In this article in our series of articles about the secrets of outsourcing, we are going to examine an aspect of outsourcing that won’t necessarily be relevant to all business owners, because it requires you to already have employees.  This secret of outsourcing is all about what tasks you should keep in house, and which you should not.

Know Your Employees and How They Fit Into Your Internet Business

Although it’s great business practice to know your employees on both a personal and a professional level, it’s also key in knowing what to outsource.  What is Jim in the corner cubicle really great at?  What is he lacking in?  How about Phil, whose cubicle is next to Jim’s?  It wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep a running list of activities and skills like this, so you know who best to dedicate work to.

The idea behind knowing what your employees are great at isn’t just so you know which tasks to give to what employees.  It’s about knowing how to put them directly to making you money, and which tasks to farm out so as not to minimize their money-making potential.  For example, while Jim might be a great programmer that can also type business reports in a mediocre fashion, you don’t want him wasting his time on those reports.  Rather, you want him focusing on programming for as much time as possible.  In this situation, it would be prudent and advisable to outsource the report.

Which tasks are necessary to outsource and which are necessary to keep in house is really a decision that must be left up to each manager or business owner.  Just like the other secrets of outsourcing, this relies on your ability to understand the resources that you already have, and how best to employ them.

Chances are, if you’re running your own business as a part of your Internet marketing strategy, whether its online or offline, then you’re a bit of a control freak.  If your name is on the business, and your livelihood is directly determined by how well the business or website does, then of course you want it to do well.  However, you can’t do everything yourself. This is one of the hardest to learn secrets of outsourcing.

Remember Why You Outsourced

This secret of outsourcing revolves around one idea: remembering why you outsourced the project in the first place.  If you decided that you didn’t want to do it yourself, for whatever reason, then don’t do it!  This not only means avoiding your direct involvement in tasks, but it also means not constantly staring over your workers’ shoulder while they are working.

However, this doesn’t mean that you need to be completely hands-off. Rather, asking for daily or weekly progress reports is perfectly reasonable.  In fact, you can ask for progress reports from your workers as often as you want, but you should bear in mind that the more time they spend telling you how they are coming along with a task is the less time that they have to dedicate to the task itself.

Provide Minimal Direction

Broadly speaking, the less direction that you provide a worker, the better.  This way, you will get the most creative potential out of them, and you might be surprised with the results.  This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t be giving them instruction at all; rather, give them just enough of a framework to get the task done, and then back away and let them work.

Removing yourself from the working equation can be one of the most difficult to learn aspects of the secrets of outsourcing, but it is absolutely critical.  If you’re spending all of your time worrying about what your employees or assistants are doing, then you’re wasting time that you could have spent generating more money.

In our article series about the secrets of outsourcing, we’ve primarily focused on outsourcing as a method of minimizing income loss as a part of your Internet Home Business.  While this is the primary reason that you should be outsourcing work, it certainly isn’t the only reason that work should be outsourced.  In this article, we will go over one of the best parts of being a business owner: not doing work that you hate doing.

What Tasks Do You Hate?

Everybody has them: that type of work that, when you know you have to do it, fills you with misery and dread.  It isn’t that you’re incapable of doing the work, it isn’t even that you’re not good at it – you just hate doing it.  For some people, these can be things like maintaining a calendar or doing finances.  Maybe you hate making phone calls or interacting with people that are in certain positions.

Provided that you have developed your task and category list of things necessary to make your business function, it is now time to move on to another secret to outsourcing.  This secret is tagging certain things on your list as tasks that you hate doing.  These can even be expensive things.  Sure, you may not make as much money as you otherwise would be doing, but what’s the point of generating a high level of income if you’re not happy enough to take advantage of it?

It’s entirely possible that you are one of the rare exceptions of people that have begun a business and you genuinely enjoy doing every task necessary to run it.  However, chances are that you’re something like us, and that there are things that you hate doing.  So why bother?  Although some of these tasks might be so expensive to farm out that it isn’t worth outsourcing them, this is an equation you’ll have to figure out for yourself.  For those other tasks?  Get rid of them!

When you’ve determined some of the thing that you would like to outsource, you’re ready for the next secret of outsourcing: that sometimes you will have to accept when good enough is good enough. Even though your Internet Home Business  is something dependent on high quality work, you will have to accept mediocre work occasionally.

Not Exactly Ideal

When you’re contracting work out, whether its writing, programming, or designing, you need to be aware that those you pay to do work for you are working first and foremost for themselves.  This means that they will be placing just enough effort on a task or project in order to get paid by you.  Unfortunately, this means that they won’t necessarily be working to your standards, no matter how high you set them.

When you are working within your field of expertise and are actively trying to make the best product that you can, then you will be spending a great deal of time and energy on it.  However, if you were doing a similar project for someone else, only for them to get all of the credit and residual income, then why would you expend your greatest work on it?

Unfortunately, this is the way that most people work.  One of the more difficult to accept secrets of outsourcing is that you will need to accept subpar work once in awhile, especially if you otherwise like the work of your freelancer or virtual assistant.

Pay for Better Quality

If you’re looking to minimize your costs just to get a particular aspect of a job done, then you need to also be aware that only those whom do not highly value their own work will accept the job.  Simply put, if you’re offering a quarter of the market rate for programming, then you’re going to get a quarter-rate programmer.  Alternatively, if you offer a handsome payout for a job, then you’re going to have the best programmers all competing with each other.

Ultimately, how much you offer to pay for work done will determine its ultimate quality, and the quality of workers that will want to work for you.  Figuring out which tasks are the most important to have done quickly and in a high quality fashion is a decision you will ultimately have to make, and we’ll go over some of those decision points in a future article.

So: you’ve figured out how much money you’re worth each hour when focusing just on your expertise, you’ve developed a list of the various things that your business does and with what frequency, and you have categorized each and every one of them.  It is now time to move on to the next step of outsourcing: determining what work to outsource, and understanding just how much your Internet Home Business will be better because of it.

Determining What Tasks Are Costing You Money

The first step in determining which tasks you want to outsource is determining which categories of task are making you money, and which of them are costing you money.  This is one of the biggest secrets of outsourcing: only outsource things that actually cost you money.  Once you have compiled a sufficiently long list of the tasks that doing yourself cost you money, it’s time to determine which ones you should be outsourcing.

Figuring Out Which Tasks Are Worth Doing Yourself

The flip side of the coin spoken about above is that some tasks simply aren’t worth outsourcing.  For example, you might not make any money sending a 50 word email, but will it cost you more money to farm it out to someone else than it will to just type it up yourself.  Which tasks are going to cost you more money to outsource than to just bite the bullet and do yourself is really a matter for you to decide as you examine your task and category lists.

Note that tasks that can be found within this topic aren’t necessarily quick tasks like shooting out emails or making a phone call or two each day, and can actually be long and involved tasks.  For example, if you’re running a website and your expertise is in programming, it may still be cheaper for you to write your own content rather than outsourcing it.  This not only gives you quality control over the text content, but lets you avoid paying for it yourself.

As with all of these tasks, it’s important to be aware of which fall into your area of expertise and which do not.  Even if it isn’t something you consider yourself an expert at, just sticking to what you’re also good at can also be a great idea.  Ultimately, the biggest secret of outsourcing is just to be making a profit regardless of your task.

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Hey  Everyone!

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Devon

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