It’s easy to take your eye off the ball!
Sometimes do you find yourself taking your eye off the ball and creating tasks just to keep your virtual staff happy? That’s wasting valuable time and money that could be put to other uses.
Before blindly outsourcing all parts of your business left, right and center, drawing up an organisational chart, so that you know exactly what needs to be done and what can be outsourced, is the way to becoming outcome-focused in your business.
That’s one of the following 3 business outsourcing basics designed to help you get started developing your outsourcing strategies:
1. Understand Your Business Model
The first step is to make sure you understand your own business model and map it out – how will your business make money, what are the deliverables and how will you bring them to your customer better than the competition?
2. Understand The Roles In Your Business
Knowing your business model enables you to understand the roles that are required in your business to deliver the product to the customer and keep them coming back. What needs to happen and what people do you need? Usually an online business will need people to cover roles in the following areas:
– Marketing – SEO people (this may be sub-divided into Ezine, Web 2.0 etc), PPC etc.
– Fulfillment – Creating (with sub-divisions of copywriting, graphics etc.) and shipping
– Operations – HR, Legal, Accounting etc.
3. Draw Up Your Org Chart
Only once you have defined all the roles can you produce your Org Chart. Include every role you can think of and note on the chart who is doing what at the moment. If you are a start-up the likelihood is that you are covering most of the roles yourself.
This approach will help you to break jobs up into “bite-size pieces”. Especially when you are just starting out, you usually won’t need someone to come on board for 40 hours per week and multi-task. You might need someone to do some marketing work for 10 hours, another person to do some general admin and another person to cover some legal aspects.
A Note About The “Jack of All Trades….”
A lot of people forget the second part of this line is “master of none”. Don’t try to find someone to do everything when you’re out-tasking. Part of the beauty of business outsourcing and out-tasking is that you can hire specialists in the field on short-term job contracts. We cover this elsewhere in more detail.
In fact, we have just got started with outsourcing here and taken you through some of the very first considerations you need to make. There’s plenty more to find out but there is a logical step-by-step process covering all aspects of identifying, hiring and ensuring you get the best from your virtual contractors. For all of this and more check out the complete Outsource Profit Machine workshop simply by clicking here.
In Emyth, I like the part where Gerber advises having a detailed org chart even before a business starts growing big. He suggests putting names on those roles even if it’s just you and your two assistants working in the business.
This does set things straight from the very start – where you want to go and how you want to go there.
I like the idea of doing out-tasking simply because you get the expert services of people when you need it for your business. Setting priority tasks is one sure way to go so you can get things moving in your business with the help of these experts.
Yes, in every business organizational charts are really important. They show how each staff should work and the amount of task they have to turn in.
Agreed. I have worked with a virtual employer who gives/expects tasks from each of the virtual assistants tasks that are out of their individual expertise instead of hiring short-term job contractors fro the specialized tasks. It only messed up the productivity level our team was aiming for.