Ep. 263: Outsourcing Tasks You Don't Know How To Do

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 263, outsourcing tasks you don't know how to do. So I recently went to lunch with someone who told me that they were struggling to get some things done with their ofs. He said, oh, they're amazing. I love them, I love the work they do. But getting things done that I don't know how to do is a struggle, or at least that's what he thought. So we talked all through it, and in the end, we kind of figured out that getting the work done isn't the struggle, it's managing the process that's the struggle, because he's trying to manage something that he doesn't know how to do. He's already overworked. Even with his team in the Philippines, he's taking on too much work and he's not managing the process well because he doesn't understand the process. So if you're looking to hire someone to do something that you don't know how to do, let's consider a few things with me and let's talk through this. So, number one, it's definitely doable. I've done it. I've done it a bunch of times. So have tons and tons of other people. You can definitely hire someone to do something you don't know how to do. Next. The more experience a worker has, the easier this is going to be. And generally not always, but more experience is more expensive. So when you're going to hire someone to do something you don't know how to do, you want to look for the most experience that you can find and. And they're going to cost more. That's just part of it. And then if you don't manage the process, you're unlikely to see results. And therein is the rub of this. If you're already overworked and you're already not managing things, great. In your business, hiring someone to do something you don't know how to do and adding an extra bunch of management to your workload is really, really hard. And it means either accepting any outcome that they do, whatever they do. You don't know, you don't care, you. You don't know how to do it. It doesn't matter if it's. If it's how you think you want it or if you're not man. If you're not able to manage the process well, you have to accept any outcome or you have to Add a bunch of time managing it, which is perfectly acceptable if you have that time and that bandwidth to manage it. Or you have to bring in outside help of someone else who does know what they're doing to manage the process. Now, there are a couple exceptions to these rules. First, technical tasks. So like design work is a technical thing where, yeah, you don't really have to know how to do, do design. To have someone design you something nice, you can see what looks nice and what doesn't. That's pretty, pretty easy and obvious. Next, sales copy is something that you don't have to know how to do. Someone can write you sales copy. That's. It's a pretty reasonable thing that you don't have to know how to do that. Programming is another one. But building something big is a different story. Where you can hire a programmer, but building a system, you have to understand how to build the system. Because the programmer, they might know how, they might understand. But there's just so much that goes into software development that if you're completely inexperienced with it and you hire a programmer, you ask them to do things that are impossible or technically super difficult that you don't think are. The programmer could spend months and months and months trying to accomplish this thing where you don't really understand what's going on and you don't know why it's taking so long. You don't realize that you've asked them to do something impossible. I'm sure there are more exceptions to this, but let's take a step back and try something different. So all of this is why I suggest that the first person you hire is someone to do something that you do know how to do. It allows you to get something off of your, to get some time back to clear your head and get some more mental bandwidth to allow you to focus on what is actually working in your business. And then once you've gotten some time back, then it's super reasonable to hire someone to do something that you don't know how to do. If you try and do something you don't know how to do, like, oh, I don't know how to build a website and my website sucks, so I'm gonna hire someone to build my website. Well, if that's the first thing you hire for, it can add a lot of stress and difficulty and failure to the process. Whereas if you hire someone to do the data entry that you're currently doing and get that off of your plate and get some time back, then it's way, way easier to hire the website person later. You just have to recognize, you have to manage the process. You have to manage the outcomes and the expectations, and you have to. You have to understand something about it. Otherwise you could create a really, really difficult situation for both them and you in assigning things that really kind of aren't even reasonable to do. So if you have advice of how to get things done that you don't know how to do, I would love to hear it. Email me johnlinejobs phone.