Running a small business comes with a peculiar collection of jobs. You have the work you started the business to do, followed by administration, enquiries, finances, planning and everything else required to keep it moving. Somewhere in that collection sits another responsibility: keeping people interested in what your business has to say.
That means updating your website when something changes, finding ideas for the next blog, preparing social media posts, writing emails and perhaps producing a brochure or press release. None of these tasks necessarily looks enormous on its own. But together, they can consume a surprising amount of your working week.
Business communications take more time than the writing
A 1000-word blog does not represent 1000 words of work. Someone has to decide on the subject, consider what the reader needs, research the details, organise the ideas, write the piece, edit it and prepare it for publication. The same principle applies to almost every form of business communication.
Social media provides a good example. Writing one post might take a few minutes when you already know exactly what you want to say. But maintaining a useful presence over several months requires ideas, planning, and the discipline to keep producing material when running the business is constantly competing for your attention.
And not just any old material. It will always be the case that better marketing beats more marketing. Filling every available channel with material creates work, but the volume itself achieves very little unless each piece has a useful purpose. Choosing worthwhile communications can reduce the workload while making better use of the time invested in them.
Your time has another value
For an owner-operator, time spent on one activity is time that cannot be spent somewhere else. The bulk of an afternoon spent writing an article could have been used serving clients, preparing quotations, developing a service or dealing with the jobs that have been sitting on your own list.
There is also the mental space involved. Writing tends to require concentration, particularly when you are trying to explain specialist knowledge to somebody encountering it for the first time. Switching between your main work and a half-finished piece of content can make both activities harder to settle into.
This creates an important question for any small business owner: which parts of the business actually need your personal time? Your expertise may be essential to delivering your service, meeting customers or making important decisions. The finished wording of Tuesday’s social media post probably does not require the same level of personal involvement.
You already have plenty to say
Finding subjects for business content can seem difficult when you are surrounded by your own expertise every day. Things that seem routine to you may be useful to somebody considering your services. Customer questions, changes within your industry, recent projects and lessons learned through experience can all provide worthwhile material.
And besides, in most cases, your customers are looking for answers, not marketing. The questions you answer every week can therefore provide some of your best subjects. Useful communication can begin with knowledge you already possess rather than an endless search for promotional ideas.
This is one of the parts of communications work I particularly enjoy. Getting to know a business means discovering the knowledge and stories sitting beneath its everyday activities. A conversation about something that happened during the week can become an article, a series of social posts or the starting point for a piece aimed at an industry publication.
Your expertise still drives the content
Handing over the writing does not mean handing over your knowledge. The business owner supplies the experience, opinions and specialist understanding that give the communication its substance. My role is to recognise the possibilities within that material and turn them into finished content.
Knowing who the content is intended for makes that process much easier. The principle of writing for one person, not everyone helps focus the language, examples and emphasis on the people the business actually wants to reach. That makes the work more purposeful without asking the owner to spend hours shaping every sentence themselves.
As I become familiar with a client’s business, less explanation is required for each new piece. I learn the services, audience, terminology and subjects worth exploring. An idea can gradually become something the client hands over rather than another project they have to manage.
What would you do with the time?
This is perhaps the more interesting side of outsourcing business communications. The immediate benefit is measured in work you no longer have to fit into your own week, but the value of those reclaimed hours depends on what you do with them.
You might spend them with customers, concentrate on the work that earns your income or finally develop an idea that has been waiting for attention. You might finish at a sensible time rather than writing a blog after everything else is done. Running a business gives you plenty of possible uses for an extra few hours.
Your business still needs to communicate, because there will always be useful things to explain, share and promote as it develops. Having someone else take care of the writing allows those communications to keep moving while you put your own time where it can do the most good. The interesting question is what you could do with that time once you get it back.