Make Outsourcing Pay for Itself

Outsourcing: Make Outsourcing Pay for Itself

Does this title sound too good to be true? Trust me it isn’t. While I can’t guarantee that outsourcing will pay for itself right away, or ever (no one can), I can share with you something you can do to give yourself the best shot at reaching this goal. And who knows, you may end up making way more than you’re spending as a result of starting to outsource, as long as you make outsourcing pay for itself.

What this is about is mindset. Here’s how to approach outsourcing. You start by deciding how much you want to spend per month. You can start by thinking of the tasks you want or need to outsource and pricing them. Then choose based on those numbers what you can afford to hire out right now. Or set aside a certain percentage of your monthly income for outsourcing. This can be something as small as ten or twenty percent. Keep track of it. If you want, stick it into a different bank account. Then spend it wisely on what you need help with the most.

So far so good, but this doesn’t do anything to help you pay for the added expenses yet, does it? We’re getting there and this is the part where mindset comes in. You know what you’re spending on outsourcing in any given month. Now it’s time to make up for that extra expense. Make it a game and the way to win is to bump up your income by the amount you’re paying the people you’ve hired.

For example, let’s say you hire a virtual assistant (VA) to help with your weekly newsletter and social media marketing. You pay her $200 per month. Your task now is to increase your sales or your income by at least $200 to cover that bill. This brings up some interesting questions.

How could you make the best use of the time you’re saving by not having to deal with your newsletter and social media? What can you do to spend it in a way that makes you more money?

Here are some ideas to make outsourcing pay for itself:

• Work on a new product and launch it this month.
• Set up some split tests to improve conversions on a few of your existing products.
• Find five new affiliates to promote your existing products.
• Offer an hour of coaching per week.
• Create engaging content that drives more traffic.
• Set up a new list building funnel that sends new subscribers to one of your bestselling low-cost products.
• Start a membership site and work on recruiting new paying subscribers.

While not all of these examples will work for your particular business model and your own plans for how you want to run your business, they should help get the gears moving. Brainstorm a few ideas and give one or two of them a try. See what works and what doesn’t. Then keep going.

Increase your outsourcing budget. Hire more people or give your existing team more hours or more projects. Keep bumping up your income. All the extra work you do on high-level tasks will start to multiply and hopefully help you reach that next level of income.

The Power of Working in Your Zone of Competence

There are things you’re good at. And there are things you aren’t. That’s okay. We all have different talents, different experiences, and different likes and dislikes. At the same time, running an online business takes a lot of different skills. Some of those you’re good at. Some of them you’re not. And that’s okay as well. By only working in your zone of competence, you can make outsourcing pay for itself.

In the beginning, you may want to try to do as much as you can on your own. This is especially true when money is tight or when you’re still trying to figure out what aspects of running your business you’re good at and what you can’t wait to outsource. You won’t know until you try. But you get to a point where you have a pretty good feel for where your strengths lie. That’s when it’s time to tap into your zone of competence and spend as little time as possible in the zone of incompetence.

Think of them as two buckets. Stuff you’re good at (or at the very least plan to get good at) and stuff you’re not good at. Your job as an online entrepreneur is to spend as much time and mental energy as possible on the things you are good at. This is where your value lies. This is how you can make the biggest impact. This is what will build your business and your brand. And it is why people are drawn to you and want to learn from you. It’s what will turn a visitor into a subscriber and finally into a customer.

Unless you’re teaching social media marketing for example, your audience doesn’t really care who made the pretty Instagram or Pinterest graphics or who wrote the latest tweet. They do however care that you teach the course that’s for sale on your site and they expect time with you if they signed up for your coaching program. Those are where you bring value to your business. This is you working in your zone of competence.

Maybe you’re great at writing engaging content for your newsletter, your blog, and your Facebook page. It’s your voice and what you share that draws your audience in. In that case this is something that’s also in your zone of competence. You should do the writing. But that doesn’t mean you have to keep publishing your newsletter, your blog posts, and your Facebook updates. It simply means that you should write what gets posted and shared.

You can pass along the boring and sometimes time-consuming parts like formatting and actually sending your newsletter, scheduling posts on Facebook, and prettying up and optimizing the blog posts to someone else. You write, pass it along, and let your virtual assistant deal with everything else. That means you have more time to write the next blog post or newsletter segment. Or work on that paid product and membership content.

Take some time today and think about what’s in your zone of competence and what isn’t. Don’t be afraid to break things apart. You can be good at writing, but not so great at proofreading for example. Or maybe you create awesome videos but don’t have the patience or the skills to edit and upload them. That’s okay. Do what you’re best at and outsource the rest!

Creating a List of Tasks You Want to Outsource

When you first start to outsource, the biggest problem aside from finding good people, is deciding what you should or want to outsource. Online business owners usually fall into one of two camps. They either want to outsource everything, or they can’t think of a single thing they are ready to let go. It depends on how much control you feel you need to have over what you do with the tasks that result in the income that puts food on the table.

The good news is that you don’t need to do either. There’s no need to outsource everything, and most of us don’t have to keep doing everything ourselves. This then brings up the question of where to start. I don’t know about you, but lists help me figure this out. Why not come up with a list of tasks you want to outsource?

This will help you as you move along on this journey towards outsourcing more. It makes it easy to pick the first few tasks to hand off to someone like a virtual assistant and it helps you see at a glance what you may be able to stop doing yourself over the next few months. The strategy of learning how to make outsourcing pay for itself is a powerful one.

Get out a piece of paper or open a word document and start your list. This is a brainstorming exercise which means you shouldn’t second guess or edit yourself. This also doesn’t mean by any stretch of the imagination that you’re committing to outsourcing all these things. It’s simply a starting place.

Think about tasks you dread doing. Think about things that take up a lot of your time. Get suggestions from fellow online business owners. Look at the pages of a few different virtual assistants or talk to them and find out what they do for their clients. Come up with all sorts of ideas for things you can consider outsourcing. Then walk away for a bit. If you come up with fresh ideas down the road, feel free to add them to this master list.

After you’ve spent a little time (ideally a day or two) doing something else, come back to your list. Strike through anything you don’t’ think is a good idea anymore. Maybe it’s something you know you need to take care of yourself. Maybe it’s something not worth outsourcing, in which case I challenge you to consider if it’s worth doing at all. Or maybe it’s simply not the time yet.

Look at what’s left. Find then or so tasks that make sense to outsource now. Put a star by them and start looking for people who can do this for you. You can outsource just one or two to begin with. Then add more as time goes by and your income increases.

Before we wrap this up, let’s quickly talk about how to approach the other big outsourcing problem – finding the right people. You’ll often find the best people by asking others for recommendations. This is true when you’re looking to hire someone to clean your house, fix your roof, or help you grow your business. Talk to other business owners, ideally those in either a similar niche or with a similar business model and ask who they are using. Most online entrepreneurs don’t hire anyone full-time and are happy to share contact information.

You Don’t Have to Outsource Everything All at Once

There’s something important I need you to realize. You don’t have to outsource everything you want to eventually outsource all at once. It’s okay, and actually preferable to start small and build up. Why is this a better idea than to hire out everything from day one? Couple of reasons. Let’s walk through each of them and then talk a little bit about how you can start small and grow what you outsource over time to the point where you only do what you enjoy and what brings the most value to the business.

Knowing How To Do Something Helps You Judge How Well Others Are Doing Their Job

It’s always a good idea to have at least some knowledge of the tasks you’re about to outsource. It helps you determine if the person you’re considering is qualified in the first place. Later on, it’s easier to judge how they are doing if you know what they should be doing.

This doesn’t mean you have to be an expert, or that you should be efficient at the task. All I’m trying to say is that it helps when you’ve done this before and have at least a rough idea how long it should take someone to schedule your Facebook posts for the week for example.

Outsourcing Things One At A Time Help You Judge Their Effectiveness

Another great reason to start slow and outsource things one at a time is that it gives you time to judge if this is a good use of your time and your finances. Let’s say you start by outsourcing Pinterest marketing and have someone create and submit ten pins per week for you. In a few weeks, you can go look at your data and see if this is resulting in more traffic and more subscribers to your site. If it doesn’t make a difference at all, it may not be the most effective use of your outsourcing budget, especially if that budget is still small. Stay focused on how to make outsourcing pay for itself.

When you outsource too many different things at once, it can be hard to judge down the road what’s making a difference to your bottom line and what isn’t. Keep that in mind before you go all out on hiring a team, and remember to make outsourcing pay for itself.

Taking Your Time With Outsourcing Keeps Your Books In The Black

Last but not least, taking it slow helps you keep your business financially healthy. You can make sure you’re not overspending on outsourcing. As your virtual assistant takes on some time-consuming tasks, try to spend that time wisely. Use it to drive more traffic, improve conversions, grow your list, and more importantly make more sales. Maybe the best use of your time is to finish creating that product you’ve been working on. Those sales can immediately start to pay for what you’ve spent outsourcing, allowing you to increase your outsourcing budget for the following month.

If there is one lesson I want you to take away from this it is that it’s okay to start small. In fact, it’s the smart thing to do.

Creating a Budget to Make Outsourcing Pay for Itself

One of the big decisions when you first start to consider outsourcing is how much you should spend. There’s no right or wrong answer here other than it’s probably a good idea to spend less than you’re making per month. And yes, if you have starting capital and need help getting your website set up for example, it’s okay to consider going in the red.

For most people though, outsourcing should be treated like any other business expense. Make sure it makes sense for you at the time and that you have a good shot at recouping those expenses soon. Start by deciding how much you can spend on outsourcing. Consider this your max budget. It could be a percentage of your income (10 to 20% is a good starting point), or it could be a fixed dollar amount that you adjust as needed. Decide what that number is going to be. Make sure it’s something you can sustain for a few months and don’t make it so high that you start to lose sleep at night.

Once you have your budget, review it regularly. If your income changes quite a bit from month to month, or if you’re seeing a lot of growth, it’s a good idea to look at those numbers once a month. If your income is fairly steady, set your budget and then a reminder to review it quarterly.

How you spend your fund is something else you may want to consider. You could set a budget of say $200 per month and then spend it. Or it may make more sense – especially in the beginning – to save up for a bigger job. Let’s say you want to rebrand which means new graphics and a website redesign. You’re not going to be able to do that on $200. But what if you save that money for a few months? That gives you something to work with.

Of course you can also mix and match these strategies; spending part of your budget on ongoing tasks each month and setting the rest aside in an interest-bearing account to use for bigger projects that you know are coming up in the near future.

All in all setting an outsourcing budget is no different than any type of budgeting you do in your personal life. You already know how to save for a vacation or a new car. You know how to make sure you have enough money to pay your utility bills and when it’s time to scale back on some of the more discretionary spending. Your business is not all that different. But there’s one big exception. While outsourcing is an expense, it’s something that should ideally help you grow your income over time. When you make outsourcing pay for itself, that’s a beautiful thing.

I’m Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author, independent publisher, and serial entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and would love to connect with you. If you’re new to the world of online entrepreneurship please check out my training on how to make your first income online at 3 Day eBiz (Use Code: MAKEITHAPPEN to Save) and learn how to gain an unfair advantage when it comes to building a lucrative online business.