Guide To Outsourcing Part 1

This post is part 1 of 2 in Guide To [tag]Outsourcing[/tag]

Alot of people have been asking me about outsourcing lately – what I outsource, how I find the people, how much I charge etc.

I thought I’d make a post to answer some of these things for everyones benefit because the truth is that great outsource staff lead to a better business and a less stressful, more happy life for you the business owner.

Further to that, it’s something I’m particularly interested in. There’s nothing like the feeling of being somewhere else, doing something else and knowing that you have reliable personnel holding down the fort and moving your business forward without your perpetual oversight.

At the same time it’s the worst feeling knowing that a project is late because you’ve hired the wrong person for the job and you don’t want to fire them mid project because it will only cost you MORE time… Not to mention hiring people who cost too much, produce only an average level output and take weeks past the deadline to boot.

Bottom line, outsourcing is important and knowing how to do it for the benefit of your business is a vital skill to being a successful entrepreneur.

I’m just going to spill these ideas in a random manner but they are all equally relevant and important.

1. Decide What You Want To Outsource

First, is the question of what should you outsource?

Of course the answer to this is is different for everyone but an exercise that you should perform regardless of whether you plan to outsource or not is this:

Start looking closely at the tasks you’re doing each day. I mean really look at it… Look at how much time you’re spending on producing content, making/improving your sites, driving traffic – and divide it up to individual tasks too so you REALLY know what you’re doing. It’ll be an interesting experiment in time management too.

So once you can see everything you’re doing each day how do you decide what to outsource?

Even that answer could be different for everyone but you want to start by choosing the activity that’s taking up the most of your time and working your way down the list. You might find the first task is “answering email” which you can’t outsource yet so you move to the next option and so forth.

Basically you want to work off the principle that 80% of your results/income will be coming from 20% of the activities you’re performing, so you want to make sure that YOU are focusing on those 20% activities and the rest you’re getting taken care of by someone/something else.

You could also start by asking the question “What of my daily tasks are HARDEST for me?” What you also need to do as a business owner is realize what your core skills are and focus on those tasks rather than trying to do everything and anything – including the things that you plain SUCK at…

Some tasks in your day will be harder and some will be easier, and my guess is that those will correlate with the tasks that take you the most time and those that take you the least time too.

Do what you’re good at and find other people to do what you’re NOT good at. It results in a higher quality output too because you can outsource the stuff you SUCK at to people who DON’T suck at it! Your work will be quality and their work will be quality – that equals greater profits I can promise you!

Ok so you’ve decided what tasks you suck at or take too much of your time for not enough effort – now what?

2. You Create a System

Depending on whether you’re looking for someone for ongoing work or a one off project you will have to create a system or develop a project description.

Basically you have to ‘teach’ someone else to do this task so that if they jumped onto their computer somewhere else in the world, they could complete that task without messing it up and without having to bother you every 20 minutes.

If you just want some articles written, this is easy. Be specific with what you want and when you want it done and create a description.

If you’re looking for someone for ongoing work, you’ll need a little more planning but really it’s not a big deal.

To create a system, you’ll need to break down the big task you need done continually into all the little tasks that go into completing that thing.

Note the tasks down carefully and in order. You need to set them out in the chronological order you want them completed, how many of each task you want completed every unit of time, hour/day/week.

Make the description as clear as you can. Make videos of YOU doing the task with Camtasia and upload them to the web for your prospective staff member to look at and so on.

You can even set the small tasks of the system out in a spreadsheet with the tasks on one axis and time on the other axis so that the person doing them can tick them off as they complete then, making it easier to track their progress and get the task completed.

Finally note that it’s usually best to hire someone on an ongoing basis when you can because it gives you time to get to know the person and train them to get the output as close to what you want as possible.

In the next half of this article we’ll look at what to do once you have a description together – how to ensure you get the best output from the best person on a consistent basis.

Andrew Hansen