August 15, 2025
If you’ve ever looked around your office and thought, “Who’s in charge of this?”, only to realize the answer is, “everyone and no one”, you’ve experienced the paradox of the internal support structure.
Your internal team is at the heart of your business. They cover essential tasks and carry the culture of a workplace that was thoughtfully built. The people behind the business are often the reason your clients and customers keep returning. As vital as your team is, they’re also a cost center. Likely, it’s the most significant business expense you have. Maintaining an in-house support structure demands time, money, and a surprising amount of emotional energy.
As Ashton Nelson, GLC’s own Director of Human Resources, puts it “Success hinges on a company's ability to maintain a sharp focus on its core business. As Stephen Covey noted, ‘the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.’ This is a sentiment echoed by Bill Gates, who attributes his success to focusing on ‘only a few things.’”
The Firefighter Approach
Leaders often find themselves in a perpetual survivor mode. As tasks crop up they, or their team, find themselves spending more time on non-core functions than on strategy. The result is finally that the business runs out of oxygen. The team loses patience. The tasks are still unmanaged and unstandardized.
It’s a common occurance, and often teams will fight through it, or ignore the problem entirely. Eventually this mode becomes more a state of the way things are, but let's look at the actual results of this method of running a business.
Ashton says “This loss of focus often leads to burnout, internal conflict, and a decline in revenue. The need to manage every aspect of the business simultaneously stretches resources thin and saps morale. Leaders often find themselves spending more time on the “non-core” functions of a business than they do on success. The results of this “firefighter” approach to business can be tragic.”
The Over-Regulation Trap
Many industries face an environment where people are “responsible for everything, authorized to change nothing.” That’s a recipe for frustration, and occasionally for comedy, if you’re in the mood to laugh instead of cry.
Ashton shares with us the example of this from the world of dentistry.
“According to a survey conducted by the National Institutes of Health three of the main reasons for the mass exodus of dentists from private practice toward DSO’s is over-regulation, stress, and financial reason all of these relate to the management of a business in general whether administrative, financial, scheduling, compliance, or any number of issues.”
It’s a jarring example that finds root in offices around the country. It begs the question “What would happen if more dentists were able to focus on…dentistry? It’s not just dentists, these problems can be applied across the board to many professions. For example, legal, medical, educational and trades as well as dental.”
It’s not a radical concept to imagine those who trained for a specific job to immerse themselves in that role. Yet, too often skilled workers find themselves trapped in a daily grind of compliance paperwork, scheduling snafus, and budget reports.
Blame Game Delays
When all business support is relied upon in-house, we find there is a frequent problem of the management stalemate.
When a problem emerges, instead of swiftly solving it, managers spend days, weeks, even months debating who owns it, who dropped it, and who’s definitely not taking responsibility.
Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking, customers keep waiting, and your competitors keep moving.
As Ashton notes of this, “A frequent challenge in business is that leaders become bogged down by the demands of daily operations, which distracts them from the company's central purpose. This loss of focus often leads to burnout, internal conflict, and a decline in revenue.”
Outsourcing office and business support removes the ownership tug-of-war. By giving non-core functions to a trusted partner, you create a direct line between problem and solution, no finger-pointing required.
It’s a warning to businesses demanding their staff fill shoes and wear hats they are not suited for. Ashton states it plainly, calling back on his experience in HR, “Employees too can feel the stress of a business not able to focus on its mission. When employees become overburdened by non-core tasks, they can begin to lose their dedication to purpose, the compass that drives the entire team toward its goals. Employees begin to be frustrated by the ability to see the problem but the total lack of a solution.”
The Outsourcing Advantage
A Trusted BPO is here to give your team back their dedicated time. It’s not about managing or regulating someone else’s business, it’s about streamlining costs and reducing the drag of administrative weight so leadership and teams can operate at their highest value.
By partnering with specialists for non-core tasks, whether that’s HR, reception, hospitality, mailroom, or managing records, you free your people to focus on what they do best. Leaders can get back to growth strategies. Employees can re-align with the company mission.
In Ashton’s words “Strategic outsourcing can be the key to overcoming these challenges. By entrusting non-essential administrative tasks to specialized partners, an organization can reclaim its focus. This allows leadership to concentrate on growth strategies, reduces operational stress, and improves both employee satisfaction and customer outcomes. When the team is empowered to concentrate on the core mission, and leadership can focus on strategy, the result is a more efficient, motivated, and profitable organization.”
You don’t have to do it all in-house to do it well. In fact, with the right support, you might do it better when you don’t. Outsourcing isn’t about losing control. The right BPO team should offer your team clarity, steady costs, and finally, keeping “the main thing the main thing.”