Outsourcing For Beginners: What Is It & How To Get Started?
‘Living the 4-hour work week i.e. outsourcing most tasks – whilst you live the passive income lifestyle'
Outsourcing has become the norm of the day – since most businesses are now preferring to delegate less important tasks – thus, giving them more time to focus on top priority tasks.
Even big companies like Microsoft outsources some less potent tasks to external parties – so that they can focus on their core income generating activities.
Thus, outsourcing is an important metric in modern businesses.
But the key question is, ‘how can a small business like yours get started with outsourcing, so that you can get more results by leveraging other people?’
That's what will be addressed in this article.
What You'll Learn:
Without further ado, let me jump straight into more detail.
What Is Outsourcing?
In simple terms, it is an act of delegating some tasks to other external parties, so that you can focus on more important tasks.
For example, let's say that you own an ecommerce website, you can delegate the customer service duties to a freelancer in Asia – so that you can find more time to focus on the core parts of your business i.e. income generating activities.
By buying other people's time, you can easily grow your business faster – unlike in cases where you do everything by yourself.
Not only that, but you can also produce high quality products and services – due to specialisation and division of tasks.
Thus, outsourcing is a great deal – especially if you want to grow your business faster.
With that being said, let's quickly discuss how you can get started with outsourcing – in order to grow your business faster.
How To Start Outsourcing Services?
The first thing is to list down all your business tasks – and you group them based on their order of importance i.e. from the top to the least.
An easy way of doing this is to place a score on each task, so that you can have a numerical measure of how each task is important to your business.
Once done, simply choose those tasks which are less important to your business i.e. those which consumes most of your time but yields less benefits to your business.
Simply go to freelance sites like Fiverr or Upwork and search for freelancers who’re cost effective – but at the same time, considering the ‘quality aspect’ of their work.
You can look for reviews of those freelancers before hiring them – so that you wont waste your money on less productive freelancers.
Once you've found the ones who matches your specs, simply hire those people – and provide full job description of what needs to be done.
As simple as that!
The process is not that complicated though.
When Is The Best Time To Outsource?
If you’re a small business, you might not need to outsource your business tasks due to limited resources – thus, you'll need to do everything by yourself.
But as your business grows, you might start to face some challenges with fulfilling all the tasks by yourself – since the tasks might become heavy for you.
But the problem is that, most people fails to notice this tipping point – since they’ll be so focused on growing their business.
And if you’re not careful, you might start to face some challenges with your customers and suppliers.
But my advise is – you must develop the habit of outsourcing as soon as you start generating some decent income i.e. when you're able to generate more than a full time income, use that additional income to outsource some tasks.
That way, you can scale your business even much faster.
However, there are some instances where you might be forced to outsource duties – even if you're not making some decent amounts.
For example, let's say that you're running a blog – but you're not really great at content writing, you might be forced to outsource the writing services to someone who is really good at this task.
This allows you to serve your audience with better quality content – although this might have some negative impacts on your cash flow.
Which Tasks Do You Need To Outsource?
This question depends on your business priorities – since businesses tends to value things differently.
But if you use the technique which l shared earlier, you can easily determine which activities are worth outsourcing.
But from what I have noticed, most businesses tends to outsource the following services:
• Social Media Management
• Paid Advertising
• Content Creation
• Customer Service
NB: These are just a few of them
Pros Of Outsourcing
• Allows you to delegate less potent activities – thus, giving you more time and energy to focus on what matters the most.
• Allows you to scale your business faster – since you can easily leverage other people to complete more tasks in less time.
• Helps to improve quality – due to division of labour and specialisation i.e. to people who're really good at fulfilling certain duties.
• Allows you to live the passive income lifestyle i.e. rather than working ‘in your business', you can remove yourself and work ‘on your business'.
Cons Of Outsourcing
• Outsourcing can be costly – especially if you're just starting out and you're not generating enough revenue.
• At times, the delegated parties tends to under-deliver – since external parties do not value your business the same way you value it.
• There are other tasks which can't be outsourced – e.g., if you're a public speaker, you don't have a choice than doing the work yourself.
Wrapping Up
To sum up this quick post, l think that outsourcing is a great technique for entrepreneurs who're looking to scale their businesses faster.
The reason being that, outsourcing allows you to buy other people's time – thus, allowing you to focus on what matters most i.e. income generating activities.
Although outsourcing yields some benefits to a business, we should not ignore its drawbacks – since this technique has its own loopholes as well.
Overaly, outsourcing is a great strategy which should be utilised by most entrepreneurs who're looking to scale-up their efforts.
Want To Get Started With Outsourcing?
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