To Outsource or Not to Outsource? That is the Question...

As business owners, as an entrepreneur at one point, we come to face to face with the question: Should I outsource, and what will this do to my business?

Hello, virtual enterpreneurs. Join me on this episode of the virtual entrepreneur.

If you're new to this podcast, welcome on our last episode of the virtual entrepreneur, we had a great interview with David Trotter, and the interview talked about how to get your social media marketing done in five minutes a day.

Now David has been industry for years and years, and he was kind enough to share with us his wisdom, his knowledge, and his own personal experiences so that you, my friends, and I can use that knowledge and applied to our businesses, wherever we are, at whatever stage we are David information, David's information is available on our website, which is Herbert's marketing.com That is Herbert marketing help.com

So Herbig marketing help.com And there you'll find the full episode with the notes and more information on how to get in contact with David Troja and as well as how he could help you in your business. He has been helping a lot of female intrapreneurs, and really the results speak for themselves.

So if you want to get in touch with him, and learn more about David Schroeder, I recommend you check out our website for more information, but that is that, and when I had the interview with David Schroeder, I realized that there is a topic that we haven't touched on this podcast, at least not in detail, and that topic is outsourcing. As a business owner, as a founder.

At one stage of your business, you come face to face with the question, should you outsource, should you get more talent in for your business. And that question can be very difficult depending on how you are approaching the business with some of the foundations haven't been laid up properly. There's a lot of struggles because hiring someone to do work can really mean a lot of things. And the reason why I say it can mean a lot of things is because when someone comes into work.

That is a completely different person with their own vision, their own way of doing things their own mind, and their own autonomy. And what I mean by this is, you may be doing things in a very specific way, like, as simple task as writing a blog, being written by two different people will sound completely different, even if the topic is the same.

And so as a business owner, you need to have set a specific system, so that whatever work or content you decide to outsource. The results will always speak to your audience to your very specific, narrow targeted audience, because if the language is different, then it's a completely different message for them. And it won't resonate. And as we know, if the message doesn't resonate, then there is no action.

Right.

It's that simple. And so one of the best resources for this type of, I suppose, area for this specific area. I think will be the book by Michael Gerber the entrepreneur myth. The book talks about how most entrepreneurs come into the intrapreneurship world with a mindset of a technician. Right. And I want to go into the technical terms here that are being used there, but simply put, someone is good at doing something, they decide they should do, build a business around that, and that is okay in some cases, or in all cases, except knowing how to do one thing, like how to fix computers, does not mean you know how to build a business that fixes computers.

Those are two different skills, one skill is building a business. Another one is fixing computers.

And so, as a business owner, when we decide to outsource we need to be very careful because we need to have had the systems that guide every single person into our business, so that whatever action they perform.

The end result becomes a product of the business, with the same message with the same branding, with the same voice, and that is possible, my friends. When I started my photography business it was one of the key things I was experimenting with. That was when I came into contact with that book.

My first look, and reading it. And what I saw was that you could build a system, even for a business, which is as creative as photography.

Think about that.

I was able to create a system in a photography world where all the pictures I could produce could be produced by completely anyone else. And what I had there was, was simply I selected very narrow, specific settings that I would use for photographs for different environments, and I turned those into spreadsheets. And so whenever I wanted to take photographs.

I didn't have to think as a creative person anymore. All I had to think was, I've put my settings, and it didn't matter how creative I went, as long as it was within the settings in the parameters that I had created.

It was the same for delivery and it was the same for all these other things. Now that is just an example in my personal example. And this was also a while back, but one thing that I've learned is if you can do it for a creative profession, which varies a lot depending on the environment. I mean in photography.

If the light is bright and if the light is dim if it's day or night. If it's a lot of people to one person, or if it's one person, you're photographing conditions can change a lot, and you could easily end up, You know, having to worry about every little thing, but you can narrow, all those parameters down so that everybody else can follow that given a simple rule, which is if this is the condition.

Simply put these parameters, either into your camera or into the post-production process, or into your email response, and all these things come up and packaged together to create a very uniform product, which is what the customers want and I was photographing for corporates, right, and it worked, it worked.

So, that's my side story on that. And what I want to talk in here is, I really want to address the elephant in the room, right, and the elephant in the room is:

Should You Outsource?

And this question is simple to think about.

However, it can be a little bit tricky when it comes to actually outsource. And the reason why it can be very tricky is that sometimes the tasks that we are not very good at are the tasks that we need to get very good at,

For example, as a small business owner, outsourcing your social media, or your podcasting or your blogs, is one of those few things that can be a little bit tricky because it takes time to formulate the message that you want to tell your audience.

The Voice, right, it takes time to really find that voice that you think, speaks directly to your audience. And so, even though it is a task that we are not very good at the beginning.

It is also the task that we feel like we want to outsource the most because we do not see it as being a very high critical task. But the thing is, is very highly critical, because it's one of those things where you plant a seed today, and 10 years later, you reap the rewards, right.

So, when it comes to social media, that, or any of these tasks that we outsource some of the tasks that the earlier, you know the founder isn't really sure of, are these kinds of tasks, and I'm going to jump right back into my notes before I stray too far there.

And one of the key things is the question that you probably will be wondering, should you outsource and when should you outsource for the task. And what exactly should you outsource and I have a strategy that I've used that I've learned from mentors, and then we'll explain it to you the way I learned it. And my goal is that it'll give you a very specific starting point from where you can start taking action.

Okay, so, whether to outsource or not, that is really not the question.

The question is when should you outsource and what are you going to outsource?

Because the thing is, I've heard this phrase that you cannot climb two mountain peaks at once. And I think that's very true. You really can't climb two mountain peaks at once.

And if your goal is to reach really high, then perhaps having a team of people climbing different mountains. At the same time, then it's easier because there's one there, there's one or the other one on the other side. And so together you may reach out faster than if you, you had to try and climb this one and then that one and then that one just takes very long. And as intrapreneurs.

We have a very specific goal.

We have a very specific goal, and that is growth for our company because growth translates into more power in terms of getting more resources in.

Right.

And so, if that is our goal, right. At one point we will come into contact with tasks that we don't know how to do this is a given it's a guarantee we will find tasks that we don't know how to how to do unless you were, you were born with a brain capable of building businesses from scratch.

I mean, Some people probably wait, I haven't come in counting to one with one of them. So I would love to. If someone knows one person, but the goal is.

At one point, there is tasks that we don't know how to do. We have limited time, and we also have limited resources. So how do we go about accomplishing those?

One of the biggest things is to have the right priorities right. And we talked in this podcast about where we are putting our attention. And really our attention should be so narrowly focused on our priorities, whatever is the most important task that will get us more result should be the task done first.

Each day, because that task is done correctly, then that day is a success because that is the most important task and everything else can wait right there really can't be all the tasks are important, they're not that important. And one of the best ways to evaluate which task is important is either.

What results is it going to give you?

And also, in terms of basically the results, it's going to give you which results do you want to now fast today and what tasks we will, we'll get to those results really because of the results you want.

And in this case, a business that is generating revenue, any task, having to do with generating revenue should be the most important task is what I'm trying to say here. Right. And so the way I learned it about outsourcing, right, was as intrapreneurs we need to come to a mindset that when you're building a business.

We are not doing everything by ourselves. There's going to be a team of people, a team in the marketing team in the sales team in HR team in the finance and team in the PR, and even the product relations, and all these other things, even the delivery, right. We don't want to be the entrepreneur who is doing all those things by themselves, because it's time-consuming, and it's wasted energy and time in other areas.

Right.

So, we need to be able to know how to find the "Who" that can do those tasks.

For us, we need to be getting good at finding a very good person who can do those tasks for us, rather than focusing on learning how to do them. That is the way I learned this, right.

And so, when we know who we save time, but we also save momentum, Because as I said, as entrepreneurs we have a very specific goal which is growth for companies for businesses, right, and building a business has momentum right when you're getting these tasks done. We build up momentum which propels us, which fuels us which inspires us. And when you're trying to learn how to do something.

The learning curve is frustrating and it slows us down in bleeds, it brings us back. Right. It kills that momentum. And when that momentum is lost, there's energy lost, and to build that up all over again takes a lot of time, and we don't do that, right.

So, how do we go about outsourcing?

Well, there are several places where you can go and outsource and I'm just going to name three here is fiverr.com fiverr.com you can find people who have certain skills in all areas of business from audio annunciators so people can produce for you, audio files, if you want them to video editors, all the way to even photographers if you're really looking for that right, so there's lot of people, you can find on on Fiverr, this freelancer.com, you can find a tonne of people in freelancer.

They can also, it's similar to Fiverr, but the difference is the way the platform is being run right in Fiverr. It's almost as if everybody has this little mini shop, right, little mini stall.

So like you're walking into the market, and there's all these stalls of people who can do different services, and you can go around, picking which services you want. Right. Well, as a freelancer, all you have to do is post a project, and then people start to bead that they can do it, the Maven propose how much they can do it for, right, and then this people per hour, which I think works much closer similar to Fiverr and Freelancer combined.

I've never really used people per hour, so much as I've used Fiverr and freelancer. And my number one go-to platform has been freelancer, myself I've hired a lot of teams from freelancer, combining their skills with my skills, we were able to do much more than if I had tried to do it myself. And I know a lot of big businesses, people including some of my mentors have hired people from both of all these platforms.

So with that said,

The Next Thing Is Proof or Demonstration.

If you're looking for someone to hire one of the biggest things is you need to find someone, either who has a lot of very good reviews, or you can host a competition.

Right. And one way to do this is by freelancer, which allows you to host a competition.

So if you're looking for a graphic designer. Sometimes you may not know exactly what the end result you want to look like. So by hosting a competition that is guaranteed that someone's going to win. People are willing to participate, to offer you the idea, their creativity, their design. And then at the end, you select one winner, who will get the prize for that competition.

And then there you can move in contact them and work with future projects that involve similar designs. And what this does is it eliminates the need for you as an entrepreneur, working with someone who is learning to be a graphic designer. Because the thing is, there's nothing wrong with learning to be a graphic designer, but there's everything wrong with you, be just a new intrapreneur with a small business, with very limited resources, and using those resources, you know, to create products that will not really guarantee results, so you want the best result.

Because you want to make everything as effective as possible. Once you have achieved, and you've gotten all the, you know, you're generating all these sales, then you wouldn't mind if you hired someone and they were learning and you really liked you know their approach, or their mannerism, or they really would connect with your company.

But because you can afford this time, right, you can afford to have somewhere to learn and it wouldn't be badly, as it is, if you are at the beginning, you know, you're just starting out and you're using, you know, work that isn't really guaranteed to bring you the results you want. At the end of the day sales is the key thing. Once you have sales you can solve that all the problems.

So, that's how about you go to host a competition or get good or find someone who's really good reviews.

Now I'm thinking at this point here that is, there's a lot of the things that I've just said, I'm going to try and bring it down to a closing into what we can do is an action. A call to action for this episode. Right. So what we can do is what I want you to do right now is to create a sheet, a form, or pay a page one, page that will allow you to see what you can outsource and who you can outsource and where you can outsource.

Right, so the best way to go about this is you right at the top of the page right, You'll create columns, and on the first column, you write, tasks, and then you list down all the tasks that you know needs to be done in whatever process that you're working on. If it's a sales process, then all the tasks associated with that sales process.

So that may be lead generation copywriting, creating sales funnels, creating video sales letters, creating Word doc one-page sales letters, creating a call to action, you know, integrating all those tools together with all these tasks, you can write them in on the column on the first call. And then on the second column, you know, right, how much time it's gonna take you to do it if you were to do all of them.

How much time is gonna take you to the first task, which is wearing the video sales video server, how much time it's gonna take you to do the second task, and you will continue until the end?

Right.

And then on the next column after that you're going to ask, how much time. Ideally, it will take someone who knew what they were doing. Right, so gonna write down the times of each task on the next column. And then after that, you can write down the cost of how much it's going to take.

So, How much would it cost someone who knew what they were doing, how much would they charge for it. And the funny thing is, you'd find for things like graphic design. If you've never done it, it will take you a long time to learn, but for someone who knows what they're doing.

They'll just charge you $20 And they'll give you a high-quality professional graphic design cover, even if it's a professional book, and I'm saying this because I've written a book and I you outsourced, you know the graphic design of it.

I'm a photographer, but I had to outsource the graphic design for it, because I am not a graphic designer. And you'd be surprised that for a professional it's so easy for them to do it.

Don't even charge you, so little that if you were to do it you wasted you so much time and as beginner entrepreneurs, we need to get into the habit of finding people who know how to do it. So, on the column beside cost.

So you've written time and cost. Then you want to calculate, to see how much in terms of, so if you were doing.

Right there is the cost of you doing it and is the cost of someone else doing it because of you doing it is usually one way to evaluate this is how much is your time worth. Right. We've talked before on a previous episode where we calculated how much is our time worth, right. So if you're doing some of the critical tasks on the list.

Right.

How much would you do in one hour? And would it be better to do what you are doing in that one hour, or to do something like in graphic design, Richard didn't know how to do to learn to do that. Right, so you want to calculate how much will it cost you to learn how to do that.

So the next column you want to write down how much is going to cost you how to learn, how much time it's going to take you to learn how to do that. And the comb. After that, you're going to write down the list of someone who you can find who can do that for you.

At a price lower than that. and then you'll see that by just looking at that.

It doesn't, you do not have to do every single task, right, you can outsource them. And if you find that some of these tasks. You do not have the resources to outsource them, then it's best to go and do something you really can do for someone else, get that money and then you use that to outsource because the chances are, you still get much, a much better result than if you try to learn it from that.

Now I've strayed a little bit from here, and it's going to be a little bit difficult to follow that but repeat that and try and draw for yourself just write down the columns and the tasks and break down things for you, if even if you don't follow what I'm giving you here, you will get one thing for sure, you'll get a clear view of what tasks you should be focusing on, because of how much they cost, and what they mean to you in terms of results.

So, this is us on this episode, I want to thank you so much for joining us on this episode, as I said in the last episode we had a visitor, a guest.

David Trotter.

I would like you to go and listen to the interview, David Schroeder, even if you do not get to work with him, you will definitely learn something from the interview.

I believe there are other things that we can benefit from each other besides, cash transactions.

Right.

You can learn a thing or two from him, and the notes for this episode can be found at Herbertmarketing help.com So thank you again for tuning in on this episode, no talk to you on our next episode of The Virtual Entrepreneur. And as always, have a wonderful evening.