A buzzword you’ll be hearing more and more about in the coming weeks and months is “insourcing.” With the recession kicking into high gear, companies of every size will turn towards insourcing to help lower costs. The theory mirrors the same principles of multi-tasking, where people take on non-traditional roles to save costs on services provided by vendors not affiliated with the company.

Basically, insourcing is a sexy way of saying Do-It-Yourself - or finding others inside your company to take care of an issue.

For small business, insourcing can be the difference between success and failure. If an employee at Home Depot’s corporate headquarters has a computer problem, for example, that employee can easily request a member of Home Depot’s IT department to fix the problem. A small business owner most likely doesn’t have that same luxury since they don’t have an IT department. Instead, they would have to call an outside IT services provider like Geek Squad for help. In today’s economy, if that same small business owner was able to fix the computer problem him/herself, they’d save a lot of money. This is known as insourcing.

But even large industries are dealing with insourcing, especially the auto industry.

Understanding Marketing helps companies with two portions of their insourcing - marketing and public relations. It can cost a small business owner up to $10,000 every month to hire a PR firm so they can get written about in newspapers and magazines, and placed on television and radio news stations for publicity. We realize there aren’t many small businesses that have this kind of budget. Instead we’ve developed the first e-book in our series of Do-It-Yourself (insourcing) resources to help the small business owner easily do their own PR. This information can be found in our PR Toolkit ($29.99).

There are many other areas where a small business owner needs help for insourcing. Legal matters, tax and accounting issues, business development and customer service, to name a few. Successful small business owners will find a way to insource a majority of these areas to save on costs. To give each small business the best advice for these areas, check out the #smbiz small business chat, hosted on Twitter each Tuesday night from 8-9 p.m. (Eastern). This chat serves as an open forum where small business owners get free advice on anything they have questions on in running their business.

Tell us your insourcing issues and success stories here by leaving a comment.