Grow Your Business on a Small Budget with Outsourcing

Running a business, is usually hard work. If you are a ‘solopreneur’ then you often have to switch between different jobs and tasks frequently, acting as the company director, receptionist, admin and marketing executive.

You can learn a lot and make a lot of money from doing everything yourself, but there comes a point when to grow further, you need to hire people. This need not be a huge financial risk, however. Although there are some advantages to hiring locally, you can first look to build your business through outsourcing.

This can be difficult for some entrepreneurs, as they like to have control and certainty when it comes to any work related to the business. There will come a point to, when you will want to work on the business, rather than being in the business.

To use the analogy of building a house. If you are the plumber, the electrician, the groundworker, the bricklayer and the roofer, at some point you are going to become burnt-out and overwhelmed. However, if you take a step back and manage the house-build, you can hire tradesmen to do the work for you, and you could build 2 or 3 houses at the same time. Working this way can prove more profitable, and less stressful.

Advantages of Outsourcing

Compared to employing someone full time, outsourcing to a freelancer, for example, has many advantages. For example, if you have an assistant that lives in a different timezone, they can provide 24/7 coverage of your website live chat or your company email inbox. With outsourcing, you will tend to pay per project and have no long-term commitment. You won’t have to put the freelancer on your payroll and in most countries, you won’t have to pay employment taxes or worry about benefits. Thanks to exchange rates, if you live in the USA and hire someone in India to design your website, for example, you often get an expert for a fraction of the expected cost.

If you are looking to save money, then hiring an independent freelancer or a virtual assistant on a website such as Upwork or PeoplePerHour is the best approach. The main disadvantage with this is that you may have to spend more time researching and trailing/trying-out, different freelancers. You may also have to train and manage them more when they are working on certain tasks. The alternative, using an agency or a company to carry out projects for you will cost a lot more, but will usually save you a lot of time. A company has taken the time to recruit and train its employees and they will tend to manage projects for you.

How to Use Upwork

With Upwork, you have to sign up for an account, then you simply post a description of the task that you need completing. You give it a headline and a description, including all aspects of the job and who you are looking for. Once you post the job, people will ‘bid’ to do the work for you. People from all over the world will typically bid on the job. You can see their profile, their portfolio, references and ratings.

You can quickly filter through and choose the freelancer that you want to use based on the cost and their credentials. Upwork also provides a work-diary feature, that provides you with screenshots every 5 to 10 minutes of the freelancer’s computer screen. This way you to be sure that they are doing the work that they are billing you for. Upwork also provides a certain level of protection in that you can report malpractice to them and Upwork can potentially suspend a freelancers account or even reverse payments.

Once you have finished a project with a freelancer, you are asked to leave a review.

What Should You Outsource?

This is a tricky question to answer. The best way to go about it is to track or journal all your activities in a journal for a typical working week.

Not all activities listed in your journal will have the same value. Next, put a value in dollars (or whatever currency you work with) next to each task on the list that you made. You can now browse websites such as UpWork or PeoplePerHour and see how much each task would cost per hour to outsource. Administrative tasks, for example, can typically be outsourced to some overseas virtual assistants for around $3 per hour, whilst more technical tasks may cost hundreds of dollars per hour. 

Identify those tasks on the list which you can outsource for relatively little expense, or that you can outsource for a cost that still provides value for money. For example, a video editor might cost upwards of $50 per hour but the value in terms of branding and your online presence might justify the cost – especially if you are not an expert yourself.

Virtual Assistants

Using virtual assistants ( V.A.s)to carry out low skill and/or repetitive tasks can free up lots of your time so that you can focus on more important things, or just enjoy more free time. Many entrepreneurs, recommend hiring assistants based in the Philippines.

You can find assistants in the Philippines on websites such as UpWork but you can also go to CraigsList in the Philippines and post jobs on there. In this video, the assistants from the Philippines are described as loyal, hardworking, highly skilled and very inexpensive. Identify those tasks on the list which you can outsource for relatively little expense, or that you can outsource for a cost that still provides value for money.

Virtual Receptionists

Something that you can outsource almost immediately, is telephone answering. By using a virtual receptionist or call answering service, you can free up a lot of time but you can also dramatically reduce the number of interruptions you typically endure during the working day. Interruptions can upset our flow, reduce focus and make us feel annoyed and even more stressed. By filtering out annoying sales calls and potentially dealing with a large percentage of customer queries, a well trained, dedicated virtual receptionist from the likes of Moneypenny, can be as valuable as a full-time receptionist, at a fraction of the cost.

Freelancers & Agencies

If you are looking for a specialist skillset, to help with a one-off or ongoing project, then there are lots of websites similar to UpWork and PeoplePerHour that you can use. If you are looking to hire a computer coder, for example, you can use UpWork, PeoplePerHour, Toptal, Guru.com or Freelancer.com – and that’s just a sample!

As mentioned previously, using a freelancer directly on one of these websites, will be a lot cheaper than using an agency. The main advantage of going through an agency is that they will manage the computer programmer for you. Whether you go direct or via a marketing or development agency will largely depend on your budget.