Have you ever looked up at the end of the day and wondered to yourself, what did I do all day? Between responding to emails, posting on social media, researching, following up with a prospective client, taking phone calls, and keeping your coffee cup full, the day is over and you haven’t tackled half of your to-do list.
And you still need to generate revenue today. Uh oh… it’s going to be a long night.
As you sit there running your biz on the solo, you know there has to be a better way. There are only so many hours in the day and you can’t possibly get everything done, no matter how many hours you work.
So then we have internal conversations. If we could only:
- stop wasting time
- stop getting stuck on the phone
- get up earlier
- use a new tool that automates your <insert task here>
- get more help from our spouse/partner
- manage our time better…
All the excuses we come up with for why we can’t get ahead… the list goes on. But the fact of the matter is simple: no matter what you think you could do better, you still need to outsource some tasks. Why? Because you need to eat, sleep, and practice self-care so that you have enough strength and stamina to keep going. As an entrepreneur, you’re going to be faced with having to wear many hats. It’s up to you to make sure that your business thrives. But trying to do every task yourself can be a mistake.
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Why You Can’t Afford to Do Everything Solo
As a solopreneur, your daily activities should be centered on revenue-generating tasks. Outsource as much of the rest as you can.
- Outsource tasks outside of your core revenue-generating activities.
- Outsource your weaknesses.
- Outsource stuff you don’t like to do.
By outsourcing, you stand to gain more for your business than you’ll spend on the money it takes to pay for the outsourcing. You’ll be able to hire professionals who can do the task faster and easier.
This not only saves you time, but it takes the stress off of you since you won’t have to do it all yourself. You end up gaining more productivity because you’re freed up to focus on other areas of the business that only you can handle.
Plus, by outsourcing, you’ll experience faster business growth because you won’t have to wait until you complete each step of a project.
Outsourcing saves you time and lessens your stress - you won’t have to do everything yourself. Click To TweetHow To Save Money By Outsourcing
Many small business think they can’t afford to outsource anything, that they have to do everything themselves until they make some random X amount of dollars. This is not necessarily true. Once you are generating revenue, and you can eat 3 meals a day without worrying about paying the electric bill, consider outsourcing.
Let’s take a look at an example and play with some numbers:
- Let’s say your average hourly rate = $50
- Hours spent trying to do your own social media graphics each week = 4
- {hourly rate of $50} X {hours doing graphics 4} = you are putting a value of this task at $200
- You can hire a VA or someone on Fiverr/Upwork to create graphics for $20 – $50
If you outsourced this task, your time saved is the equivalent of 4 hours, or $200 if you were billing your time. Are those graphics worth $200?!
This is 4 hours that you could be out soliciting clients, performing client work, focusing on revenue generating tasks, pre-recording video for your new ecourse, etc. Doing ANYTHING more profitable than creating social media graphics. That is not your lane. Go do some money-making work and outsource that task.
Does outsourcing make sense now??
Aspects of Your Solo Business You Can Outsource
Any tasks involved in running a business can turn into time drains. Of course you have to perform some tasks as part of running the business. However, the following outlines the types of tasks you should outsource, so that your time is freed up to concentrate on generating revenue and growing your business.
1. Writing
You can outsource some writing for starters. Whether you’re a good writer or not is not the point. Writing has the potential to take up a lot of time – and if you have dozens of writing projects you need to complete, you can spend many hours simply developing content that you must have.
These are hours you could spend on something else. It’s faster and even cheaper to hire a writer. Some small businesses worry about the cost effectiveness of hiring someone to write their content for them.
But if you tally up what your time is worth, how long it takes you, and what you can potentially make per hour versus outsourcing the work, you’ll see that you come out ahead. Use a writer to write your ebook materials, to write your reports, your articles, your product descriptions and more.
Whatever you need written, outsource it. This includes your email marketing campaigns too!
2. Graphics
You’ll also want to outsource your graphics. It takes time to design all the graphics that you’ll use in your business.
Even if you have experience in this field, you still might not be able to afford to spend the time it takes to create the graphics that you’ll use. Instead of tying up hours of your time designing them yourself, hire someone to create your graphics.
You’ll use graphics for sales pages, banners and buttons, and social media images. You’ll need logos, blog graphics, headers, add to cart buttons and the list goes on.
Every time you need something new, you don’t want to have to stop what you’re working on to create it. That can slow a project down. Instead, assign the graphics to your designer and keep on moving ahead with a project. If you get a graphic designer to create a few templates for you, that’s a bonus! Then you don’t have to worry about design every time you need a set of graphics.
3. Research
Research is something else that you’ll want to outsource. Looking up the information that you need can be a huge time drain. You’ll need to find facts and reliable sources.
You’ll want to read articles and sites that can give depth perspective. When you’re spending time researching, it can take multiple hours and in some cases even days. I am totally guilty of this.
You can’t afford to do that yourself because while you’re spending time researching, everything else that you need to take care of grinds to a halt. Research is one the BIGGEST time drains!
4. Website Set Up
Setting up a site is another area you want to outsource. If you are not a website designer, go find one.
Despite some sites’ step-by-step setup guides, it’s still going to cost you valuable time. Setting up a site can easily be a week or two project for you versus a couple of hours if you hire it out.
Tech details are something that you want to pay a professional to do, especially if you’re brand new. You can dig around behind the scenes on a site, mess up a simple code and crash everything.
Rather than trying to figure out the tech stuff, just let someone else take it on and save yourself the stress.
Specific tasks that also fall under website setup include:
- landing pages
- website headers
- adding new products to your shopping cart
- changing your website optin
- uploading new blog posts and making them look pretty…
All of these are technically related to your website, and each task can be a massive time drain. Outsource.
#Smallbiz tip: Outsource website setup and pay for maintenance. It's better than crashing your own site Click To Tweet5. Customer Support
When you run a business, you’re going to have to deal with customer service. The good, the bad and the really ugly come out when dealing with customers. Not only can this drain your time, but there can be a lot of stress involved with handling the customer service side of any business.
Instead of letting that take up your time, outsource it to a virtual assistant (VA). A VA can send information to clients while you’re busy or out of the office. If you have a canned responses to customer inquiries, your VA can handle your customer support function, and contact you when a questions falls outside of the commonly asked questions realm.
Did you catch my not-so-subtle hint? Create canned responses to the most common customer inquiries you might receive.
6. Social Media
Finally, a big time drain for solopreneurs can be social media management. Whether you run a Facebook group and you need someone to make sure you’re posting regular content, or you simply use multiple social media platforms and you want to maintain a consistent presence, outsourcing it will free up hours of your time.
If social media isn’t a strong point for you, or you know it takes too much of your time, hire someone else (like me!) to manage it. Your Social Media Manager can create your graphics, post on your accounts, respond to inquiries and mentions, and maintain engagement.
Ciao,
Miss Kemya
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