Outsourcing, Teamsourcing or Smartsourcing, they all have one thing in common, it’s not you or you small business doing the work.
Often solopreneurs, small business and non-profits think they can’t afford to hire someone to help them, when the reality is they can’t afford not too. One thing that will keep them from pursuing it, is focusing on resources and seeing this as an expenditure instead of an investment. They focus on all the reason they think it won’t work or past failures where it didn’t work.
Perspective
If you don’t learn how get outside help and be a better leader, you will remain in a state of overwhelm, not grow and limit your income, as well as limiting the number of people you can help with your product, service or charity.
First lets look at cost. Even using the word cost will set us on the wrong course, the word invest is a better way to think of it. A business coach I work with says it’s not about your resources, it’s about your resourcefulness. Here’s an example Think of someone you care deeply about. Got them in your mind? If I told you they would die if you didn’t get $1000 in 5 days, would you get a $1000? My guess is you do whatever it takes to get that money to keep them alive. This illustrates the difference between resources and resourcefulness.
Some say it takes to much time to train someone. I heard Chris Lema (a speaker and WordPress expert) speak and he shared that even if it takes 10 times as long to show someone how to do something it’s worth it because as they repeat the task they will get quicker and in a short time be able to accomplish much faster than you. It doesn’t always have to cost you time or money. here’s another exercise to help illustrate that. Pick the top two or three things that are holding you back in your business right now. Within the next 48 to 72 hours find someone or something that can help you with that item that doesn’t cost you money.
Options
That brings us to options. When I did the above exercise, I was reminded of a friend in my network who had some administration skills who had already offered to help, at no charge. I contacted her and was able to work out an arrangement. I offered her something I was already doing, meaning no extra work for me, which useful to her in exchange for help in the area where needed help. In other words bartering.
Some colleges have programs for interns who will work for no or low cost, so they can get experience for their resume while going to school.
Thanks to technology there is the option of outsourcing overseas where a fair wage there could be less than local. Some would balk at this arguing that were taking jobs away from local people who need it. But think about this, if you can bring in more revenue and profit, you’ll be able to partake of more local services which provides jobs locally and as you scale you can bring on local help as well.
I Tried & It Doesn’t Work
Some people might say they tried hiring others but it didn’t work. There could be a number of reasons why it didn’t work, they were giving tasks versus systems, they micromanaged or practiced or poor leadership qualities. Maybe they didn’t have a good plan and were assigning things that were busy work but didn’t really help the businesses revenue stream. Seeing the help as a hireling vs a valuable member of the team working towards the same goal. The list could go on, but the point is the reason past efforts didn’t work doesn’t meant the concept doesn’t work. It means looking at the experience and finding the parts we played that caused it not to work, fixing those and trying again. If we learn from each experience, the next one will be better.
In the four years that I’ve been outsourcing, I’ve developed some processes to have applicants self screen meaning I only focus on interviewing and testing the best applicants. I’ve also learned some things about communicating with them to get a better result and things that I need to do to be a better leader. There’s a session on this topic on Inspired Marketing & More, click the link to learn more. If you’re able to make the live call you can ask your questions, if you miss the call it will be available in the members area. Click the agenda to see past and future call topics and to see if this is a good fit for you.
