CodingElite.com | Articles

Outsourcing | Article #286 : OUTSOURCING – PART 7

In our final installment on outsourcing, we’re going to finish up our discussion on what not to outsource and then finally show you how to coordinate your outsourcing if you are outsourcing several tasks.

One thing you never want to outsource is the actual management of your business. You want to know what’s going on with it at all times, from the sales that are coming in to the expenses that have to go out. Letting people run your business for you is a bad idea on so many levels, not the least of which is that, as with stealing ideas, people can steal a lot more than that once the money starts rolling in. So keep a close eye on everything at all times. This is where hands on is critical.

Before we get into managing your outsource I do want to point out something that I think is important. As I said in an earlier installment, you want to outsource tasks that you can’t do. But what about things that you can do? What if you were a crackerjack web designer and wanted to put up a new site? You could do it, but you also know how long it would take you. Why not outsource the task to somebody else and focus on things that will bring you in more money immediately? It’s just a thought.

Okay, let’s for arguments sake say that we’re starting our new project and there’s very little that we can do on our own. We need somebody to design our web page. Turns out the person we hired can’t go graphics. So we need to hire somebody to do our graphic design. In addition to that, we can’t write. So we need somebody to write our sales copy for the website. Let’s leave it simple for now, because it can really get a lot more complicated than this.

You’re working with 3 people. Each one is going to work at their own pace. Each part of the project is going to take a certain amount of time. The first thing you need to do is get an estimate of completion from each person. You should probably make this as part of the agreement before you even sign anything. Why is this important?

Let’s for arguments sake say that we want to launch our new site on March 1. It’s currently January 1. The web designer says it’s going to be 30 days to finish the site. The graphic designer, because of the number of graphics you want, says it’s going to be 45 days to get them all. Because these graphics all have to go on the sales page, this effectively means that even though the site will be done in 30 days, it really won’t be completed until after the 45 days that it takes to get the graphics from the graphic designer because you then have to get those designs to your web developer. He will then need a few days to incorporate those designs into the site itself.

Then we have the issue of the sales copy. Your copywriter says it’s going to take him 60 days to write the copy and have it tested for effectiveness. This puts you right at your March 1 launch date, effectively giving you no margin to play with. Under these conditions, you might want to put off your launch until April 1. This gives you a whole month to put all the pieces together and work out any glitches.

This is why managing your outsourcing is so important. The more people, or cooks you have in the broth, the harder it is to keep things under a tight leash.

Eventually, the time will come when you will need to outsource something.

Hopefully it’s because business is booming, because that’s the best feeling in the world.

View All Articles Under This Topic.

P.S: If you would like to learn more about this topic, you can do so by joining our mailing list. Just go to the top right hand corner of this page, enter your name and email and click "Join Our Newsletter!".