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Are you thinking about outsourcing, but worried that it’s too expensive to pay someone else to work for you?

If you outsource in the right way, the outsourcing you do should save you money. It’s about more than just getting a job done, it’s about freeing up your time.

I want you to do a simple exercise that will help identify which aspects of your job you should be outsourcing, and how outsourcing can save you money. I want you to work out what your time is worth. Now, this is not necessarily the rate you are charging your clients. But this is the amount that you need to keep in mind when you are doing every task you do during a work day.

1. Write down what you want to earn in the next year.
2. Write down how many weeks per year and the hours per week that you want to work.
3. Using these figures, calculate your hourly value.
4. Keep that number in the front of your mind throughout each work day, for a week.

Say, for example, your goal is to make £250,000 in the next year. You want to earn this amount by working 30 hours a week for 46 weeks. This would make your hourly value £181.16.

Whatever this number is, stick it above your desk, put it on your screensaver, write it on your day planner. Then, as you go about your working day, you should be asking yourself constantly, “Is what I’m doing right now worth £181.16?”

Or, more importantly, ask yourself, “Would I pay someone else £181.16 per hour to do this?”

I guarantee that if you do this for just a couple of days, you will immediately find many areas where you are wasting time. For example, you might spend an hour on a phone call with someone who is just chatting with you instead of helping to grow your business. When you see the figure “£181.16” written by your phone, you’ll quickly realise that this phone call is not a good use of your business hour.

Or you’ll think, “Actually, I could be paying someone else to do this for a lot less.”

If you spend an hour formatting and uploading a webpage, you could easily find someone to do that for £35 per hour. Or why spend three hours doing bookkeeping which could be done by someone else for £20 per hour?

Now I know some people might say, “Right now, money doesn’t permit me to outsource.” But even if you were to outsource just a couple of hours each week, those hours will be worth so much to you.

Time is the scarcest resource that a business owner has. If we’re short of money, we can make more money, but we can’t manufacture more time. That’s why it’s important for you to hand over routine tasks or basic administration work to someone whose hourly rate is a lot less than your hourly value. These tasks are having a direct impact on your business, because they are pulling you away from your unique ability – the things you love to do, the things you do best, and the places where you add the most value.

When you start outsourcing, sometimes it seems like you’re spending more, but that is because you personally have been absorbing these costs in the past. If you wrote a cheque for £181.16 every time you sat down to do something that could be outsourced, you would stop doing it very quickly.

If you’re doing jobs in your working day that could be done by someone else for a lower hourly rate, you’re basically cheating your business, and you’re cheating yourself. You’re taking money out of your own pocket.

Because why not pay someone else less to do the same work? If you value your time in the hundreds of pounds per hour, why are you wasting your time on penny jobs?

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

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