A lot of people have asked me how I do “all this.” I sure couldn’t pull off two large membership sites, this blog, consulting, training, and marketing without a solid team.
The “4 Hour Work Week” might be a pipe dream for you at this moment, but how is that 60+ hour work week working for you right now?
Do you want to know the secret to getting the job of 15 people done? Have a team of 15 people. (Were you expecting magic?)
The biggest issue readers talk about to me is time. Social marketing eats up hours like a swarm of locusts in a corn field. All the other things you have to do to market and service your customers also blaze through your precious minutes each day until you are left wondering how guys like me do all this stuff.
In short, I don’t do all this stuff myself. I have a team. A damn good one.
If you aren’t outsourcing you are only going to get so far with internet marketing. Every major player online has help. Lots of it. There simply isn’t any other way to become a player on today’s web after a certain point.
Whether you set yourself up for a literal “4 Hour Work Week” or not, saving yourself the stress of being designer, copywriter, promoter, networker, accountant, fulfillment manager, and content producer for your online business is worth everything.
Jeff Mills has a killer course on outsourcing that is the most complete I’ve ever seen. Whether you grab it or not, you need to look at outsourcing and understand how you can ramp up to a full team of helpers from modest beginnings. I can’t tell you just how it has affected my life.
And don’t cop out with the “I can’t afford outsourcers” excuse. Want to know how many people could afford hiring help when they were just starting out? Exactly NONE of them. Yet they all found a way. I did and so have tens of thousands of others.
I still work hard, but on the things I am good at and on the the tasks I should be performing, that only I can perform, for my business.
Outsourcing changes the whole game. It’s the difference between a part-time hobby and a major, multi-million dollar potential business. Ask any of your favorite experts. Every single one uses outsourcing to pull off some very big business.
More outsourcing resources…
Outsourcing Web Design for Better Results
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Miles Galliford 04.23.08 at 11:51 pm
Jack, you are absolutely right about the value of a great team. One way to get started is to pay people on a project basis. The two places my company source good quality resources are:
Elance (www.elance.com) - good for design and writers
oDesk (www.odesk.com) good for developers
Also there is an excellent new website for getting logos and website designs done:
99Designs (www.99designs.com)
Also when building my business, which now has 10 people, we made the most of the many free and cheap resources on the web. For a list of the 35 free or cheap services we have found critical to our success have a read of this article:
http://www.subhub.com/articles/Free_or_Cheap_Online_Resources_for_Your_Internet_Start_Up
Troy Duncan 04.24.08 at 7:35 am
I’m starting to use freelancers to handle some of the more time consuming and mundane work.
Troy Duncan’s last blog post..How To Make Big AdSense Money On A Shoe String Budget
Alex Poole 04.25.08 at 2:06 am
I’ve been using http://www.OutsourceSuccess.com, a british guy called Gavin set it up and he has teams in Mauritius and India.
He knows his stuff about internet marketing too and often he’s available to bounce an idea off.
It’s freeed up my time loads
Alex Kinetic
http://www.kineticfitness.co.uk
Kevin 04.25.08 at 9:26 am
Hi Jack,
Being someone who almost burned out a couple times myself, I was glad to see you talking about outsourcing. You are so right on with this article. I hope everyone takes it to heart. One thing everyone should ask themselves is “how much is my time worth?”. Being a control freak outsourcing has always been hard for me, but I would have burned out a long time ago if I did not outsource pieces of my biz. The course by Jeff Milles looks interesting and hope people will check it out. What people need to be asking themselves is “What am I good at?”, and then stick to it and try to outsource the rest.
Kevin’s last blog post..Linkbaiting Tips and Practices
Christopher Flores 04.25.08 at 10:28 am
So Jack,
What are the tasks that YOU focus on?
What activities do you handle and where do you begin handing it over to the team?
Where do you find outsourcing the most cost effective for you?
Christopher Flores’s last blog post..Welcome to the blog!
Linda Lupowitz 04.25.08 at 11:47 am
Hi Jack, I found the Outsource Compendium to be a free ebook worth keeping around for future reference, and I am sure that Jeff’s course will be a useful blueprint for people to get started delegating and working with virtual assistants.
I am in favor of anything that gets people thinking about employing the resources and skills of other people who can do a job better than you can, and a whole lot faster. He has a good idea and it appears to be more than comprehensive.
My only serious caveat is that the overall push is to get work done by the lowest bidder and if that means you are paying $3.50 /hour , then you “win” — This attitude is becoming pervasive, with the result that people think it is somehow shameful to pay a decent wage to a US home-based educated English-speaking virtual assistant, when you can get a room full of Filipinos for the price of a bag of rice (which is going up BTW)
If you are serious about your business, keep in mind that the talent you hire is reflected in your results. That said, a $997 course where you get to spend many hours in self-education, reading, listening and watching videos about getting your work done, could be spent on a virtual team who will actually DO the work - that’s a lot of time, esp at $3.50 per hour! Even at 10 times that much, of actual work.
So if you really want to, you can spend a thousand hours (more) in front of your computer, get started on those lessons, and when you are a certified expert yourself, start looking for the cheapest hungriest global population out there to launch your internet marketing campaign for you and “automate” it too…or
Consider using the resources and talent of a virtual staffing company, where you get the account manager to help you organize and delegate, along with the VA– as well as all the vetting done for you, screening ,interviewing, testing ,guaranteeing that your virtual team is there when you need them, replacing your VA if needed and supplying individuals with the appropriate skills for the tasks you need done properly the first time. your choice…
Linda Lupowitz’s last blog post..Connect2Pro at your service…
Linda Lupowitz 04.25.08 at 3:42 pm
My regrets for having spouted off on a previous comment that was most likely moderated and has not appeared, but I can see it is unnecessary in this context. I was trying to get some controversy going but don’t want to burst anyone’s balloon, so whatever, it is valuable to learn how to get help and to establish an ongoing relationship with skilled virtual contractors because most people don’t know how to do that. Virtual staffing bypasses many of the employee relationship obstacles, and is a very efficient arrangement. Sure you can get hundreds of hours of education to help you figure it out… I do think that makes virtual staffing agencies very valuable, providing a great service to the client — coaches, consultants and entrepreneurs — to connect to professionals and get great, measurable results.
Linda Lupowitz’s last blog post..Connect2Pro at your service…
Ryan Hodge 04.25.08 at 8:08 pm
Jack you sound like my old VP from when I was a financial planner…he would tell me all the time that I needed a secretary to someone to handle the BS work he called it… I would tell him I couldn’t afford it… he would tell me I couldn’t afford not too…mind you I never did and maybe that is why I never made the amount of money I wanted to make…I made good money…but never hit my $$$ goal…ok I understand now…and I really do…thanks for the kick in the pants again.
Ryan Hodge’s last blog post..Matt LaClear is back at it again…I thought you are suppose to learn from your mistakes
Jack Humphrey 04.25.08 at 8:41 pm
Christopher,
I focus on a lot of tasks that you should outsource. Reason is, I have to keep up on my game so I can keep teaching what works and what doesn’t. But 99.999% of people reading FTR just need to understand what to get done by outsourcers and let me keep them up on the game.
We have people that do all kinds of stuff for us such as blogging about us, commenting (GOOD commenting) on other blogs for us, that kind of thing. Anything that is like data entry level stuff gets outsourced. Repetitive work is outsourced.
Then you move up to contractors and staff once you’ve hit a certain level, so I have a publicist, support people, managers, accountants, all that stuff.
If you have people doing comments for you on blogs - where they use your urls instead of their own - make sure they are really replying to the conversations and being a real person and contributor. All they are doing is using your URL instead of theirs but the content of their comments needs to be good.
Alex Poole 04.26.08 at 12:21 pm
I agree what is the point paying $1500 for a load of information about how to do outsourcing.
that buys you a lot of VA time and REAL education and something to show at the end of the day
Alex