Outsourcing allows you to free yourself up from performing mundane tasks and enables you to focus on more profitable tasks that will boost your businesses success.
Why is Outsourcing Important
You only have 24 hours in a day. Even if you sleep very little, you’re still not going to average more than 18 workable hours a day. If you factor in the fact that you have to eat, shower occasionally, and you may have miscellaneous other responsibilities–it’s hard to imagine more than about 12-16 working hours per day. However, even if you COULD work 24/7 that sounds like a miserable life. Who would want to?
Your time is your most limited asset. Outsourcing allows you to purchase other people’s excess time so that you can have more to either grow your business or do things you enjoy.
Where to Find Freelancers
I’ve had a lot of luck with finding Freelancers on Upwork to help with miscellaneous electronic or Administrative tasks such as Sourcing with OAXRay or consolidating reports with XERO. If you need someone on-site to do things, I’d recommend reaching out to family/friends or other people you may have established trust with already. In addition, you can post craigslist adds or reach out on Facebook groups to find additional labor.
How to Outsource
It’s important to spell things out when outsourcing. Not only will there sometimes be a language barrier with the people that you’re outsourcing to, but there are a lot of assumptions we tend to naturally make when describing our tasks and if we don’t share all of the information that we have with our freelancers, miscommunications abound.
Be as descriptive as possible not only with the task that needs to be performed, but why the task needs to be performed. This helps to empower the VA to be able to complete the task even if there are any issues that should arise.
Pitfalls to Avoid
When working with a new contractor, it’s good to set limitations with them. I’ve found it’s best to start them off small and work up too larger, more complicated, or more mission-critical tasks. If you’re dealing with a VA it’s also important to set parameters on the number of hours to spend working on something. For instance, I’ll often say ‘budget about an hour running OAXRay on these websites’ or ‘Spend about 45 minutes searching for wholesalers near me and compiling a list of about 10 or so general wholesalers’.
Being specific and setting parameters helps avoid situations where the VA may be confused and spend a significant amount of time on a trivial task and you end up wasting money. Additionally, by not delegating critical of tasks you avoid any major issues that could create problems for your business.
Growing Your Business
In the end, you are the bottle neck at your business. There are only so many tasks that can be completed in a day. By outsourcing and delegating you effectively ‘buy’ more time, increase your capacity, and limit the opportunity costs associated with choosing tasks.
By focusing on important things that will grow your business and delegating less important tasks, you speed the development of your business.