Everyday outsourcing is something that we do all the time, but we don’t even realize it. If this was 5,000 years ago and you wanted something to eat, you either had to grow it, kill it, or pick it. Now we just go to the store. We’ve essentially outsourced the function of food production to someone else. They package it and then we pay a price for it in our daily lives.
There are lots of other examples of our everyday outsourcing. One of the most common things is our accounting. If we want our taxes done, a lot of people don’t do it themselves, they have somebody else do it.
Or when was the last time that you paid a neighbor’s kid to rake your leaves or mow your lawn? Again, you’re outsourcing, and these are the things we take for granted.
How Will You Outsource
Most people’s idea of outsourcing is the call center in the Philippines that they reach when they call for customer service on their cable or electric. Again, this is outsourcing, but it’s on such a large scale that people don’t see how that could possibly apply to them. In Tim Ferriss’s book, The Four Hour Work Week, he basically makes the case that you can outsource almost anything. He experimented with it to the point of actually outsourcing his own dating. I wouldn’t recommend it, but he did it to prove a point. Tim actually had somebody set up dates and screen dates based on his preferences. I don’t think it worked out particularly well, but not all outsourcing does.
Most of the outsourcing models that are advertised are based on a full time person. They usually live in the Philippines, but it can be elsewhere. You pay a flat fee that they’re essentially an assistant that can do lots of things such as sending emails, managing social media, etc. But this is not the only option for a typical small business that is outsourcing. If you have the resources and can afford a full time virtual assistant, then you’re actually in some ways ahead of the game.
It is easier if you have the resources to hire a full time va and then work out the details of what they’re going to do. You can at a high level figure out that you’re going to use somebody for most arrangements of 80 or 160 hours per month. But for smaller companies just starting out, this can be a challenge. If you’re just starting out and you can’t afford $500 or $1,000 a month for a VA, you’ve got to look at other options.
A Small Army
Chances are you need lots of different work done and there may be skills that don’t all exist in one person. You may need a webmaster. Perhaps you may need a graphic designer. You may need an account or a bookkeeper. You may need a PR firm. So there are a lots of different things that you might need and the likelihood that you would find all of them in one place is probably pretty small. That’s where this site comes in.
We try to look at the ideas of everyday outsourcing and how you can use your time, what type of services you need and gives you options. Hopefully this gets you beyond just hiring one whole person to try and do everything and hope that they’re excellent at all of them. This site allows you to pick and choose the types of services that you want to use, see what makes the most sense for you, and come up with a smorgasbord of services that meets your need.
