How Do I Start Outsourcing?
So you’ve made the decision to start outsourcing. Congratulations!
You’ll soon notice the positive impact this will have on your business, and you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it. Outsourcing is so important, because if you want to grow a profitable online business, you’ll need more than one person!
It’s time to build up a network of people around you that you can outsource routine tasks to.
But where do you start outsourcing? For some people, deciding which aspects of their business they could or should outsource is really simple. To them, it just makes sense which routine activities to outsource.
But for other people, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious answer to the question of where to start outsourcing. No part of the business stands out as being more easily outsourced than any other.
Something that will help you to identify what to outsource is to keep a log of your day. Try to keep a track of all your work activities on a daily basis, ideally for a week. It may seem very labour-intensive to start with, but this will help you to save time in the long run.
Once you’ve done this, sit back and look at this time log. Start to identify any activities that you would like to hand over, things that could be done by someone else. Highlight any tasks that, in an ideal world, you would handover.
Say, for example, you really dislike doing the accounts, or you wish you could get someone else to do your monthly newsletter mail out. Highlight every time during that week you spent on accounts or on organising the month’s newsletter. You’ll probably be amazed at how much time you’ve spent on tasks that aren’t part of your core business. Tasks that you could hand over to someone else to deal with.
This is where you should be starting to outsource. The routine jobs that immediately jump off the page at you are where you should concentrate, as these are the tasks that you have readily identified as not being part of your core business.
When you start doing this, maybe you’ll only highlight a few tasks on your log. While you might want to hand over other things on your list, at the moment it might seem like too much of an impossible dream.
But I promise, once you start this process you’ll be hooked. And the longer you do it and the more things you’ll start to observe, you’ll begin noticing all that you’re doing that you could be delegating.
The great thing about doing this is that once you’ve got your list of tasks and activities that you would like to handover, you can start to group them together. Ask yourself if there are skill sets that go together, and if you can outsource a group of tasks to one person or team.
For example, your list might contain several activities relating to editing and publishing, or website maintenance, or data entry. These groupings might not occur to you if you just thought about a regular business day. But actually going through each minute of your day clarifies exactly what you do to keep your business going.
I still find myself monitoring my daily routine, because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of doing things that I could be delegating. Whenever I sit down to look at exactly where I’m spending my time, I immediately experience a boost to my efficiency and productivity.
So, your challenge is to keep a log of your activities next week. For those who aren’t outsourcing, you’ll be amazed at how much of your day you will be able to delegate to someone else. And while you may already be outsourcing, think of it as a ‘tune up’ for your business.
Get ready to feel that boost of productivity!
