The Outsourcing Frenzy

In this article, I’m going to talk about the outsourcing frenzy. Today, in the entrepreneur community, there’s this huge trend that they outsource everything, and I mean everything.

I have friends who are I like: “I don’t want to write this email, I’ll just hire someone from Odesk to do it.” I’m not necessarily against outsourcing, in fact most of my clients outsource most of their work, they outsource a lot of stuff, but there’s a point where it becomes kind of ridiculous. So when you’re implementing a new system into your company, and you can do it yourself perfectly well, and you’re just making five figures, do it yourself. If you can’t write an email, it gets kind of ridiculous. You need to have a certain skill set, if you want to run a company.

Most entrepreneurs in the beginning, especially the successful ones, they kind of do a lot of the stuff themselves in a business, and outsource just one little thing in the beginning, and then maybe two little things when they hit six figures, and maybe up to eight little things when they hit seven figures.

They don’t outsource everything, just the bare minimum. Some skills you want to learn yourself, you want to be able to email, and know how marketing stuff works. If you outsource a super important part of your marketing, you’re not going to be able to know what the hell is going on, especially if they’re doing a good job, or not.

This is not an easy thing to do, it’s not something that you can hire someone who cares, about what you do. I actually noticed, that a lot of the places people out source to like India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines, for people who earn $2-$6 an hour for work. A lot of the time, if the works more complicated than what they’re used to, they’re going to give it to you in the best quality that they could produce, but maybe not up to your standards. It’s going to be full of mistakes, because they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

In fact, they may actually know, but they don’t really care if it’s good quality, or if it’s got some errors. They haven’t tested the result; they haven’t tested it against the competition. They get their hourly wage, and do the bare minimum – they throw it at you, like have fun with it, hope it’s good, and then you have to write all these new briefings, to update them on what needs to be changed. You will need to do all the checking; you need to look at it very very carefully, before sending it to any kind of clients.

If you know how this works, then it’s fine to spend some time on this, but if you can do it yourself, even better. Especially if you’re not making a lot of money in your business yet. When you can get someone locally (like a friend to make a website), and you know he does a good job, and you know he does this as his day job, and you know he can do it like five times faster, if you pay him the $10-$15 an hour, then your business will get started a lot faster, and be a lot lower risk (If your friend is trustworthy). Still test him, like you would someone else.

You’ll find that doing it locally, with a friend, and you pay him a couple more bucks an hour, will be better. I know this goes against a lot of the stuff I’ve said in other videos, but if you have a friend like that, and have access to resources like that. It will work better for you a lot of the time.

Maybe you can grow your company, and not give him a percentage, but an hourly fee, and teach him some business skills, and eventually he’ll be able to start his own business. Or maybe you can just keep paying him, some people don’t want to have their own business, and it’ll be very profitable for you as well.

Always be thinking whether you can do this yourself, or whether you can hire a friend. Ask yourself, if this is something you can do. If yes, try it out, learn the skill, it’s probably not that hard. In business, you’re going to have to learn a bunch of skills anyway, and you can probably do it better yourself, if you’re not making a lot of money yet, and you can’t afford to hire really really successful people. If you have any questions, comment down below.