Shortcut #6: Go Team!

I can honestly say this.

I would not be where I am today without outsourcing to smart, qualified people.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when they start outsourcing is to outsource cheap.

They go to Fiverr (which is fine) and get an ecover done (again, awesome) and think “I’ve got this outsourcing thing nailed.”

OR what happens is they try to outsource once and it doesn’t go well, and they give up.

OR they think it’s too expensive so they don’t start at all.

Listen. I’m about to tell you contradicting advice, but I hope you understand why.

First of all,you are already outsourcing in your life with great ease.

Most of us don’t cut our own hair, we have a barber or hair dresser who we rely upon to make us cute. We don’t do our own colonoscopies, and we don’t drive our trash to the dump. We hire people.  If we need a ride from the airport, we Uber or Lyft, but we certainly don’t walk 10 miles carrying suitcases.

The only difference between hiring in our personal lives and hiring in our professional lives is 1. knowing what we’re hiring out and 2. knowing how to express it. Without either of those, it can fall apart.

Which leads me to my contradicting point.

While I just said that outsourcing was easy, it is also a skill. It’s something to learn. It’s basically people management tied with business skills. If you don’t know what to outsource or how to outsource it, it’s worth it to either invest some time learning or hire a coach who can help you implement the systems you will need. With growth comes the need for help and I certainly don’t want you looking back wondering where 5 years went as your business slowly grew when you can enjoy those 5 years and have a better (more profitable) business at the end, too!

If you want more information about outsourcing, go ahead and search my blog for the word so you have the latest.   www.NicoleontheNet.com

One last thing about why outsourcing is such an important shortcut.

You can outsource in a few different ways, depending on your needs.

When I work with my coaching clients, we narrow down their needs by doing worksheets to define where their money is best spent for the biggest results.

1. Up in skills. Most people think of outsourcing the things that they don’t want to do first. But I like to start with outsourcing up in skill level. For instance, if you’re a Coach, this might mean that, rather than outsourcing to a Virtual Assistant to post on Social Media for you, that you might focus on hiring a strategist who can help you create a sexy webinar funnel that converts leads into customers. THEN, with the money you make from the webinar, you’d have resources to hire someone to keep your social media active. Or if you can’t figure out how to set up your shopping cart, but you can whip out products like a crazy women, do that. Hire someone to set up your cart so you can sell your stuff. Again, look at roadblocks. What is standing between you and money? MOVE that roadblock.
2. Down in skills. Outsourcing down in skills is simply hiring someone to do something that you’re capable of doing but that it’s not worth your time, when you have things to do that would give you a better return on investment either professionally (like public speaking) or personally (like going to your kid’s soccer game). This might be something like posting on social media, or uploading videos that you’ve batch recorded to YouTube. Yes, you CAN do it, but it’s fast and easy for someone else to do. Hot tip: This is also a GREAT place to bring in Interns or hire a teen or college kid for a reasonable price.
3. Lateral in skills. This is similar to #2 but slightly different. If you are cabable of doing a higher level task, but you have someone else who can do the same task in your business as well as you can, then it’s a little bit different of a decision. I usually hire the first two outvfirst (up in skills first and then down in skills). And then I take this on a case by case basis. These tasks are outsourced at a higher price point usually, so it’s not quite as easy of a decision as the other two. I recommend heading into these as needed, once the others tasks are handled. For instance, I CAN set up a new funnel. I ENJOY setting up funnels. I’m GOOD at setting up funnels. I might call in help with some of the tech stuff, like setting up the lists, or the webinar or whatever pieces that I don’t want to do. But I probably wouldn’t outsource the whole thing because I enjoy writing the copy and getting it all done. However, this is not always the case. For instance, at one of my businesses, CoachGlue we wanted to set up an assessment. We went around and around and I got frustrated, so I decided it wasn’t worth the frustration anymore and I outsourced it. Was I CAPABLE of sticking it out to completion? Yes. Was I interested in doing that? No. So, we did get CoachQuiz.com live, and I popped in and made a few changes and voila. I didn’t have to do it from scratch. This #3 is a sticky one because those of us who have been around awhile can be good at a LOT of things. That doesn’t mean we should do them all. 😉 And, you can take that extra time you get back from outsourcing these things and enjoy it.

And from there, that leads into the following things I assess when helping someone with their outsourcing:

1. The things you enjoy but don’t have time for (or your time is better spent elsewhere).
2. The things you don’t enjoy.
3. The things you put off.
4. The soul sucking things that can keep you from reaching for your dreams. For me, this is customer support. Most of my customers are so wonderful. But 1 out of 100 has a bad day, gets frustrated and then can get mean. I’m working on handling it better, but that can totally derail me. If you’re a sensitive one, like me, you might want to have a team in place who handles these things for you and knows to send you the ISSUE (if you need to be involved) but not the email if there is mean one.

Obviously, money should be allocated to the best places. We want to invest in outsourcing smartly. I hope this has gotten you thinking about where that might be for you.

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Go do awesome stuff.

Warmly,