As you learn more about business automation, it’s important to realize there is another way to automate your business, and that is by hiring someone else to do the work for you. Hiring experts to deliver work for you on your behalf is called outsourcing.
You can outsource to contractors, or you can hire employees. It’s up to you and depends on the type of business you want. Outsourcing to contractors allows you to hire experts for parts of projects without keeping them on payroll long term and is focused just on deliverables. In contrast, hiring employees puts you in charge of their time and gives you the ability to direct them more closely.
- Legal Work – Most small business owners will not hire a legal person to work on their team as an employee. Instead, they hire a law firm on retainer and use them only when necessary. If you do have a lot of contracts and other needs for a legal team, this is your best answer to those annoying legal issues. It’s also nice to have someone on call that you can ask simple questions of and check over contracts.
- Finance – Most small business owners can save a boatload of time, stress, and money if they find someone to help them with taxes, bookkeeping, payroll, and other issues with money and accounting. You can hire a bookkeeper, a CPA, an EA, or even an admin person to do the data entry to help remove some of these responsibilities, but this is where you really do need an expert, at least at first.
- Technology Needs – Most small business owners hire people and use automation technology when it comes to their websites. Building websites, using automation software, and all that technology really does need someone who understands it all in a professional sense.
- Marketing – Whether it’s social media marketing or some other type of marketing, hiring an expert will pay off. Experts know how to use the software available and know all the tricks of the trade to ensure the process works. When you outsource marketing, you free up time to do something you’re more knowledgeable and skilled at doing.
- Graphic Design – Giving a designer ideas for your graphics is so much easier than trying to design them yourself. Even if you think you can deliver good ideas using software like Canva.com, it’s not going to be as excellent as an expert can make it, and letting someone else do the design will save an enormous amount of time.
- Customer Care – No business owner should be handling their own customer care because it’s just too hard. You’re too close to your product or your service, and it’s too easy to get upset about issues. But an expert can help set up your customer care in a way that takes it off your plate for a lot less than you may realize.
- Administrative Tasks – Track the admin tasks you do every day, and you can likely save a few hours a day if you hire a virtual assistant to do the administrative stuff all business owners have to do. Whether it’s managing events, performing personal errands, or other tasks as directed by you, this is a substantial time saving and can really turn your business on like nothing else.
- Writing – Your business needs a lot of content for customer education, product information, and so forth. Whether it’s blog content, article content, sales page content, or internal content, a professional writer can help you with it.
Whether sales, marketing, finance, accounting, customer service, or helping manage a team, you need to outsource in your business. You may not have enough resources to outsource it all right away, but you should consider creating earning benchmarks that signal the time to outsource the task. When you outsource more, you free up your time to focus on what you do best.