Outsourcing: Why Your Business Needs It and What Can You Outsource

There comes a time in every entrepreneur’s life when you realize you’re focusing too much on repetitive, tedious and administrative tasks and have little time and focus left for the important things that will actually help your business grow.

It’s hard to start delegating, to let others handle some of the things that don’t need to be completed by you, and to free your time and mind. But it’s also a must on your way to being more efficient and running a profitable business. Michael Gerber message in The E-Myth Revisted was loud and clear: in order to scale and grow your business, you must work “on” it versus work “in” it.

Outsourcing may be the solution to your burnout, lack of motivation, boredom, bad time management, and more. It basically means that you’re delegating one-time projects and jobs, or whole aspects of your business to an outside company or individual.

Here are a few reasons why you and your business need it:

• it reduces costs – hire virtual staff (which is also inexpensive) and keep in mind how much an hour of your time is worth, you can do the math;
• fast and quality work – you’re letting experts handle whole processes of your business and do what they do best, be it copywriting (serviced by Womeneur Preferred Partner Vanessa Williams), marketing, branding (serviced by Womeneur Preferred Partner Brittney Fells), accounting (serviced by Womeneur Preferred Partner Pamela Balentine, CPA)
• you’ll stay sane – you will finally have time for your family and all the other things you want to do with your free time. What’s more, you won’t be worried about what’s left to be done as you’ll now have created a whole system that is working even without your supervision.

Where should you start if you’re new to outsourcing?

Begin small and first off, check out Womeneur Preferred Partners who offer Services and Digital Guides in a plethora of business areas. Additionally, platforms like UpWork, Guru, Freelancer and PeoplePerHour connect employers and freelancers. Post your first job offer and check out all the proposals you’ll receive.

I suggest you choose more than one person and give the collaboration a try with a one-time gig. See how he or she performs, how the communication is and decide whether or not he or she’s a good fit for the position.

You may not be lucky enough to meet the perfect candidate right away, as there are so many people constantly applying for jobs on these sites. Don’t get discouraged because once you do find someone you can see yourself working with in the long-term, you’ll save yourself so much time and unnecessary worries in the future.

 What can you outsource?

Below are some options:

1. Administration – that’s a time-wasting activity that needs to be done all the time. I’m talking about answering email, following up, record keeping, file maintenance, communication with employees and clients, and more. That’s where a virtual assistant can help you. He’s a person who can do basically any task you can delegate online, even personal ones. For instance, Womeneur Preferred Partner Tyra Johnson of POSH Life Social offer amazing virtual assistance and administrative support.
2. Marketing – get a marketing expert to do the promotion of your business, to reach out to influencers, get feedback from customers, create media pitches and campaigns, manage your social media channels and more.
   Social Media – Womeneur Preferred Partner Suzzette TurnBull of Ucommon Marketing created a kick-ass Ultimate Guide to Understanding and Managing Social Media and Jamie Caroccio of Hispire provides high quality social media management services.
3. Writing – part of your personal brand and site (be it a company or a personal website) is having a blog and updating it frequently with practical content on trending topics. But if writing isn’t your thing, or if it takes you too long to come up with a single blog post, let a freelance writer do it. He won’t just give you documents with text once a week or so, but can take care of the whole blogging process;
4. Finance – you can hire someone offering bookkeeping, accounting and payroll services and Womeneur Preferred Partner Pamela Balentine, CPA offers just that. You’ll never have to worry about late payments, information you don’t understand, taxes, stats and the big picture of how your business is doing again.

Now imagine communicating with each one of these five people every now and then online – it will be like a meeting, but a short and to-the-point one. You’ll assign them tasks, see how they did the past week, and even brainstorm ideas on how to improve this particular aspect of your business.

That will be your first remote team. From then on, the more your business grows, the more people you can hire and the more time you can free for yourself.

Now that you know why outsourcing is so important, are you ready to hire your first virtual employee?