Running a business or other organisation of any size involves the use of a lot of different services, and these are divided into what are known as hard services and soft services.

Hard services usually cover things of a technical nature concerning the premises in which you operate such as heating, lighting, plumbing, and so on, and which require the services of engineers, plumbers, and others who are trained in that sort of work.

So-called soft services are things like catering and cleaning. So if you have a canteen in your office for your staff you could hire cooks and chefs, washers up, and hire a manager to look after the whole canteen including ordering all the food and groceries, and put them all on your payroll. Then you’d have to give them holidays, cover staff who go on sick leave, organise the payroll which might mean taking on an extra person in the accounts department, etc.

The alternative to all this extra burden is to use the services of a company that specialises in providing all of these extra services that you need in order to run your business, so that all you then have to worry about is paying their invoice at the end of the month. This is often a far more cost-effective way to deal with it than all the time-consuming trouble of doing it yourself.

There are facilities services providers who are specialists in providing all the extra services that you need to run your organisation so that you can get on with whatever it is that you do.

So for instance, you might own a food manufacturing business. Now you could employ your own cleaners, security, and waste management team to clean everything perfectly overnight, and ensure that everything is perfectly hygienic when you start work again at 8.00 am, that all those cleaners are overseen by security staff when they enter the premises and leave again, and that all waste food is disposed of in the proper manner. However, you might find it a lot more economic to use the services of a company that will do all that for you, so that you can concentrate on what it is that you do best which is creating amazing recipes and preparing them, and supplying them to retailers, restaurants, hotels, and so on.

Very often, you will find that one services company can provide you with all of the extra services that you need, so you might find one that can supply the cleaners, the security staff, and the waste management team that you require.

Possibly you might run a stately home that many people wish to visit. You could employ your own gardeners to look after landscaping and grounds maintenance, but you might very well be better off outsourcing that to a specialist firm while you concentrate on taking care of all the antiques and paintings and furniture inside the house that require your specialist knowledge and that an outside firm probably could not do. Very possibly you may have a lot of houseplants throughout the building that need proper attention in order to keep them looking and growing at their best, and a company that understands gardening and grounds maintenance could take care of those for you as well.

In other words, it is very often the case that you should do what you do best, and outsource the other things to companies that cannot do what you do, but can take care of all the things that would otherwise take up a lot of your time and energy which can be far better spent elsewhere.

So the simple fact is that, whatever sort of business you run, there are service providers who will deal with all of the soft services that you need, which frees you up to spend your time doing things that will grow the business.