“Basic Outsourcing for Home Based Businesses”

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach

Did you know that outsourcing can save you time and money - even if you're a small home based company? When people think of outsourcing, they often think of huge corporations hiring people in developing countries. In reality, a lot of outsourcing is done by very small companies, by people just like you.

 How Outsourcing Can Help You:  Outsourcing can make all the menial tasks go away. You can outsource a lot of your menial tasks both in person and online.

For example, let's say that every week you need to scan forums for potential clients. You look through various forums looking for people who're asking questions. You answer those questions and offer your services. The whole process takes about 5 or 6 hours.

Of those 5 or 6 hours, only 1 hour is actually spent on responding to questions. The rest is spent on locating questions, browsing through the junk and finding people who're actually in your target market.

Those 4 or 5 hours of time are important to your business, but can easily be outsourced. For a mere $3 to $6 an hour, you can have someone else do this menial task, freeing you up to do more important things in your business.

Getting Started:  To begin with, come up with a value number for your time. For example, your billable hours might be worth $100 an hour. Of course, you have to put in a lot of work to earn a billable hour. You decide that your time is actually worth about $50 an hour.

So any time you can save yourself an hour of time for less than $30 or $40 an hour, you're profitable. This is the magic number you use to decide whether or not to outsource something.

Now make a list of all the things you might want to outsource. Include everything from business tasks to personal tasks, like laundry and cooking.

Finding Your Outsourcers:  One you have your list of tasks you want to outsource and you know your budget per hour limit, it's time to find outsourcers.

For digital tasks, head over the oDesk.com or Elance.com and create a job describing the tasks that you want completed. If you have a lot of different tasks that you want one assistant to do, use an hourly rate. If it's a per-project payment, then pay by the gig instead.

For in-person tasks, use tools like Zaarly or Craigslist to locate people who're willing to do it. In first world countries, you can generally expect to pay between $10 and $25 an hour for a personal assistant or menial tasks.

This will help get you started on the path to outsourcing. In time, you'll want to outsource virtually all the non-essential tasks in your business.

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Remember all it takes is a plan and specific daily action steps to move you to your goals!

Here’s to your success!