Our automations list wouldn't be complete without including some suggestions and information about outsourcing.
Again, as I mentioned in yesterday's article, this is not to overwhelm you or a suggestion that you should hire all of these contractors right now. Rather, I invite you to allow the information in and see what's possible (and necessary) for your specific needs and lifestyle business.
Very few entrepreneurs can start a business and outsource right away, unless they have savings or an established secondary income. An examples of this: many of the physicians, psychologists, and other health & wellness professionals I work with are able to build their team quickly because they still have their primary income coming in from their private practice.
WHICH POSITIONS WOULD FREE UP YOUR TIME
The good news, you don't need to hire contractors for all these positions today. You do, however, want to look at which positions would free up your time the most right now. Or which positions would take off your plate the tasks that are not in your expertise OR frankly, the things you hate doing.
If you're working on building your blog or YouTube channel, then a graphic designer or YouTube marketing expert should be your first hire. This person will help you help free up more of YOUR time and help you achieve your goal.
If you're a course creator or program facilitator and you're ready to roll out your first (or next) offer, then hiring a tech consultant, like me, would be the best position to hire right now. Especially since tech can be an endless rabbit hole maze that can be extremely overwhelming.
OTHER WAYS TO AUTOMATE
As your learning more about business automation, it’s important to know there are many ways to automate your business, and by hiring someone else to do the work for you, you can stay focused on your area of expertise AND your personal needs.
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.
Let's take a look at the main areas where contractors (not VAs) are needed for their expertise:
- 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 have a lot of contracts, this is your best answer to those legal needs. It’s also nice to have someone on call when you need to ask simple questions, check your client contracts and review your website legal pages.
- Finance – Small business owners can save a ton of time, stress, and money if they find someone to help them with taxes, bookkeeping, payroll, and other tasks around 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.
- Technology Needs – I encourage entrepreneurs to hire tech experts to implement the automation, systems, and workflows they need for their new client and customer onboarding, offers and sales, product launches, freebie opt-ins, running webinars, specific functions on their websites, etc. Setting up and using automation software does require someone who understands it, knows how to make it seamless and as "hands-off" as possible.
- Marketing – Whether it’s social media or some other type of marketing, hiring an expert pays 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 your office hours to focus on your expertise, creating content, and working with clients.
- 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 good as the design an expert can create. 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 service, and it’s easy to get upset about issues or complaints. 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. (This is where implementing support ticket software in your business, from article Creating a Business that (Almost) Runs Itself, comes in handy--you can let someone else manage this.)
- 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 take over your administrative duties. Whether it’s managing events, performing personal errands, or other tasks as directed by you, this is an opportunity for substantial time savings.
- Writing – Your business needs a lot of content for customer education, product information, and the like. Whether it’s blog content, epic article series, sales page content, or internal communication, a professional writer can help you. Copywriters are a great resource, but they also require a big investment. Alternatively, you could hire a freelance writer for your general content and when it comes to sales pages and sales emails, a copywriter can make sure your messaging lands and sales conversions are high.
Whether it's sales, marketing, finance, accounting, customer service, or help to manage a team, you need to outsource certain areas 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 certain tasks that should be off your plate. When you outsource more, you free up your time to focus on what you do best AND live your best lifestyle-freedom life!
Please share in the Facebook group what you've learned about yourself and your business. I will be in the Facebook group every day to answer your questions and support your growth.
Till tomorrow,
Be brilliant.
Be imperfect.
And always, be you.
Melissa