Client Magnets Official Blog

Archive for the ‘outsourcing’ Category

Vision is a powerful thing.

It’s one of the most important tools you have to move you from where your business currently is, to where you want it to be. If you have a picture in your mind of what you want your business to look like, you’ll find that it’s much easier to bring this vision into being.

If you don’t know where you want to go, how will you know what to do? You don’t jump into your car and start driving, with no destination in mind. Before you start the engine, you have in your mind where you want to go so you know whether to turn left or right at the bottom of the driveway. The same principle applies to your business.

So what I would like to ask you to do today is to imagine for yourself another version of you.

Imagine yourself running a more successful business. You’re happier with how your business is progressing. Maybe you have more clients. Maybe you’re working fewer hours. Maybe you’ve expanded into new markets. Your vision will be unique to you and to your business.

Imagine what this business would be like, what your experience of a typical working day would be like. Start imagining it now, because it’s available to you.

It’s so important to recognise that this starts with YOU.  Your business has to be built around your vision. You are driving your business, so it’s based on what you want. You need to ask yourself: if I could have my business set up any way I want it to be, how would it be?

Bear in mind that the perfect solution for you may not be the perfect solution for the next person. And that’s fine – every business is unique, because your talents are unique. But regardless of what your perfect solution is, it starts in your mind.

There’s one common step that every business owner can take to achieve their vision, and that’s outsourcing.

If you’re really serious about expanding your business, you need to identify the routine or basic administrative tasks that can be given to someone whose hourly rate is a lot less than yours. Next, you need to develop the ability to find the right people at the right price who can help you. These people will be able to get things done quickly for you to allow you to spend more time envisioning the future and bringing it into being.

The purpose of having a vision is to imagine what you’re trying to achieve and to act as though it’s already in place so that you’re moving toward it. This is what Dan Kennedy calls “behavioural congruency”, which is essentially acting as if you already have the outcome you desire.

If you want to make, for example, £250,000 over the next 12 months, the more you act in alignment with that outcome the faster you’ll get there. So if you’re already running a £250,000 business, chances are you wouldn’t be doing your own expenses, but would instead have someone handling routine bookkeeping tasks. So you need to start acting as though that has happened already.

Something happens when you make a conscious decision that you’re ready to change and you want to do it differently.

If you don’t make this a priority, you’re still going to be in exactly the same situation three months from now, six months from now, a year from now.

So start creating your vision today – I know whatever vision you have for yourself can come true!

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

Tweet

What if you’re not completely happy with someone you’ve hired to help with your business?

Should you keep them on to see if things improve? And, how long do you wait for that to happen? Is the problem really this person? Is it your system? Is it you?

Here’s what to consider:

• A good rule of thumb is to trust your gut.

Really trust your gut. Chances are that if you’ve been thinking for awhile about letting someone go, you probably had an inkling within the first week that something wasn’t going to work out.

If an employee, assistant, vendor or supplier takes up more time and energy than they are worth, you need to let them go. Dan Kennedy, a marketer who has influenced me quite a bit, has very strong beliefs about running your business autonomously and doing business on your own terms. He says, “If I wake up three mornings in a row thinking about you and I’m not sleeping with you, you’ve got to go.”

As much as you’d like to see the good in everybody and give people a chance, don’t drag things on longer than necessary. Be decisive about pulling the plug when things clearly aren’t working. There’s really no point in continuing down the wrong path.

• Check their attitude.

There will always be an element of human error. If you’ve hired a person who has the right attitude – where they’re proactive, they’re willing, they’re trying – and they’ve just made a mistake, be willing and able to overlook that. The fact is that whenever you’re dealing with people, there’s going to be an element of human error. That’s just a fact of life.

• Evaluate your communication and training systems.

85% of problems can be solved by communication. Evaluate the training you’ve provided. Be clear about your needs, and have a good system for communication in place.

• Examine your own attitudes and beliefs.

Determine your own role before you make your decision to keep someone on or let them go. Ask yourself, “At what level am I creating this?” And be honest with your answer. Have you created an insurmountable barrier in your own mind that they can never break through? If you’ve already written off someone who’s working for you – thinking “they’re no good” – you’re going to get that mirrored back to you. You need to take responsibility for that as well.

• Are they an investment or expense?

The right people will ultimately make and save you more money than they cost you. The wrong people will just cost you. If your time or energy is being drained by an individual, then you may very well need to just cut your losses and move on.  Remember, if it’s not working, it’s not working. The best thing you can do is to set  free. Let them go so they can find where they’re meant to be.

Use these tips to evaluate your team and make the right decision as to when it’s time to say goodbye.

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

Tweet

I’m a huge fan of outsourcing. I think every business owner should outsource as much as possible.

I’ve been outsourcing for a number of years. I now have a team of virtual assistants located around the world, and I can’t imagine doing business without them. It doesn’t matter if you outsource to one person or to one hundred. Making the decision to outsource will have such a profound impact on your business that you won’t ever look back.

Today, I’ll give you my top five reasons to outsource.

1. It will grow your business.
Outsourcing will help you free up more time, which you can devote to the business. This seems pretty obvious, but sometimes it can happen in surprising ways. I’ve mentioned before a client of mine who came to me, asking for help in attracting new clients. However, she was so bogged down in administrative work that the last thing she actually wanted was new clients because that meant more paperwork. But as soon as she started to outsource her administrative work, her business started to take off. Wouldn’t you like to hand over the mundane parts of your business to someone else to deal with?

2. It helps you decrease costs.
Sometimes you need to play mind games with yourself, and start to quantify every cost that’s going on in your business all the time. You are the greatest asset that your business has. You are the hardest worker, and you come up with new ideas and new products and new plans. Your time is worth so much to your business. But if you find yourself doing routine tasks instead of earning money for your business, you are costing yourself money. You’re completing the accounts or updating the website when you could be meeting with a client. These tasks could be carried out by someone external to your company, and would cost a fraction of the amount that you could otherwise be earning. Outsourcing should not be an expense, but rather a cost saving exercise.

3. It increases your productivity.
By outsourcing routine tasks that aren’t part of your unique ability, it will free up your time and allow you to focus more on what you do best. The whole purpose of your business is to build a business around your unique strengths and your unique talents. You don’t want to be stuck doing jobs that you dislike and which could be done by someone else. Whenever I let go of a part of my business that’s been draining my time and energy, I get an instant boost in productivity.

4. It will help you move faster.
This will have a huge impact on your business. It’s quite interesting the number of people who have told me that it can sometimes be frustrating to attend a seminar or buy a new product to do with building the business. This is because it gives you more ideas, but if you’ve already got a backlog of ideas that haven’t yet been actioned, the last thing you want is more ideas. You need help getting things done, and outsourcing your work can give this to you. When you get someone else to do your routine tasks, you will free up time and energy to move on ideas that you haven’t had the capacity to action. You’ll be able to respond more quickly to clients, both new and old.

5. It builds scalability.
If your business is built purely around one person doing all the work, sooner or later you’re going to run out of time. And normally that’s sooner rather than later. But when you start to outsource, you will start to build scalability because it makes it easier for you to multiply and duplicate your business. You can put systems in place that make it easy for tasks to be duplicated, which make it easier for your business to grow. Building an online business is about helping you reach more people. You’ll be able to deliver more value to more people more often, so you make more money. You’re in a position to do more because you have more time and energy.

Many people think that they can’t afford to outsource. But I guarantee that you’ll be amazed at how much of an impact outsourcing just one task will have on your business. It will free up so much time and mental energy that you can devote to core aspects of your business.

Tweet

So you’ve made the decision to start outsourcing. Congratulations!

You’ll soon notice the positive impact this will have on your business, and you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it. Outsourcing is so important, because if you want to grow a profitable online business, you’ll need more than one person!

It’s time to build up a network of people around you that you can outsource routine tasks to.

But where do you start outsourcing? For some people, deciding which aspects of their business they could or should outsource is really simple. To them, it just makes sense which routine activities to outsource.

But for other people, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious answer to the question of where to start outsourcing. No part of the business stands out as being more easily outsourced than any other.

Something that will help you to identify what to outsource is to keep a log of your day. Try to keep a track of all your work activities on a daily basis, ideally for a week. It may seem very labour-intensive to start with, but this will help you to save time in the long run.

Once you’ve done this, sit back and look at this time log. Start to identify any activities that you would like to hand over, things that could be done by someone else. Highlight any tasks that, in an ideal world, you would handover.

Say, for example, you really dislike doing the accounts, or you wish you could get someone else to do your monthly newsletter mail out. Highlight every time during that week you spent on accounts or on organising the month’s newsletter. You’ll probably be amazed at how much time you’ve spent on tasks that aren’t part of your core business.  Tasks that you could hand over to someone else to deal with.

This is where you should be starting to outsource. The routine jobs that immediately jump off the page at you are where you should concentrate, as these are the tasks that you have readily identified as not being part of your core business.

When you start doing this, maybe you’ll only highlight a few tasks on your log. While you might want to hand over other things on your list, at the moment it might seem like too much of an impossible dream.

But I promise, once you start this process you’ll be hooked. And the longer you do it and the more things you’ll start to observe, you’ll begin noticing all that you’re doing that you could be delegating.

The great thing about doing this is that once you’ve got your list of tasks and activities that you would like to handover, you can start to group them together. Ask yourself if there are skill sets that go together, and if you can outsource a group of tasks to one person or team.

For example, your list might contain several activities relating to editing and publishing, or website maintenance, or data entry. These groupings might not occur to you if you just thought about a regular business day. But actually going through each minute of your day clarifies exactly what you do to keep your business going.

I still find myself monitoring my daily routine, because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of doing things that I could be delegating. Whenever I sit down to look at exactly where I’m spending my time, I immediately experience a boost to my efficiency and productivity.

So, your challenge is to keep a log of your activities next week. For those who aren’t outsourcing, you’ll be amazed at how much of your day you will be able to delegate to someone else. And while you may already be outsourcing, think of it as a ‘tune up’ for your business.

Get ready to feel that boost of productivity!

Tweet

Would you like to be able to jump from earning between £50,000 and £100,000 a year to averaging well over £30,000 per month? Is one of your goals to reach the million dollar mark in online sales?

You don’t necessarily have to work longer or harder to accomplish that. In fact, I did that during the same period of my life when I had my two children.

And, as any parent knows, when you have two youngsters around, there isn’t exactly an abundance of time to work with. Quite the opposite.

So, achieving this kind of dramatic increase in your earning is not about putting in longer hours. It’s about creating a structure, both externally and internally, that will make it possible for you to receive money 24/7.

There are three basic things you need to do in order to create that structure.

1. Stop undervaluing what you have to offer. Trying to squeeze your expertise into low-priced solutions doesn’t work and won’t really give your clients what they need.

Part of your journey to financial success has to include your offering higher value products and programs that really deliver great solutions to your clients. This will also enable you to charge more.

2. Productize your service business. Instead of getting paid by the hour, package your expertise into products and programs that can be sold off the shelf and aren’t dependent upon your time to deliver.

If your business model involves going out and working with a client for a day, and then getting paid for that day, can you develop a product that does the work for you? With this type of business model, instead of doing the work and getting paid, you do the work once and get paid over and over and over again.

3. Remove yourself from the manual labor of your sales and marketing – or at least, as much as possible.

You don’t need to be personally involved in every single sale. You don’t need to pick up the phone to prospect and find new customers. You don’t need to write individual proposals or have meetings and phone conversations to make the sale.

All of that time-consuming sales and marketing activity can be replaced with automated sales processes. Use things like direct mail, the Internet and email marketing instead.

Rather than selling one-to-one, develop one-to-many techniques that will help you reach more people in less time.

When you stop undervaluing your services, and begin to productize them and automate your sales process, your earnings will skyrocket. Doing any one of these three things alone will make a noticeable improvement in your business. But, implementing all three of them -  together -  will have a dramatic and profound effect. That’s when the magic happens.

Tweet

If your goal is to have a business that operates without being totally dependent upon you, you need to develop a team that is self-sufficient.

As your business grows and becomes more complex, things are going to come up that you haven’t anticipated. Your team will be part of the solutions, but it may also, at times, be part of your problem. There will be misunderstandings. There will be mistakes.

When you’re dealing with people, there will be things that go wrong. This is just part of human nature. That’s part of a growing business. Learning from mistakes and implementing new procedures will help to improve the performance of your team, and in turn, improve the performance of your business.

One way you can do this is through weekly team meetings…

• Weekly meetings make you focus more on keeping your team updated. You think about your business more than anyone else does. If you come up with ideas and things almost overnight, you could end up moving forward on something that you haven’t even mentioned to anyone yet.

• Weekly meetings are the one time a week when your team is guaranteed your full attention.

• This means you’re available to tie up loose ends or address any minor issues that need to be handled.

• Instead of your team constantly checking with you on different matters throughout the week, or trading e-mails, you can handle things right then and there in an allotted time slot. This can save you alot of time.

Improving communication systems is another way to improve your team’s performance…

• Setting parameters is a good way to let your team know what’s expected of them.

For example, do you spend an inordinate amount of time answering a constant stream of e-mails with one question in them?  Consider telling your team to send only one e-mail each with all of their questions in it. That’s easier to manage than turning on your inbox and seeing 10 different emails from the same person.  Psychologically it’s easier to handle this way.

• Remember, you are also setting aside time at weekly meetings to address issues.

All of this goes back to your vision; doing business on your own terms. You’ve got to set the parameters. You set this up. You decide how you want it to be.

Progress reports are another great way to ensure your team’s performance…

Arrange for your team to submit a weekly progress report.  That way, you don’t need to be chasing your team and asking, “Have you done this? What’s the progress on that?” At the end of each week, the responsibility is on them to take everything that you have put their way, and give you an update.

And finally, in order for your team to be truly self-sufficient, you need to take some time off.

This may sound odd to you, but it’s important.

Give yourself a few free days.  It’s important for you as a business owner to recharge, to get in touch with your own creativity.

Take a well-deserved holiday at the seaside, or wherever you’d like to go. Leave the laptop home. This will really force your team to step up and take charge. If you make yourself available, you know for a fact there will be a couple of hours worth of emails or questions coming your way.

If you simply aren’t available to them, they will just handle it. This is actually great training for your team. If you want to make them an ongoing part of your business, you have to build free days into how you do this.

At the end of the day, you are paying these people. They are on your team. So you choose how you want them to communicate with you. The leadership and the guidance need to come from you.

Try implementing at least one of these tips this week and see the different to your business and lifestyle.

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

Tweet

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

Tweet

Just imagine that you are building your dream house. It’s on just the right block of land in just the right location. You’ve designed it just the way you want it, and you’re ready to start building. You can’t wait to move in.

The next step is to hire one person who is going to build the entire house, from the foundations to the roof, all by himself. He will be the bricklayer, the carpenter, the plumber, the electrician, the painter, the roofer and the landscape gardener. This one person will be responsible for every part of your dream home. Your plans will be reliant upon that one person and can only progress as fast as he can work.

Sounds pretty unrealistic, doesn’t it? If you decided to build your dream home like this, you’d still be waiting for it to be finished ten years later.

So when you’re building your dream business, would you use one person to do every job?

It’s amazing how many people decide to build their business this way. They approach outsourcing with the belief that they can hire one person to do it all. They want one person to be responsible for their administrative work, their data entry, their website design, and their newsletters.

Looking for one person is a mistake for a few reasons:

1. It’s unlikely that there will be one person who will meet all of your requirements. If you’re looking for one person to try and fix everything, that’s an unrealistic expectation. You’re going to get frustrated because you’ll end up with someone who is good at some things, but weak in other areas.

When you start to think about outsourcing, you can’t look for just one person to do it all. You want to start thinking about your different business needs, and match them up to the right individual or organisation to do them for you. For example, I wouldn’t ask the person who does my data entry to start formatting my newsletter. Instead, I use different people for different tasks, depending upon their areas of expertise.

2. Using just one person will only transfer the problem. What we are trying to do with your business it to turn it into an entity that can operate by itself, and isn’t solely dependent on you.

One of the major frustrations of owning a small business is that so much is dependent on us: if we stop working, the income stops too. I want you to get out of that trap. I want you to set things up so that your business is creating an income regardless of whether you’re working, or at the beach, or asleep.

If you look for one person to meet all of your outsourcing needs, that person becomes the indispensible person for your business. They will become the bottleneck through which all your business must travel, instead of you.

You need to find the right people with the right skills to do the right tasks. You can’t just click your fingers and have the perfect person present themselves in front of you, like a genie from a bottle. You will need to build a team that works for you, and this takes perseverance.

But it makes a tremendous difference, and you will be able to free up energy and time immediately.

This will allow your business to focus on its unique talent: you.

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

Tweet

If generating leads for your business only happens when you physically get up and go to a networking event or when you think about placing a specific ad – if it’s something you have to think about or make time to do – it’s not a system.

In an ideal world you would have the time to do all the things you need to do to generate more leads. The problem is, you don’t. That’s what keeps your business from growing. The answer to that problem is to systematize and make lead generation automatic.

A true lead generation system happens without you thinking about it. If you had a true system, you could take a month off and get back to find more leads than before you left. That’s a system.

Some of the activities you’re doing right now are not actually adding anything to your bottom line — they’re just making you tired. Because if you don’t have a system, you just have a job.

Start taking a cold hard look at each aspect of your business. Figure out what is working for you and what isn’t. And if something isn’t, it’s time to drop it.

But you can’t know what’s working and what isn’t until you start to track and measure results. For example, if you paid £800 to join a breakfast networking group, look at whether it has really added revenue to your business since you’ve been a member.

It may well be you’re getting a fantastic return on investment. If that’s the case, great. Do more of it. Look for another group to join. But if it’s not, you need to drop it and focus on something else.

The devil is in the details. You need to do this in a way that’s unique and specific to you. The bottom line is to systematize and automate. If you have to think about it, it’s not going to happen.

I’ll give you an example. One of my biggest priorities is generating traffic to my website. This is a really important way for people to join my newsletter list and it starts the journey of them becoming paying clients. I was always thinking about traffic and new ways to get traffic.

So I implemented a system. I now hand one of my teleseminars over to my team, and the team does its magic and turns that one teleseminar into multiple methods of getting traffic to the website.

I’ve found a way to focus on what I do best for 90 minutes. And from that 90 minutes, we set up a system that brings thousands of visitors to my website.

And there’s the secret to figuring out the key to your system. You’re most valuable to your business when you focus on what you do best. That’s what you need to do. Hone in on your unique ability. Spend your time on what you do best. Outsource everything else.

So start thinking what you do best. Find that one thing, focus on that one thing. Your system will come into place, and the leads will follow.

© Bernadette Doyle, 2009

WANT TO SEE MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS ONE? See more articles at my website

Tweet

Are these routine tasks part of your usual work day?

Email correspondence – 1-2 hours
Record keeping – 1 hour
Sales (phone calls, proposals, appointments) – 2-3 hours
Web site maintenance – 1 hour

If you devote this kind of time to your working day on a regular basis, you are not spending your time doing what it is that you set out to do.

Doing all of these things is not why you went into business in the first place. If you don’t stop doing them – or at least stop doing some of them – you won’t have the time to actually do what it is that you truly love and set out to do.

Remember why you started your own business to begin with – it is where your passion and talent lie. Of course there are a number of required tasks associated with running a business, but that doesn’t mean that you are the only one who can do them.

This is why you need to outsource – delegate tasks to others so that you can focus on what it is that you do best.

There are two compelling reasons for you to consider outsourcing some of what you do for your own business:

• You don’t have to spend time doing things that you just loathe
• You can spend more of your time doing the things you really excel at.

So, when you think about it, outsourcing is really all about you. Which might seem strange, since it’s also mostly about handing things over to other people.

And, thanks to the Internet and technology, the emerging industry of virtual assistants makes it easier for you to outsource your work. There has never been a better time to outsource. People who work from their own home offices are at the ready to provide services for every need on an hourly basis.

Before these virtual assistants came into the work force, options were much more limited. Hiring an assistant meant having to actually have an office,
a premises, a desk for that employee to sit behind, and a computer. Very
expensive.

The beauty about the opportunities available today is that you can outsource on an hourly basis, paying for people as and when you need them without having to put up a huge capital investment.

When you do decide to hire help, don’t just look around and say, “Okay, what’s on my plate right now that I want to get off my plate? Where do I find someone who can take it off?”  That is reactive and short-term.

I want you to think bigger. Think about the long-term view. Act in accordance with where you’re heading as opposed to where you are. It’s about your space and your confidence. “My business is growing. I’m going to need help. I’m going to need additional resources. I’m moving in this direction.”

Outsourcing is most successful when you recognize your own part in the process. Let assistants handle the things that you don’t excel at, that weigh on you. This will allow you to focus on what you love and what you do best.

That’s what’s going to help you reach your vision of what your business should be. That’s what will make you the most money and bring you the most happiness and satisfaction.

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

Tweet