The Art of Outsourcing Your Business

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When most people think of the word “outsourcing,” they imagine hiring workers from third-world countries for pennies on the dollar, soliciting sub-par work while sacrificing American jobs. Although this is certainly one definition of the term, outsourcing is actually a much broader topic that could be better defined as hiring others to help you achieve your overall business vision.

If your business is a blog or website, and unless you plan to write the content, take the photos, record the videos and program the backend functionality of the site by yourself, then you will most certainly outsource some of the work, probably starting in the very near future. The trick is to know when to outsource, how to do it effectively and efficiently, and how to avoid the common pitfalls that come along with it.

Assessing Your Own Skill Sets and Time

When it comes to developing your business, you’ll be limited by two primary factors: your skills and your time. Perhaps you’re a born genius who can program for HTML, C++, Java, MySQL and a host of other languages, write impeccable, timely content, take the most amazing photographs, and charm the entire internet into begging to link to your site. Even if you had all of these skills, you’d still be limited by the same 24-hour clock as the rest of the world’s population. Odds are better, of course, that only one or two of those traits are true of you. In either case, you’ll need to outsource at least some of your work.

Start by being honest with yourself and assessing what about your business you’re truly good at, and how much work you can realistically accomplish in the amount of time you have. You may find that even if you’re an excellent writer, for example, that your time would be better used managing and instructing a team of writers rather than putting every word to the page with your own hands.

The process of outsourcing will require a rather enormous initial and ongoing time investment in itself, which is why you need to know how to outsource, not just that you’ll need to do it.

The Importance of Solid Communication as an Outsourcer

All of the aforementioned skills are great for completing the day-to-day, nitty-gritty work of running a business, whether it’s a website, blog or something else. As a manager or owner of your business, however, you’d better have a mastery of an entirely different skill set: communication. Without it, your outsourcees won’t have any clue as to what you’re asking of them, and the work they complete will probably be a far cry from your original vision.

Let’s say you’re outsourcing a piece of content entitled Sprint 4G internet vs CLEAR. You might assume that simply sending this title to a writer will be enough for him to satisfactorily complete the assignment, and maybe that’s true depending on the level of control you hope to keep over your business. However, odds are good that you have something more specific in mind. A few things that you might cover with the outsourcee in this case include:

• What facets of each service should the writer focus on?
• Is the purpose of the article to declare a decisive winner, or simply to overview the pros and cons of each?
• Has your site entered into an affiliate relationship with one of the services? If so, you might want to confer to your writer that it would be best to avoid “slamming” it, regardless of his actual findings, and focus on the positives.
• What sort of tone should the article use? Who’s the audience? Should this article be technical in nature, or more for general consumers?

As you can see, without specific instruction (which, alas, takes more time than simply emailing over the title), the article could be wildly different depending on the writer’s background, knowledge and his assumptions of how you want the piece crafted. This same logic applies to a whole lot more than just writing, even including things that are more objective than subjective such as web programming.

The Life of an Outsourcer: Editing and Revising

No matter the depth and articulation of your instruction, you’d better be prepared to decide between two outcomes as an outsourcer: accepting work that may not fit your exact vision, or editing the work (sometimes extensively) yourself. The former is cheaper in terms of both time and money, while the latter allows for an end product that’s just how you want it. To say that the latter would always be worth the extra time and money would be ignoring the idea that perhaps your business could benefit from some outside vision rather than just your own.

In reality, you’ll end up landing somewhere in between these two extremes. Once you assemble a team of outsourcees that you trust, you can expect a steady decline in the amount of time and explaining necessary to complete each job. However, you’ll still probably want to spend some time going over each piece of work you receive, and offering your own input before, during and after each creative process.

The last thing you should expect is consistent perfection from your outsourcees. This is just the reality around which you’ll need to navigate, and it’s an inherent trait among all team-based environments. Remember, you need to rely on the people to whom you outsource your work for your own livelihood, and a little diplomacy can go a long way towards achieving long-term, mutually beneficial business relationships.