Are you outsourcing? Should you be?
January 29, 2008 by ShannonCherry
Filed under Business
Recent estimates say that outsourcing tasks to independent contractors can save as much as 30 percent versus hiring an employee.
And in today’s virtual marketplace, almost everything a company does can be outsourced, including engineering, marketing, and manufacturing. Yet only 6% of the companies that outsource are satisfied with the practice.
Why? According to the Harvard Business Review, too many make outsourcing decisions piecemeal, not focusing on a strategic view of outsourcing.
Take me for example. Before I thought strategically about outsourcing, I sent my virtual assistant projects I simply didn’t want to do or couldn’t get to. Although it was good for me to get rid of the stuff bogging me down, I ended up losing money in the process because she wasn’t the best person to do some of the tasks either.
Now, I outsource based on the tasks and the skills involved to complete the tasks. It’s much more productive – and lucrative.
But someone had to tell me the hard truth about why I was still spinning – even though I had outsourced. And that person was Melanie Benson Strick from Success Connections.
Join me when I interview Melanie, asking her all about her virtual team building secrets, on February 5 at 8 PM EST (5 PM PST). It’s a free teleseminar (including the phone number) so there’s no excuse for you not to come!
To get the call-in details, all you have to do is send me an email teleseminar at cherrycommunications dot com.
It’s a nice post and useful for the outsourcing people.
Sounds as though you and your virtual assistant were not the best match.
Kelly,
No. She was a good match for certain tasks.
One of the things I learned was to find the right person for the task. After all, some people are better at project management, others are good with numbers and still others are good for client relations. Now focusing on skills, I find the perfect person for each job.
Before you can really think about outsourcing anything, you need to define your processes that clearly define what tasks need to be done and how to do them. Then you can more easily match the person and the fee to the task. One place to learn about how a business system works is James Brausch’s Freedom Business System. He has several examples of procedures that you can use to think more clearly about your own processes.
It is interesting that everyone talks about outsourcing different parts of the business except sales. I have run into a consultant that has launched salessurge.com, a sales outsourcing model that seems to have viable promise. Instead of stumbling around and trying to build a sales team, you can send them in to design the perfect team, AND MANAGE THEM. As a sales manager, I can tell you, this is one of the greatest challenges for young companies. Many great ideas never get wings because the go to market and adaptor to majority sales plan is not executed properly.
Karl,
I would love to outsource sales. It’s a big challenge for me.
But I think it’s hard to do. After all, who knows your business better than you. And I also worry about the pushy sales approach, which I don’t feel comfortable with.