If you are like many small business owners and work at home moms, your business is your baby and you want to be in complete control over every aspect of it. From the recruiting of new clients to the implementation of your ideas to the answering of emails, you have always been the one to get the job done and why would you want to change that now?
Being the one that developed the business idea and built things up from the ground up, you probably think there is nobody out there who could possibly do things just the way they need to be done. I know, because I was there myself once. And that is sometimes true. But as I wrote about recently, because I never let someone else step in to help, I was only getting about 20% of the things done that needed doing. There was no physically possible way that I could ever have done all the tasks myself. This, of course, resulted in my business only growing at a snail’s pace.
Getting Started with Outsourcing
Outsourcing for the first time can be scary. In fact before I hired my first full time worker in the Philippines (an article writer) I tossed and turned for several nights thinking about giving up just that little bit of control which would dictate how things get done. Questions such as “Won’t I be spending more time checking her work than it would take me to do it myself right the first time?” and “Isn’t it going to take me forever to train this person to be as good as I want them to be?” kept running through my head.
Even with all my concerns I decided to go ahead and hire an article writer for my marketing and consulting business. Yes, there were some bumps in the road…and once I even had to get a completely new person to join the team. But I have never once regretted the decision to start spreading my work around more evenly.
How it’s working for me
Since then 5 more people have joined my team in the Philippines and I couldn’t be more happy with them. Plus, the progress I am seeing in my business makes me ecstatic. Things which used to start as ideas and then get pushed to the back of the to do list for some faraway future time that may or may not ever come are actually getting done within a matter of days rather than months. And the things which I knew I needed to be doing but just couldn’t find the time for because so many more important things were presenting themselves first, are being achieved every day. Like SEO on my websites and keeping articles on my website up to date. These are things that must be done by someone, but most people cannot actually manage to run a blog, establish the personal relationships one needs to establish for success, run around promoting yourself online, tweet, Facebook, publish newsletters, create books, etc, etc, etc all alone.
Sure, there is still the element of “Are they doing it the way I would do it?” but spending a few hours tweaking their work when needed beats doing it myself for weeks on end any day. Would I have this person call up my clients and pitch them a deal? Of course not — but that’s not what I hired them for either.
Find your own assistant
When first starting out to hire somebody to work for you my advice to you is to have a close look at all the tasks you do in a given week to see what you don’t like doing and tend to put off. For me this was article marketing and SEO. I don’t really enjoy it because it’s monotonous and I know my time can be better spent elsewhere. Writing is ok, but doing manual submission really takes me way too long. Therefore I only tended to post about 1 or 2 new articles per day, and more often than not, it didn’t get done at all.
But with my fantastic Filipino worker, I managed to get 5 new articles published and posted in A TON of directories every day. For me, that is worth giving up a bit of control in my company. At first I had her send me the articles before posting them, but within a week or two I felt comfortable enough in her grasp of how my company operates that she can do the job all on her own.
Don’t be afraid to give up a bit of control in your company, the dividends earned from hiring a person far outweigh the negatives.
