are any drawbacks to relying on them long-term.

What Are Professional Services

These services are provided by individuals or companies to their clients, typically to help them manage or improve a certain aspect of their business. Outside of the business world, a good example would be a private piano teacher offering piano lessons.

These companies offer non-physical commodities and usually hold a high degree of expertise in a niche area. They might offer freelance, private practice, or contract work, and they charge billable hours or fixed rates.

A lot of skills can be ‘’sold’’ as a service. Most commonly, companies outsource some of their operations to companies offering professional services such as:

1. Information technology

Services in this field are in high demand at the moment. Thus, companies may look to hire some of the following:

1. IT support:  includes troubleshooting technology problems, installing new software and updating existing, and assisting in coding or improving business technologies.

2. Cybersecurity: these professionals manage the protection of online data and provide the expertise for security vulnerability management and cloud security. They may also be hired if any security breaches occur.

3. Software development: when companies wish to create technology solutions to provide a better user experience, they hire specialists who develop and test programs, engineer solutions, and maintain applications.

4. Web design and development: assist with coding, as well as both back end structure of the website and its visual aspect.

2. Marketing

Marketing is one of the most popular professional services. While some companies focus on offering expertise in one area such as paid advertising, more commonly, marketing agencies cover multiple services that include:

1. Brand development: developing and maintaining a brand identity of the client, which might include brand awareness strategies and logo design, among others.

2. Public relations: promoting a business and its brand, and offering and organizing different PR opportunities such as ad placements or television promotions.

3. SEO: improving the search engine rankings through optimization of content on a website. This might also include copywriting services.

4. Social media management: managing social media accounts of companies and researching industry trends to increase the business’ competitive position.

5. Paid ads: helping clients with buying advertisement slots to increase their traffic, sales, and boost brand awareness.

3. Finance

Due to its complexity and fluidity, companies often leverage professional services in the field of finance, such as:

1. Accounting: advising clients on managing wealth and helping with trust planning or taxes. 

2. Investment management: assisting companies and individuals with creating investment portfolios and developing investment strategies.

3. Evaluation: identifying the financial value of items or assisting with business appraisals.

4. Financial advising and planning: providing roadmaps for meeting financial goals and helping companies put together financial plans.

Pros And Cons Of Leveraging Professional Services

Professional services companies are getting increasingly more popular for a wide variety of reasons. Consider digital marketing. You might not have an expert in this area on your staff or you might not be able to afford an in-house marketing team. In that case, hiring experts to build and implement a marketing plan is your best course of action.

The same applies if you want to free up your staff or yourself to focus on the core tasks in your business instead of losing precious time on issues that you’re not well equipped to handle on your own.

Additionally, outsourcing tasks also helps control costs by decreasing the payroll and extra expenses such as benefits.

Leveraging professional services can also help you achieve a higher standard than what you would achieve if you dumped the task on your current staff. For example, you want to update to a cloud-based service. Instead of relying on your IT technicians to handle what’s outside of their area of expertise, you can hire cloud migration specialists to complete the task for you. 

When it comes to drawbacks, most companies are concerned about whether they’ll be able to find a professional services provider open to their vertical market or corporate culture that’s on the same level as the internal staff.

This is a viable concern, as most service providers aren’t willing to take extra time to understand their clients on a deeper level. They might have other clients they also have to provide work for, so it’s to be expected that you might not get the same level of commitment as when working with internal staff.

The biggest challenge with outsourcing tasks is the loss of internal company knowledge or serious knowledge gaps. 

Many companies are unable to find a perfect employee, especially in areas such as IT. As a result, many give up as they don’t want to risk making the wrong hiring decision after a costly hiring process. As a result, they consider and usually go for an external service provider.

Since the lack of internal knowledge might make it difficult to introduce the services back at a later date, you can benefit from hiring a long-term employee. 

There is a solution, still. If you’re concerned about not finding the right person and cannot dedicate enough time or resources to go through a full-on hiring process, you can work with a staffing company like Griffin Global.

We have an almost limitless supply of carefully vetted tech employees, so we can connect you with and ensure you find a perfect employee for your company without going through an arduous hiring process.

Making The Most Out Of Your Outsourcing Efforts

Professional services are a great way to maintain a high level of competitive viability for companies that might not have enough resources to hire or expand in-house staff. However, keep in mind that not all providers are the same. 

Make sure to evaluate the provider using a variety of sources. Check everything online, from their reviews to their website and social media. It also doesn’t hurt to ask any of their previous clients about their experience with the services provider in question.

Ultimately, trust yourself. If everything online checks out and other businesses had a great experience with them, it might be wise to trust your gut. 

Who knows, maybe it’s going to be the beginning of a wonderful partnership!