How to Get More Value From Outsourcing

Having a team can be expensive for your business. It’s important to realize that you will get to a point where you can’t do everything yourself and will need to hire. However, I’ve seen plenty of businesses fail or end up hiring their entire team because they ran out of money or business just got too hard to keep up with.

While hiring the right team is important, setting yourself up for success so you can get more value from outsourcing will certainly make or break your business.

Thinking about outsourcing or do you already have a team? Here’s how you can get more value from outsourcing to boost your business and your bottom line.

Outsource Tasks That You’ve Already Tried

One of the best ways to make sure you get more value from outsourcing is to start by doing all the work yourself. That’s probably not what you wanted to hear, but this is crucial.

I see way too many people start outsourcing right off the bat because they believe that’s what a business owner does. Rule #1: don’t start outsourcing until you’re making money and have tried the task out yourself first.

Why is this so important? It’s crucial that you know how to do certain tasks in your business or at minimum, you should know how something works. You may not like writing, social media, sales or another tedious task in your business but do your research and try it first even if it’s just for a few weeks.

That way, you’ll know first hand how long it takes to complete the task, best practices, and so on. Your experience working in that particular area of your business will also help you come up with a productive system for the team member who will be taking that role over.

Come Up With a Proven System

If you want to get more value from outsourcing, you need to come up with a proven system before you consider hiring someone. Realize that it’s important to hire someone with experience who can also bring something to the team. However, you still want offer guidance and direction with a proven system.

For example, if you hire someone to do social media work and just tell them to post weekly on Facebook and Instagram, this may not do much to help your business.

Instead, you can hire a social media person but give them a system and specific directions. Tell them more about your target audience and any trends or themes your followers seem to like. Do research or ask someone else to research social media strategies including the best times to post, hashtags to use, how to get engagement, etc.

Be specific when telling your social media assistant how often to post, what type of content and which tools they can use to schedule things out. You may even want to host monthly meetings to go over progress and make tweaks to your system.As you see, giving someone a proven and thorough system is the best way to go. This also helps ensure that you get more results whether that’s more sales through social media given this example, or any other goal that you’re shooting for.

Offer Fair Compensation

It’s no secret that people are motivated by money. There’s nothing wrong with that but knowing this, make sure you’re offering to pay your team a fair rate. People will simply just not do the best job if they’re not getting paid appropriately.

Trust me, I know this. Lower budget businesses attract lower budget workers. If you want to get more value from outsourcing, pay a competitive rate.

I pay my assistant a very competitive rate and comply with requests for raises each year. Why do I spend so much money on this? My assistant does awesome work. She takes direction well, knows my business, and works very efficiently. She may tackle a project in an hour where it might have taken me three hours. I assign certain tasks to her and she keeps me accountable and helps push my business forward.

It’s always wise to consider your budget when outsourcing so if you have to start with a beginner rate, be open to hiring someone who may have less experience but is willing to learn. However, if that person proves their worth and increases the value of their service, make sure you’re ready to pay accordingly.

Be Clear About Expectations

Your team will not know how much effort to give or how to be most productive if you aren’t clear about expectations. When you outsource, be sure to tell each person what goal you’re shooting for. With a target in mind, your team will know how to break that goal up throughout the month or over the course of a few weeks.

Be realistic about your standards along with how often you wish to communicate. Personally, I like to be super specific with directions for each task and the systems I set in place. Then, I make sure I am available to answer questions and brainstorm via email.

However, it’s really not helpful to my business if I have to hover over someone or do a lot of handholding. This slows down my productivity and can stunt growth in the business overall.

Summary

Hiring help can either take your business to the next level or keep it stagnant. Since you’ll be paying people to help you with certain tasks, you want to make sure you’re getting the most bang for your buck as well as the results you desire.

Follow these steps to get more value from outsourcing and use this as a guide to help you get off to a great start. Realize that you can make changes and tweaks to your system along the way as you see fit.