Outsourcing – A Three-Part Blog Series
As a virtual business manager with a small team of virtual assistants, I am a person to whom work gets outsourced. That means I never stop thinking about how and where to find new clients, how they find me, who needs my services, and how can we best help them.
I also never stop educating on what to consider before hiring a subcontractor, how to make a virtual work relationship work and why and how the additional cost of outsourcing benefits your business overall.
Any entrepreneur who wants to grow their business, scale up their team and increase their sales and profits – including me! – needs to outsource something to someone. Unless you hire employees for your growing workload and tasks that are not in “your wheelhouse,” you need to subcontract. Because, well, the whole thing about small-business owners (SMBs) and entrepreneurs wearing numerous hats and juggling everything alone has its limits.
To address some key aspects of your outsourcing journey, I am writing a three-part blog series. Part one addresses the first stage around your decision-making.
Part 1: Outsourcing – damned if you don’t, damned if you do!?
A few trials and tribulations of outsourcing, or not, and tasks at which you are not that great.
Picture this: Every week, you spend one or two hours thinking about and writing social media posts and look for suitable images to accompany them. But your business is not a social media company. And every month or two, you battle through a stack of expense receipts to track your cost of goods and sales, and check that all your invoices have in fact been paid. But your business is not a bookkeeping or accounting firm.
These two sets of tasks are something every business needs to do nowadays, regardless of the industry you are in. And when your business does not, in fact, provide these services to clients, then these activities are what I call “secondary tasks” and you should not spend time doing them yourself.
Damned If You Don’t!
When you keep spending multiple hours on secondary tasks that will not find you new clients or customers, then your time is not well spent.
Reality check #1: The longer you avoid outsourcing secondary tasks,
the longer you will be limited in terms of scaling your business.
I know that every business owner tends to turn over every dollar before spending it. The expense, or investment, must be an obvious necessity and benefit before you part with your hard-earned money.
Instead of telling yourself, “I can do this myself,” do a reality check and be honest on how often and how well you actually do take care of those particular tasks. In principle, you may be an okay writer for your social media, and if you concentrate hard on your bookkeeping all weekend long, it may not make your accountant pull their hair out in horror.
But are you doing any of these secondary tasks in a way that does your business and your clients justice? And that does YOUR time, skills and passion justice?
Damned If You Do?
If you are resisting outsourcing because you fear that “I’ll need to take time to train them,” you’re not entirely wrong of course. However, when you hire someone who is skilled for the tasks you want them to do, they are already trained and probably better at it than you.
All they need to learn is your preferred communication style, your ideal target market, maybe familiarize themselves with a particular online platform or app you use, and how they can get the information from you that they need to do their job.
Reality check #2: There are dodgy subcontractors out there;
be sure to check references and past client work.
Sadly, the world of subcontractors has some bad apples too. This is no different from larger businesses, who hire employees based on written résumés and well performed interviews; telling little fibs or downright lies about one’s skills and experience is not new.
While a subcontractor will not provide you with a written résumé (never ask a subcontractor for one - résumés are for hiring employees), you should certainly ask for references of recent clients and some work examples, if you plan to hire them for any kind of writing or graphic or web design. Find out from past clients if they were happy with the support, quality of work, timeliness and simply put, whether the subcontractor was nice to deal with.
Since most subcontracting clients are made through direct referrals, get the word out to your networking groups and other business contacts about what and who you are looking for. Chances are good that someone can connect you to a skilled and dependable freelancer or subcontractor.
Be sure to bookmark this page and return in a few weeks for Part 2 of this 3-part blog series on Outsourcing!