Tag: outsource

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Stop Doing Everything and Hire Help

Being a business owner or entrepreneur doesn’t mean you must do all the work to see results or need to stay busy all the time. Having these kinds of high expectations keeps you and your business back from seeing the success it deserves. Low self-esteem and energy are not healthy for business or your overall health and mental clarity.

 

Here are five tips designed to help you let go of control and hire more help so you can better manage your time to lead a more productive business:

 

Highlight Your Weak Points and Other Stress Areas

The best place to start is the business areas that you are not too comfortable doing or lack enough education to do well. Accounting and customer service are by far the most common areas people outsource. Accounting takes years to understand, and customer service can often be tedious and stressful.

 

Develop A Clear and Direct Job Description

To gain actual value from having employees or contractors, you need to find the right person for the job. Create a clear and direct job description listing all your expectations and requirements for the job. Don’t skip on the little things or hold back on anything. In fact, always share the points of the job that you find the most challenging right away. The point is to be sure that those who try to apply for the job are the best for the position.

 

Utilize A Virtual Assistant

Let your virtual assistant take over the tedious and time-consuming tasks, including customer service or scheduling and setting up important meetings and other similar and repeatable tasks.

 

Hire Expert Freelancers

Hire freelancers that specialize in specific areas such as social media marketing or content creation. Expert freelancers can better set up your social media pages, add campaigns, and more to increase your engagement to maximize results and profits better. This is because they have the dedicated time and resources to become an expert in their field. When you can focus on one subject, you can master the processes and techniques to get it done faster.

 

Use Smart Phone Applications to Find Hires

There are so many different applications and companies designed for hiring help for many other business areas in a matter of seconds. Some popular choices include:

 

  • TaskRabbit – Find any repair person from your fingertips the same day. From moving trucks to cleaning services, contact deliveries, and more. TaskRabbit allows you to create tasks, send messages and pictures to a certified tasker easily and professionally.
  • Fancy Hands – The most popular US-based service to find your next virtual assistant all on the same day.
  • Fiverr – On this platform, you can find just about any freelancer or service required for business and more, starting at just five dollars a project.

8 Things You Should Outsource in Your Business

You don’t need to do everything to be successful. Use these tips and tools and get more help today.

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How to Outsource to Save You More Time

Stop doing everything yourself. Outsource your work before it’s too late. To be successful, you need to save your time and energy for what you do best. If accounting, customer service, marketing, or technology isn’t your thing outsourcing the work by finding an online freelancer is a great option to save you more time and frustration.

Positive Attitude

The following are a few areas to outsource in your life and business to save you more time:

 

  • Making hotel reservations or booking meetings and other appointments.
  • Social media, email, and other marketing projects and tasks.
  • Laundry, cleaning, and other housework or maintenance.
  • Content writing, administrative or human resource tasks such as payroll.
  • Customer service and support.
  • Shopping and dry cleaning.
  • Other repetitive, time-consuming, and frustrating tasks.

 

What to outsource depends on what you need the most, what you can afford, and what goals you are looking to accomplish. Ask yourself this one simple question to get started: “What takes up most of my time?” Then decide from there if it something someone else could be doing for you instead.

 

Depending on your needs, there are many different platforms to choose from online to hire independent contractors to do various tasks from content writing, social media marketing, answering phone calls from customers, sending out emails on your behalf, or even delivering your groceries other materials.

 

The following are a few popular choices:

  • upwork.com – Post your job and let freelancers come to you with Upwork. Their freelancers offer many different services, including development and IT, sales and marketing, finance, accounting, administrative or customer support, etc. Whatever it may be, they likely have the freelancer for you.

 

  • fiverr.com – Graphic design, video, and animation, voice overs or content writing are just a few of the many different categories of freelancers you can find on Fiverr. For just five dollars a service, you can outsource just about any project on this platform.

 

  • getfriday.com – This is the best online marketplace to find virtual assistance that can perform repetitive, mundane, or time-consuming tasks for you and your business. If you need help with market research, bookkeeping, web, or IT services, you can also find that here with their Business Support Services.

 

  • instacart.com – With Instacart, you can pay a monthly or delivery fee per order to get your groceries, prescriptions, alcohol, or other similar items delivered. This application has partnered with many popular stores, including Publix, Costco, CVS Pharmacy, and more.

 

As you can see, depending on your needs, you can find a freelancer to do the job for you. Doing everything and not outsourcing only decreases your productivity. While we often joke about business owners working 24/7, the truth is that you do not have to work all the time to be successful as a business owner.

The Ultimate Boost in Productivity: Automation and Outsourcing

 

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Tools and Tips for Automating Discovery Calls

Many small business owners like virtual assistants, business and life coaches, and others who work one-on-one with customers and clients use discovery calls to help pitch their offers and close sales. Discovery calls are a powerful way to get more customers, but it can be time-consuming if you don’t develop a process that can be automated and replicated.

HBA Funnel Builder…

  • Build a Landing Page with Your Offer – Your first step is to build a page that tells your audience about your discovery calls and what’s included, and why they should set up a call with you. You can do this with your basic website pages, or you can use landing page software like net or Instapage.com.

 

  • Set Up a Questionnaire Via Your Scheduling Software – Using scheduling software like com offers you the ability to force your lead to fill out a questionnaire in order to set up their appointment, all without you helping in person at that moment. Most people will happily fill out a short questionnaire but remember that you are trying to qualify your leads, so don’t be afraid to ask questions that make them leave the form.

 

  • Develop Transactional Emails for Your Autoresponder – Now, set up some information in your autoresponder so that once they submit the questionnaire as well as choose their time for a call, they receive automated emails giving them more information and instructions. You can use your email autoresponder for this, and it doesn’t matter which platform as long as you check to see if the other software you’re using integrates. Aweber.com works with most.

 

  • Let Your Potential Customer Choose Their Time to Call – The scheduling software allows you to put the times you’re free. In fact, you can choose different free times for different types of calls so that you know when you get a call what it’s for due to the time and date.

 

  • Get a Dedicated Phone Line for Calls – Having a dedicated line or at least a unique ring will help alert you to the call. You’ll want to set up your calls so that your customers call you instead of the other way around as it eliminates the need for you to remember anything.

 

  • Read Their Questionnaire Before the Call – You can sign into the scheduling software to read the questionnaire, or you can set up a Zap (Zapier.com) to force the system to put the questionnaire into a special Dropbox or file on Google Docs.

 

  • Set Up Follow Up Information to Go Out Automatically – Once the call is finished, you’ll want other information to go out to your lead automatically so that you can close the deal if you did not already on the call. You can use tags and triggers within your autoresponder using IFTTT.com or Zapier.com to make it happen automatically.

 

Discovery calls help you get more clients and close deals. However, due to the fact they can be time-consuming, it’s best to go in with a plan. Use the customer’s answers to the questionnaire to help guide your meeting in a way that showcases what you can do for them based on their needs.

 

Follow up as soon as possible within 24 hours after each discovery call with an offer giving them a few days to consider your offer but setting a deadline so that you can avoid overbooking yourself. This process works wonders for booking more clients for the one-to-one service provider or coach.

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9 Tips for Choosing Awesome Contractors for Your Business Needs

When you decide to outsource to others using contractors, you must understand how to find good ones and keep them before you get started. Nothing is worse than finally deciding to pay someone else to do something and making a bad choice.

communication

  1. Know What You Want – If you don’t know exactly what you need, it’ll be hard to hire the right person or team to help you. If you cannot write a detailed job or project description highlighting the expected deliverables and timetable, and budget, you are not ready to find a contractor.

 

  1. One Thing Per Contractor – When it comes to your small home business, you don’t want to hire one person to be in charge of an entire project because it can cause problems. For example, if you hire one writer to write, edit, format, and do every part of a project for you and they get sick, you may end up without a project. But if you hire someone just to do the writing, someone else to do the editing, and yet someone else to make it pretty, you’re more likely to get a better product in the end. Plus, it’s a lot easier to replace someone only responsible for editing since each skillset is specific.

 

  1. Know Your Budget – You need to know the range you’re willing to pay for the projects you’re trying to outsource. To generate the number, you need to find out what the going rate is for that particular expertise. Don’t try to get a rocket scientist on a minimum wage budget.

 

  1. Check References – Even if your friend recommends a person or company for your project, always check up on them to be sure they are who they say they are. You’d do this if you were hiring someone to come to your storefront, do it when you are going to work with someone in your company every single time.

 

  1. Start Small – When you first work with someone, don’t hire them for a long-term project. Instead, hire them for a short-term project with a faster turn around time so that you can find out if they are right for you for future or more critical projects.

 

  1. Respect the Laws – When you hire a contractor, they are not your employee. How they produce your deliverables is not any of your concern. The important part is to answer the question: Did they deliver the results you paid for? You don’t control their time because they are not your employee. For this reason, pay by project or task and not hourly.

 

  1. Use a Project Management System – Some independent contractors have their own system and want you to sign up for their project management system. This is important because it helps establish that they are not employees. But if they don’t use their own, set up a system for them to use with you as it’ll keep everything more organized and on task.

 

  1. Communicate Regularly and Quickly – When your contractors have a question, get back to them as quickly as possible with the answers. They have their own timeline, and if you’re not fast with responses, you can end up being really hard to work with.

 

  1. Pay on Time – Don’t mess with someone’s pay. If you promise to pay them a certain amount of money for the work, then pay them when you said you would. Don’t hire people if you don’t have the funds to pay at that moment.

 

Remember that the old saying that if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Always check up on anyone you plan to work with, whether you are going to pay them, share private information with them, or have them associated with your business name in any way. There are lots of great people who want to work virtually as a contractor, so if you know what you want and do your due diligence, you will find them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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8 Things You Should Outsource in Your Business

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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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.

 

 

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Outsourcing: The Key to Success for The Life Affirming Entrepreneur

When you set out to build your business, one thing was clear. You wanted a business that provided the income you needed while not overtaking your life. You want time to live all aspects of your life to the fullest, and you don’t want to work all the time and miss out on the joy of life. You want business success, and your success includes living a full and rich life in all ways and all aspects. In other words, you want to build a successful business while still enjoying life. The key to being able to do that is outsourcing.

Create a community of entrpreneurs

There are many reasons to outsource, but the two most important that come to mind are the ability to free up your time so you can focus on your goals and business planning and also to add key resources and skills to your offers. Well planned outsourcing can improve your efficiency, cut costs, speed up product creation, and give you time to focus on the important planning and directing that a business owner does aside from doing the actual tasks in the business.

 

Outsourcing helps your business:

 

  • Scale Up Faster – When you use strategic outsourcing, you can scale up when needed, but you can also shrink when needed without affecting your business. Outsourcing means you use a contractor that is not an employee, so you only use them when you need them, which is after you get the work.

 

  • Boost Resources – If you need a resource that you don’t have yourself, you can use other people to gain it. For example, if you realize you need to redo the coding on your website outside the basics, you can hire someone to do it and keep them on speed dial whenever you need them—no need to learn to code when you can outsource.

 

  • Free Up Your Time – As a business owner, you have a lot to do, and you need to save your talent for doing things only you can do. If someone else can do it without sacrificing quality or anyone noticing it’s not you, then you should seek to let someone else do it, so you free up your time to do what you do best or to spend time with friends, family, or doing fun things.

 

  • Improves Your Offers – The truth is someone else can probably do some things better than you. Because of that, if you outsource to the right people for the right things, you can improve your offers, thus improving your customer satisfaction exponentially.

 

To Outsource Successfully:

 

  • Define the Scope and Schedule Clearly – Before you even search for the person, define what you want them to do. It’s better to work with someone who is already an expert, so you just hand it over, but you don’t want to outsource an entire project to one person. Instead, define it and choose each step along the way.

 

  • Evaluate Contractors Carefully – Look at references, examples, and always make sure they are who they say they are. Even if you are recommended a particular person by someone else, check them out thoroughly to avoid problems.

 

  • Choose Based on Skill and Expertise Over Price – Don’t always hire people based on the least expensive price. Sometimes a lower price is indicative of inexperience, and it may take them longer. Sometimes a higher price ends up being a lower price due to time and expertise.

 

  • Start Small – Don’t outsource an entire massive important project to a new contractor at first. Instead, choose a small thing to work on to find out how well they meet deadlines and stand by their work.

 

Outsourcing is the biggest key to your freedom. Remember that anything you need to be done can be done by someone else. You really can hire experts remotely for a lot less than you think and increase the capabilities of your business fast.

 

 How To Build A Wildly Profitable Income Stream From Home Without Lies, Hype, Manipulation or Pressure…

https://flawlessfreedom.com

 

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Avoid Burnout: Burnout Signs to Know and Watch For

While forgetfulness, brain fog, and trouble thinking straight can also be signs of serious illness like Alzheimer’s, chronic fatigue syndrome, and dementia, it can also be a major sign of burnout.

 

If you are experiencing issues with remembering things, can’t keep your thoughts straight, and have a hard time thinking in general or have ruminating thoughts, it’s important to seek professional help even if you think it’s burnout.

 

Go to your primary care provider for a complete physical and work up to be sure that it’s not chemical or physical. But understand that even if it is depression or burnout that you’re experiencing, your doctor may be able to advise you on treatment.

 

Mental issues are still treatable by healthcare professionals and are real illnesses. In the meantime, you can watch out for these signs and seek help to keep it from getting worse.

Delegate

  • Fatigue or Exhaustion – If you feel so tired you can’t function even if you’re sleeping or you’re also not sleeping due to experiencing insomnia it’s important to note that it can be due to burnout. However, the way you feel may also be due to another illness.

 

  • No Motivation – When you have a lot to do, but you really just can’t be bothered with doing any of it, you’re missing deadlines, you’re not performing up to your skill level, and others are noticing it, you may be burned-out.

 

  • Can’t Focus – Another sign of burnout is the inability to concentrate, focus, or remember things. This is a sign that is also associated with depression, and frequently situational depression can coincide with burnout.

 

  • Feel Dread – If you feel dread every time you think of work, go to work, or get home from work, you may be burned out. If you are always fantasizing about getting out of your job or your business, you may be burned out, and that is why this is happening.

 

  • Ruminating Thoughts – When an issue comes up with your business, work, or relationship (whatever it is that is contributing to your feelings), if you end up having circular thoughts to the point of distraction, you may be burned out.

 

  • Don’t Care That You Don’t Care – This is a big sign of burnout. If you can barely be bothered to read this blog post about burnout because you feel numb to everything, it’s likely you either are burned out, or you have major depression.

 

It’s imperative to remember that being burned out doesn’t mean you don’t want to keep your business, or your job, or even your marriage—if that’s what is causing you the dread, lack of motivation, and exhaustion—it might be the way you’re doing it that is causing your burnout. Therefore, it will help to identify the reasons you’re experiencing these problems so that you can fix it and avoid it in the future.

How To Build A Wildly Profitable Income Stream From Home Without Lies, Hype, Manipulation or Pressure…

https://flawlessfreedom.com/training

 

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Avoiding Burnout by Doing What You Love

Maybe when you started your business, you thought you would love it, but you don’t love it, and that reality is causing you to become burned out. So how do you manage when what you thought was your passion turns into burnout?

 

Keep a Journal

 

The more you know yourself, the more you can figure out the things in life that make you feel satisfaction and joy instead of anxiety and burnout. Try different types of journals to determine the type that will work best for you.

Do what you love

You may prefer a bullet journal, or you may want to use an emotional journal to help you get to the bottom of your feelings. It’s up to you. You may find ways to use different types of journaling to help you resolve issues with or avoid burnout.

 

Take Time to Reflect

 

Every day as you are cleaning up your desk to end your workday, reflect on what you have accomplished as well as what you want to accomplish tomorrow based on your overall business and life plans. It can help to look at metrics that show progress so you can make better decisions every day.

 

Develop a More Realistic Routine

 

As you study your use of time, you may want to develop a more realistic routine that helps you achieve all your goals. For example, instead of working traditional hours, you note that you’re much more energetic after 10 am, so you stop working before 10 am. You can adjust your schedule accordingly to fit your energy levels.

 

Find Your Own Version of “Balance”

 

There is a lot of talk, especially with women, on finding “balance,” but maybe a balance in the way you think of it does not exist. Most people picture a scale that they try to make even. A little work here, a little fun here – but that doesn’t always work because sometimes work will need you more than home. Instead, try to create your own version of balance that feels harmonious to you.

 

Get Support from Others

 

Even as a business owner, and maybe especially as a business owner, you should not do everything yourself. Get support in life from others for business, for family, and friends. You need the comradery to help you cope with life’s ups and downs.

 

Find Ways to Do More with Less

Minimalism isn’t about doing without; it’s about doing more with less. For example, if you have set aside four hours a day to work on your business, you can get a lot more done in that four hours if you automate everything you can and outsource anything that doesn’t require your personal touch. Likewise, if you never use your dining room for dining, is it really a dining room?

 

Put Your Health First

 

Regardless of anything else you want to accomplish in life, whether business or personal, the truth is, without your health, you have nothing. It may seem trite to say it, but it’s very true. Put your body’s need for sleep, hydration, exercise, and nutrition before business.

 

The thing you have to accept is that you’re only human due to the fact human beings need certain things to be healthy. Learn about the areas of life that you need to focus on to live a full and well-rounded life full of joy and accomplishment in business and life. Body, mind, relationships, business, finance, and spirituality are a few of the most essential areas of life in which you need to find your own version of harmony and balance.

How To Build A Wildly Profitable Income Stream From Home Without Lies, Hype, Manipulation or Pressure…

https://flawlessfreedom.com/training