I don’t know this guy Soren per­son­ally, and I’ve never been to his blog before today. In the inter­est of dis­clo­sure, I will NOT make ANY money by telling you about this post. He prob­a­bly will, but I’m too tired today to turn this into money for me. 

He made an excel­lent post about out­sourc­ing, and I’ll be frank, there’s an affil­i­ate link in his post, for a prod­uct I think is a must-have. If I had got­ten any sleep Thurs­day night before watch­ing the twins (dur­ing my mas­ter­mind call!) I would prob­a­bly have gone and signed up as an affil­i­ate myself. 

The sales page linked from his page alone is that good of a les­son. But this post isn’t about that.

The rea­son I’m telling you about the post, even if you don’t even click on the link to the sales page is that Out­sourc­ing Saved My Ass. And by exten­sion, my busi­ness. (Yes, I have that much junk in my trunk. lol. This is why peo­ple need sleep. Silli­ness like this.)

I was your clas­sic, can’t afford to out­source case. I thought I was sav­ing money by doing every­thing myself, and sav­ing time by not teach­ing any­one what I know so that THEY could do it. Of course, I could have also hired some­one who already knew how to do what I needed done, but in ret­ro­spect, at the time it didn’t make sense. if I did that, what would I do? What was my value?

Duh. I could do any­thing from “noth­ing but cash checks” to “build my brand”, to “focus on mar­ket­ing” to “do the top-level, big-picture stuff that makes my prices worth it to my clients, and dif­fer­ent from the next guy”. 

Then I got sicker than I ever have been before and almost lost my business. 

Twice. In four months. 

I am STILL try­ing to pay for the mis­takes I made then, and the only way I’m mov­ing for­ward now is out­sourc­ing, because of course, health care takes up 80% of any­thing I take home (another post). 

But if my money goes to keep­ing the busi­ness open, pay­ing for the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of that time, and the cost of the projects I’m doing now, how can I pay for outsourcing? 

At first, I was pay­ing the peo­ple I out­source with on com­mis­sion, train­ing, and JV lever­age. Now, with the prof­its hav­ing them makes me. I have more time free to make more prod­ucts. When I make more prod­ucts, I make more money. 

I have more time free to cre­ate con­tent to mar­ket myself. When I make more con­tent, and use it to mar­ket myself, I make more money. 

I have more free time to coach and train. When I coach and train a hand­ful of care­fully selected peo­ple, they make more money, and when they make more money, they stay clients longer. When they stay clients longer, I make more money. 

So yes, this time last year I would have been one of the peo­ple who said “my job isn’t out­sour­ca­ble”. The truth was, I thought that if it was pos­si­ble to get rid of most of the work I had to do that I was use­less. And I had all these ideas in my head about how mak­ing money has to be so hard.

And I learned that not only is that not the case, if you don’t out­source, hire employ­ees or vir­tual teams, the thing to think about is that you’re not out­sourc­ing to get rid of your­self, you’re out­sourc­ing to FREE your­self. Whether it’s to have more time for fam­ily, to mar­ket your­self, or to have time to do the things that make your com­pany money, out­source, cre­ate a job or vir­tual assis­tant for EVERY func­tion that doesn’t fall into the core dream that you painted for your­self, AND every thing in the core dream that’s not the best use of your time.

And don’t for­get things that you just hate to do to start with. 

You can always add things back in. You always have that option later.

So yeah, your per­sonal tal­ent and touch may not be out­source­able. But if you think about it, that’s prob­a­bly 1% IF THAT of what you’re doing. It may be the most impor­tant 1%, but it’s only 1%. 

If you think about it, every major com­pany in the world is just an out­sourc­ing outfit. There were what, a cou­ple of guys who started eBay? As they grew, they real­ized, hey, I can’t do all this crap myself. 

You want to be a big­ger firm? You want to cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties for your busi­ness? You want to expand your mar­ket? You want to make more money? You want to be a big brand some­day — maybe even a house­hold name?

Go and read Soren’s post about Out­sourc­ing. Take the first step, and con­sider outsourcing.

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