How do you know when it’s time to outsource your business tasks? If you found yourself asking that question, then you’ve come to the right place.
When you’re first starting a business as an entrepreneur, for the most part, you’re going to have to do everything by yourself. Yes, that’s fine. Every entrepreneur has to go through that phase when they are starting out. That’s what I had to go through. When you’re first starting, you’re going to have to play all the positions on a team. That’s kind of how I always viewed it. It’s like a soccer team and you’re playing every position. So you’re playing goalie, you’re playing forward, you’re playing defense, and you have to do everything yourself. That can be useful at the beginning because you may not have the money to hire people, so you’re forced to do a lot of things by yourself.
It’s fine at the beginning. However, you have to understand that this can become one of the biggest problems a lot of entrepreneurs face because this is limiting your growth. At a certain point, if you want to grow and scale up you are going to need help. So once you start making money, you have to reinvest that money to hire help. That’s the perfect time to outsource your business. Things are going to be tough at first, but by learning all these different skills at the beginning stages of your business, you’ve put yourself in a position to train the people you hired so they can help you grow your business.
There’s a lot of issues that a lot of entrepreneurs face. A lot of entrepreneurs are control freaks. They need certainty. They feel like other people can’t do things as well as they can, and to some extent, that is true. On the other hand, you can actually hire people that are better than you at certain things. These people have a specialized niche, mastered their craft, and they can really help you grow even further. So in order to effectively scale up and grow your business, you’re going to have to switch from working in the business to becoming a business owner, not a business operator.
So going back to the analogy that I shared about the soccer team. In the beginning, you’re the one that’s on the field. You’re the one that’s grinding it out. You’re the one that’s in the trenches actually playing the game. You’re doing everything. You’re playing every position at a certain point though you want to be in the position where you’re the person that is managing the players on the field. That’s a much better position to be in because now you’re working on the business and not in it.
Even better than that is actually being the manager, and eventually the owner, and actually having a whole team in place for people to manage and run the operations. So that’s always the end goal. You want to remove yourself from the majority of the operations in your business. You eventually want to be in a position where you are focusing on your strengths and what you personally enjoy in your business. That’s the position that I feel privileged to be in right now in my business.
You want to remove yourself from it as much as possible. To throw another analogy at you, another way of looking at it is building a house. If you’re trying to build a house as a contractor, and you’re trying to do everything, you’re trying to do the plumbing, the flooring, the foundation, the drywall, the roofing, and the electric, you’re going to be limited. It can take you forever to build the house because you’re doing everything yourself. You’re also going to be limited in your freedom and you may become stressed and overwhelmed when you won’t be able to do much else.
But if you focus on working smarter not necessarily harder, and you think to yourself, okay, you know what, I’m going to work on the house not in the house. I’m going to hire a plumber, I’m going to hire an electrician, I’m going to hire the painters and the roofers, and I’m going to be the one that manages it. Now under the position of a contractor, you can now build five houses at the same time because you’re leveraging yourself. So that’s a much more powerful position to be in if you really want to effectively grow and scale up your business.
I’ve already shared a few analogies in my philosophy, so how do I find a virtual assistant or how do I outsource my business? What should I outsource first? The first thing to do is to hire remote workers that can handle certain aspects of your business operations. There are two ways to do this, you can either hire an agency that already has a team in place, or you can do it yourself by posting on an online marketplace for freelancers.
If you hire an agency, you don’t have to spend as much time managing employees. I’ll give you an example of this. The customer support team that I have for my business does an amazing job. Instead of going out there and trying to find freelancers and train them on customer support, I found a company that specializes in that and I hired that company. With that company, I’m dealing with a manager who trains and manages the customer support reps and I can integrate that into my business. I found that to be very useful as opposed to having to train and manage people because managing people is a full-time job. A lot of people realize that there’s a lot of time spent in just managing people, and personally, for me, that’s not really my skill. So I’d much rather work with a company that can do that for me.
Another example might be if you want to get a website designed. Instead of working with individuals, you can find a company that has web designers and graphic designers. You’re going to pay a little bit extra because of that, but it can be a lot easier because you’re working with a company that already has a team in place. They’ve already found the talent, hired them, and trained them. And they can deliver more reliable results for you.
That’s one way to outsource your business. It will cost more money that way because you’re working with a company. Same thing with content companies. If I want to get books created, I’d rather work with a company that has a bunch of writers and I can just deal with a manager. I order from them and they have writers, editors, and proofreaders. They do everything for you, and they send me the book back. Then I can publish and market that book as opposed to finding a writer and having to train them, work with them, and manage them. I found that often means a lot more work. So working with subcontractors, that’s one great way to outsource your business and VA Staffer is a good agency that can help you.
Now, if you decide to do it yourself and hire an individual virtual assistant, you’re going to have to find them, hire them, train them, interview them, and manage them. However, it’ll be a lot less expensive doing it that way. Still, it is going to require more time to train them and get them set up. If you want to do it this way, I highly recommend visiting OnlineJobs.ph. I like hiring in the Philippines personally. I’ve had bad experiences with other countries. Other countries have bad reputations, unfortunately, like India or Bangladesh. Some people have experienced more challenges with freelancers in those countries. However, I’m sure there are great ones everywhere in the world.
If you’re looking to hire people in the Philippines you can go to OnlineJobs.ph and post jobs there. When I hire virtual assistants, my favorite country to hire from is always the Philippines. I found the Filipino people very loyal. They’re very honest, they’re hardworking, and they’ve got a lot of great skills. I also do this because, with the exchange rate and the currency in the country, you can hire people very inexpensively there. You can hire people there for three dollars an hour. That’s very inexpensive as opposed to hiring in the U.S., Canada, Australia or Europe, where you might have to pay 10 dollars an hour for the same work. So I’ll rather hire someone in the Philippines that is offshore and much more inexpensive. I’m don’t have to pay certain taxes and have them on payroll and deal with all those issues because as virtual worker they’re in a different country. They are freelancers.
Disclosure: The link above is an affiliate link, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.
Now, I’ll share a little strategy that you can utilize to help you outsource your business. One question I always get is “how do you know which area of your business to outsource?” What you can do is track everything that you’re doing right now on a weekly basis. All throughout the week keep a journal and write down everything that you do. All the stuff that you’re doing, make a list of everything, and take that list after a week or two and put a dollar value to everything that you did on the list. Because everything that you do, all the actions on your list, are not equal in the sense of the results they’re going to produce in your business.
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You want to put a value to see if it’s worth hiring someone else to do those things for you. So very repetitive mundane things in your business that don’t require much thinking, those are things you can probably outsource for maybe three to five dollars an hour. Things like video editing, editing a podcast, transcribing, proofreading, and stuff like graphic design, maybe those things you can outsource for five to ten dollars an hour. Then maybe some tasks are worth a hundred dollars plus per hour. Obviously you’re not going to be perfect, but you want to basically identify what are the things under the list.
Those are some of the areas in your business that you can easily outsource. By doing them you’re losing money because you can hire someone else to do that for you. So you want to take those out of a list. Let’s say, 80 percent of those things you can outsource to someone else, and 20 percent you can continue doing yourself. Now you can focus most of your time, energy, and attention on doing those. For the 20 percent, maybe those are the things that only you can do, or they can be very expensive to outsource so you’re going to continue doing them. The other 80 percent you’re going to outsource. Ultimately the position you want to be in your business, again, is to work on the business, not in it. You’re the business owner, not the business operator.
In my business, the only thing that I really do is create content. Creating videos, creating content for my courses, that’s something only I can do. I could outsource people to create videos, but if I were to pay someone to do what I do and create really high-quality videos and content like this, it might cost a couple hundred dollars an hour for their time. Or even a couple thousand dollars an hour or so. I’d rather do these things myself because that’s a very expensive thing to outsource and I enjoy this. It is fun for me. This is my purpose, it doesn’t feel like work. So I could do this all day, all week. That’s an example of a part of my business that I don’t outsource.
That’s something that I’ve got to focus on as much as possible to grow my business. Another thing is coming up with ideas, the vision, and the strategies. I need to keep on learning because the more that I learn, and the more ideas I produce, the more my business will grow. That’s something that you can’t really outsource. Maybe you can have hire managers that can help you with that, but that’s a very important thing that you really got to focus on in your business.
Another thing that I do is I work with my team. I train them or I oversee them, and honestly, that’s something I’m trying to get away from in my business. I do less of it now, but I’m still looking to bring in more managers that can run my team. Everything else though, I don’t do. I record videos and I put it up on Dropbox. I’ve got a video editor who edits my videos, optimizes it, and puts it on YouTube, etc. They put together all that stuff for me. I’m not the one that’s doing that.
I’ve got somebody that transcribes my videos. I’ve got that outsourced. I’ve got somebody that’s editing the blog posts, writing things up and publishing them. I’m not the one that’s publishing my blog posts. I’ve got an audio engineer that takes the videos, turns them into a podcast, and publishes that on my iTunes podcast. I’ve got my social media manager that’s promoting my content. I’ve got that outsourced as well. I’ve got someone on my team to promote my content in other ways, doing some search engine optimization and writing content on other websites that can help promote my blog.
I’ve got my customer support team. They deal with customers, all the emails go directly to them. I get hundreds of emails and messages every day so there’s no humanly possible way I could respond to everything every day because it would be more than a full-time job. So I’ve got a team that does that. I’ve got a team that moderate my comments on my YouTube channel on my blog. They deal with all that sort of stuff and then I can go in once a week and I respond. All the negative trolls and negative people and stuff that nobody wants around, they’re all filtered. All of those comments are deleted and not approved. I can go in once a week and I can respond and engage with my followers. I don’t want to be the one is moderating everything because it’d just be way too overwhelming. If I spent all my time doing that I would not get anything done. So that’s an example.
So that’s a little bit about how I run my business, and it didn’t happen overnight. You’ve got to invest some money into that. Once you start making money you’ve got to invest it and outsource your business because you can’t do everything by yourself. Having a team in place has been a huge game-changer for me. I want my focus, my energy to be on creating the highest quality content possible to help as many people as possible.
This is what has allowed me to create more freedom, automate different parts of my life, and do what I enjoy every day. I do what I enjoy in my business which is the really fun part. And I don’t really want to take a break from my business because I love it. Everything I do, I love, and it’s fun for me.
One important thing to understand is that this is a process. The first virtual assistant you hire isn’t going to be the best one. That’s because you’re going to make a lot of mistakes along the way. You’re going to mess up, you’re going to hire the wrong people, and it’s going to take you failing a few times and hiring different people to really get it and know what to look for.
It’s almost like dating. It’s like if you’ve only dated one person your whole life, you don’t have anyone else to compare that person to. And when you’re first dating, you don’t know what to look for. You’ll meet somebody, go on a date, and if it doesn’t work out that’s how you learn what you’re looking for in a relationship. It’s really the same thing in business as well. You’re going to have to go through a few virtual assistants to really identify the best talent for you and your business.
I’ve been through hundreds of virtual assistants over the years, and many of them have sucked and didn’t work out, but now I’ve got an awesome team. It’s like when you got that, you want to keep that, you want to protect it. I can help them grow and I want to take care of them. I give them bonuses. I try to help them as much as possible with their lives and we’re like a family. And I’m so grateful for that because they’ve helped me do what I do.
Everything you guys see me do here, my YouTube, my blog, these wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for my team. So again, the team is really what’s allowed me to grow and scale my business, and I can share with you what I’ve learned. I’ve developed an online training course called Running on Autopilot and it is designed to guide you through the entire process of hiring, training, and managing employees remotely. You can gain access to over 10 hours of video training that can help you fully automate your business to run on autopilot.
Hopefully, this is will help you to start to grow your business and create more freedom. Just remember what I shared about working on the business and not in it.
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