24 Nov 2025 · 5 min
John Jonas explains how to ask outsourced staff to take on more work. Ask directly about their workload and capacity. You'll get four types of answers: no, no but I know someone, maybe with training, or yes. Follow up by asking what other skills they have.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS. This is episode 413, how to get more from your OFS. Okay, so today I want to talk about how you can get another task done from the person that you're working with. So I'll get people saying to me, I have this other thing that I would like them to do, but I don't want to overwhelm them, which is a completely understandable situation. So here's what I have done, and here's what I would suggest. I mean, here's what I do suggest to people who ask me this ask, and that's it. I ask my people, what's your work like? Like, how much. How much time are you spending on it? Are you full? Or could you do this task? Here's this thing that I want done. Could you do this? Can you fit this into your workday? Now, obviously, they could lie to you and say, no, I can't fit that in. And they could be working four hours a day instead of eight, but if they are, you should have a feeling about that. And this is. So this will work if you have trust with the person you're working with. Now, when I ask this question, can you do this? I'll usually get, like, one of four answers. So number one, they'll say, no, I can't do it, or I don't know how to do it, or I don't want to do it. Something like that. If you get a no from them, well, that probably a good answer because it means they trust you. If they're saying no to you, it means they don't fear losing their job. Now, it's not the only answer. It's not, maybe not the best answer, but if they say, if they give you a reason for it, not just, no, no, I don't feel like I have the time for this, or, no, I don't want to do this, I don't like it. That's a great answer. The second answer I'll get from someone is, no, I can't, but I know someone who can. This is rare, but it has happened to me. At least you get a potential solution. Now, there have been a number of times where they've said no, and I've said, well, do you know someone who can? And then they're like, oh, let me look around. I. I can't remember a time where I got a good candidate from that, no, wait. As I sat here and thought about this, that's not true. I recently, and actually that's not the full story here, so I recently decided to hire a new programmer and I went to my team of programmers and said, hey, do you know someone who fits this? And then I went and started recruiting on my own and two of my programmers said, no, I don't know someone. One of them said, maybe, but I don't know. And then it took them a couple of days to come back to me with someone really great. In the meantime, I had recruited someone really great. I ended up hiring them both and they're both working for us and it and it's actually been really, really great. His referral was really amazing. That's a less common situation where I'll get a good referral from someone, but it does happen. Okay, so the third response I get from people is, and this is like a common one, is maybe I don't know how to do it, but I can try. So with this one, it just requires training. So maybe you are already planning on providing training to them, maybe you were not. You just, you just have to be prepared that, yeah, you're going to have to provide training to this person. If you don't have the time to give the training, you can look@vasmadeasy.com see if we have training for it. I think we're up to 70 different standard operating procedure training modules that you can get individually or you can buy the whole thing and that can be a really good start or like a full in depth training to get them doing it really well for you in getting them to do something new. The fourth answer that I'll get is yes, I can do this and I'll be happy to do it. And that's the best case scenario because then you don't have to do anything else. And if they already know what they're doing, that's great. So now let me take a step back because one of the things that I have often done in all of this is if I get a no answer from them, I will often ask what else do you think you could do? Or what other skills do you have that you could contribute to the business? So like you're doing this work, what do you think we could do that would be helpful? And that sometimes produces some really good things. Sometimes it produces things that I'm like, yeah, I don't really want to do that. I know that you could do it, but I don't think that's going to help the business. So I don't want to pursue that. Other times I've thought, yeah, okay, yeah, let's do it. And in fact, that's where our YouTube channel came from. That's where all of our social media came from. That's where our newsletter, this newsletter, that's where this podcast came from, actually, was them saying, hey, I think we could do this podcast, and I could do this and this and this if you record it. So lots of really good stuff can come from saying, well, what could you do? What do you think we could do to improve? And what could you contribute to that? And then when they do answer that, I know they have the skills or they have. They have some knowledge or they have some ability to get the skills to do it, because they've told me that they think they can do it. And. And the reality is that I've learned over the years is, well, these are human beings, and I talk about this all the time. They're humans, but they have other things outside of just the single thing that you've taught them to do. And they have other ideas and thoughts, and they want to contribute. And so asking, well, what do you think you could do? They may have 10 things that they think they could do, and they may only tell you one or two of them just to see how you respond to it. And you might just ask, hey, are there other things? Like, what else do you know? And they may genuinely not have something if they say no. Maybe they're just really. They don't know. They're not thinking about your business, they're not thinking about ways to improve it. And some of my people are like that. They don't think about ways to improve it. And some of them are. In any case, asking is the solution to how do you get more from your ofs?
