When you’re running a business online whether this is for yourself or as part of consulting with people, you may often be thinking about how you can outsource. By its very nature of outsourcing means you are employing somebody else to complete work which you might otherwise have done yourself. When you’re considering how to incorporate outsourcing, it’s a good idea to follow a simple three stage process to make sure that you’re outsourcing in the best way for you. I’m going to show you this process in the remainder of the article.
The first stage of the process is you should work out which activities are not profitable for you to complete. So take a look back at your finances of your business and see what part you haven’t been directly making money on. These may be things that are simply taking too much time for you to complete them all yourself and maybe time that’s better spent working on different parts of your business.
Then you may find you can’t simply say that every part of your business although not directly profitable will not be profitable for you in the long. This can involve some what-if calculations to ensure that this is not the case. But when you work out the activities that are most likely beyond profitable for you, these are good candidates for outsourcing.
The second stage I would suggest you follow is to check these activities and see if they can be done cheaper by somebody other than yourself. Now, there are many reasons why things can be done cheaper. First of all, you may consider you yourself should be on a very high hourly rate because of your general business turnover and profit. If that’s the case then almost any activity could be outsourced to somebody who can do that for you provided they can provide the same level of service that you otherwise would bring to the job.
An alternative reason why somebody might be cheaper is they may be working in alternative economy to yours. If you’re to employ an overseas worker for this task, there’s a good chance they could complete this for far less of a rate than you would do in your own home country. Find out if somebody can do this cheaper and if so it could be appropriate to employ them.
The final stage of the process is to find the person you’re going to outsource to and this is sometimes easier said than done. You need to make sure that this person will have the appropriate skill set to complete the task for you and this may require you to train them up before they can begin to do it. The good news is once you’ve trained them up, if it’s simple enough task they continue to this forevermore or until your employee becomes bored of the job and moves on to pastures new.
You need to try and find that the most appropriate person considering both the time they would take to do a task may be longer than you would do especially if they’re unfamiliar or working with a language barrier and also the cost of employing them to make sure this is entirely profitable for you.
Therefore, it’s very easy to integrate outsourcing into your business. The most important thing you can do is to work out what activities you can employ somebody on. This should be activities which you yourself cannot complete for the same price as the worker you’re employing even if this worker would’ve take more time to complete the tasks than you yourself would do.
Once you’ve decided it’s possible, go ahead and find an appropriate employee or contractor for and you can get ahead with outsourcing these sections of your business directly to them.