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Outsourcing Explained Part 1 (Ep 28)

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One of the most incredible ways to balance the busy is to get help from others. But, I get it, that can feel intimidating and daunting. So, today we are doing a deep dive into outsourcing. I am sharing my process, where I’ve failed, and what I’ve learned…All of it.

If you have ever wanted to see behind the curtain on how others outsource, run their teams, hire, train…ALL. OF. IT. This is for you!

But it’s a lot, so I split it into two parts (Episodes 28 & 29)

Grab a pen and paper because you’ll definitely want to take notes. Let’s jump in:

This episode will:

 👉 Help the overwhelmed entrepreneur feel confident in outsourcing
 👉 Dissolve any fears about finding someone, hiring and training
 👉 Give anyone a solid system for outsourcing

In this episode: 

4:37 Reasons to Outsource
11:28 What is Outsourcing
17:53 Build Your Task List (how to know what you shouldn’t be doing)
21:10 How to Build Your Training Material (when you don’t have time)
27:13 Levels of Delegation

Outsourcing Explained is a training I first developed in 2012 and refined and updated throughout the years. Now I’m letting you listen in on this usually paid training!

I want to show you that it’s simpler than you think. In fact, I’ll show you ways that maybe you haven’t thought of as forms of outsourcing that are really, really simple. Let’s start with the “why.” Here are ten reasons to outsource.

10 REASONS TO OUTSOURCE

  1. Improve and protect your relationships
  2. Protect your personal time
  3. Get more work done
  4. Make more money
  5. Create opportunities for faster growth
  6. Reduce overwhelm and stress
  7. Do more of what you love and are best at (i.e. your genius zone)
  8. Because others are better qualified than you are
  9. Low risk in comparison to hiring employees
  10. Improve your customer’s experience
10 Reasons to Start Outsourcing

WHAT IS OUTSOURCING

Outsourcing is when you allow someone (or something) to help you do the heavy lifting. That means outsourcing doesn’t have to look like one specific thing. One example could be when you buy a template, script, or something pre-made so you don’t have to take the time to create one from scratch.

It can also be hiring a full or part-time employee. Or it could just be hiring someone for a quick project or a one-time thing. It can be someone who works for a lot of other people or someone you hire who works solely for you.

It can even be something like grocery delivery or a meal service. YES! Those are forms of outsourcing!

The reason I bring up meal service is to show you some very different examples.

Let’s use a household example. Let’s say you know you want to have family dinners, but you’re terrible at getting dinner on the table.

Here are 3 levels for outsourcing dinner:

3 levels for Outsourcing dinner

Top Level: Hire a full-time chef (yes, please!!)


Mid Level: Use a meal kit service like Hello Fresh where the planning and prep are done. We’ve used these many times. I take it a step further by putting each of my kids in charge of cooking one night. That ensures I have three nights I’m not cooking at all! Click here to get your first HelloFresh Box free!

Base Level: At least let go of the grocery shopping by using a delivery service like Instacart. They’re my favorite because I love that I can put in an order for my grocery store AND Costco through the app and, boom, I’ve saved hours! (if you’ve never tried InstaCart, you can use my code: LA8A9BC10A to get $20 off your first order!)

P.S. Takeout is absolutely a form of outsourcing! Taco Tuesday, Pizza Friday — Yes!!

There are so many forms of outsourcing, so now let’s look at it from the aspect of managing social media.

Here are 3 levels for outsourcing your social media content:

3 levels for Outsourcing your social media content:

Top Level: Full-time person (or even team) who creates, edits, plans, and orchestrates all social media across multiple platforms.

Mid Level: a Social Media Manager or service who helps create and plan content

Base Level: a social media scheduling app like Later or Tailwind

5 STEPS TO OUTSOURCING

So we started off by talking about why to outsource. Now I want to transition and get into the how. Ultimately I think there are five steps to outsourcing.

  1. Building your task list
  2. Create your training material, which is not as hard as it feels like it is
  3. Define the expectations
  4. Find your team members. Again, not as hard as you think (or as hard as I had thought it would be)
  5. Establish your review/check-in process

I jump into each step in depth in Episode 28, but let’s chat about them here too:

1. START BY BUILDING YOUR TASK LIST

For one week, just start documenting all the tasks that you do every day for a week. Have a journal or notepad with you and just start writing it all down.

What are all the things you do? If you like the idea of being able to outsource some of the home tasks as well, make sure you document your time. If you don’t, just focus on documenting work tasks. I have outsourced a little bit of everything.

You’re looking to get a better idea of:

  • How you really spend your time
  • What you’re doing
  • How long it actually takes

At the end of the week, you’re going to score your activities between 1 and 3.

Number 1: this is something that I absolutely need to be doing. This should not be delegated.
Number 2: Someone else could do this, but it would be hard to train them
Number 3: Could be done by someone else and feels manageable to train them

I found, in the beginning, that I had way more ones than twos and threes because I still had a false mindset that no one could do “it” as well as I could. The key here is to just start with something!

2. CREATING YOUR TRAINING MATERIAL

This was the thing for me that was so daunting because the whole reason you need help is that you don’t have enough time. And now you need to find extra time to train someone else so you can free up time? It felt like a paradox. In this episode, I explain exactly how I solved this in real-time without having to make extra time to train someone.

3. DEFINING EXPECTATIONS & LEVELS OF RESPONSIBILITY

It’s important that anyone helping you know what to expect. We can’t assume they can read your mind! That seems obvious, but believe me, I’ve made this mistake!

One of the fears around outsourcing is people taking advantage of you. To protect your intellectual property and everything else, we don’t start by giving them access to everything. There need to be levels of responsibility. In this episode, I go into the four levels of responsibility which I picked up from Michael Hyatt.

Level 1: prep/research, then check back in before starting (they also have limited access to things)

Level 2: prep/research, begin, then check-in (starting to have access to more platforms/info)

Level 3: prep/research, implement up to launch, wait for final approval to execute (access to most of the “vault”)

Level 4: prep/research, implement and let you know when it’s complete/results (they have full access and autonomy to everything they need to support you)

By the time you get them to level 4, you should have a lot of trust in that person because they’ve proven themselves.

That’s it for part one. Click here to jump into Outsourcing Explained – Part 2.

Links from this episode:

Hello Fresh

InstaCart, code: LA8A9BC10A for $20 off your first order

Social media scheduling apps: Later or Tailwind

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