MBA898 The Top 5 Tasks to Outsource

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Your business deserves better and that's why we deliver business lessons on every episode. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA and webinar Ninja. And in today's lesson you will learn the top five tasks to outsource the top five tasks that can save you some time. A lot of people say time is money. I think time is worth a whole lot more than money. Can't get more time, you can always get more money. So I'm going to be looking at the top five things that you can outsource that probably consume the most amount of your time. Now there's obviously other tasks that are highly skilled things that you're doing now that you can get somebody else to do. But I'm looking for the things that are consuming most of your time. I want to clear your plate as much as possible so you can focus on what you do best and also to lead and to grow your team. Some people see this as the first five things you should outsource for now. These don't have to be full time employees. They could be contract employees, they could be part time, they can be one offs. And I highly recommend that whenever you're Hiring for these, you should maybe do a trial with the employee, the person you're hiring, see how they do. If they do well, then you can continue to work with them. Now, a lot of these tasks were the first things I started to outsource when I started to build businesses. It's also some of the tasks that we started to outsource as a company at the $100 MBA and webinar ninja. So I'll be giving you some examples from our own business so you could see how you can apply these tasks or these outsourced tasks in your own business. Speaking of business, let's get down to business. All right, the top five things to outsource, and these are ranked just based on time that is spent, headaches, mind space. I want to free you up from all that stuff, and you start outsourcing these tasks with somebody else that can do it for you. So my number one is probably going to be surprising, but I think it's a really good task to outsource because of the stress that it causes you. And I feel like stress is something you want to minimize as much as possible as the leader of your business. And that number one task is accounting. Accounting services are becoming more and more affordable. You can get an accountant to your accounting books for as long as $3 or so a month. That's incredible value. For the relief of not having to do all your bookkeeping, doing all your finances yourself, your taxes, all that stuff. And you want to make sure that stuff is in check. So handing it over to somebody who knows what they're doing is great. On. I used to spend a lot of time on accounting budgeting, keeping track of things. By outsourcing to an accountant, they're going to tell you what to do. They'll probably integrate some sort of software like Xero or something like to keep track of your expenses. You'll do some small admin work like, you know, saving your receipts and your invoices so you can use that come tax time. But you can, you know, create a shared folder on Dropbox or Google Drive so they have access to it. You're going to do minimum work and then they're going to take over and make sure everything is accounted for. You might be thinking, I don't spend too much time on accounting because maybe my business is not huge. But it's the stress I believe that you're going to be relieved of. I remember when I started outsourcing my accounting to an accountant, it was a huge relief, especially when it came to tax Time I didn't have to do a thing. That's their job. They take care of it. And depending on where you live in the world, this can be quite complicated, especially for, like, retirement plans 401k or super if you're in Australia. So my number one task to consider to outsource is accounting for. Remember, there are going to be some things you're still going to have to do, help your bookkeeper out, but it's minimal and it's going to relieve a lot of stress. All right? Number two, and it's probably the most popular one, is administrational tasks. And a lot of people hire what was called a va, a virtual assistant. Now, it's very important to know what you want to unload off your plate before you hire a va. A lot of people just hire a VA and they don't know what to do with them, they don't know what to give them. So you gotta list everything you want out of your hands, whether it's scheduling your appointments, scheduling your travel, whether it's replying to your personal inbox, to people that are inquiring about things, whether it's administrative tasks like publishing a blog post that you wrote and putting it in your actual WordPress site and making sure it's published and released on the right date, whether it's proofreading emails, things like that. There's a lot of admin tasks that take a lot of time and there's a lot of software that helps out with that. But having somebody to take care of all that for you helps a lot. Especially if you get a, a lot of email and you don't want to really deal with, you know, checking and replying to email on a timely basis. Get somebody to help you out to be your assistant. That means giving them access to your inbox. But that's fine. It's your business email and they can reply on your behalf. They can let people know that you're traveling. They can book appointments for you. They can remind you of important things. They can do research for you. You're researching an article or a topic. If you're thinking of ideas for gifts for people or you need to research a good restaurant for a business meeting that you're going to have in a different city, in a new city, plenty of t that take a lot of your time. You think it doesn't take a lot of time, but it takes time. Just trying to find a right restaurant in a city that you've never been to could take an hour or so. It could be spending that time doing something else or maybe taking a break, maybe, you know, not working. So an admin assistant is great. It's also a very low cost type of hire. You can get some really good VA's starting as low as 5, $600 a month for about 20 hours a week, which is not bad. And obviously it goes up with how competent they are in certain skills or in certain expertise if they're a native English speaker, all that kind of stuff. Anything administrative, definitely think about writing a list of all the things that you just don't want to do anymore, don't want to deal with things that annoy you, things that take your time, and giving it to an administrative assistant. All right, number three, and I think this is a huge one, especially when your business starts rolling. Outsourcing your customer service is something you really should start doing. And it's very affordable now to run a customer service department with customer service tickets and responses and a knowledge base and all that stuff using a software like Zendesk, Today's sponsor. But sponsorship plug aside, as your business starts growing, you're going to get more pre sale questions, more post sale questions. Users that need help getting started using your software, using your product, using your services. Even if this is like 10, 15 emails a day, that's a lot of time. That's like maybe an hour and a half of work, depending on how long your responses are. By having somebody take care of a customer service, you know, customer service is taken care of. I remember with our business Webinar Ninja, when we started building our customer service teams or hiring our customer service agents, their response response time was faster than ours was. They're professionals, they know what they're doing, they have their shift, they know exactly what they have to do and accomplish. So our customer service rating and reputation went high, went really up, and we became known for great customer service. So I quickly realized we need to really build out that team because, you know, there's only so much I can do. There's only so much Nicole can do at the start. Okay, we didn't have that many customers when we first started Webinar Ninja, so we can handle all the tickets ourself. But then it started to get, you know, quite busy. And what I did is I just started documenting everything that I was doing in terms of customer service procedures or policies, started doing screenshots or screen videos. And I trained our first customer service agent, who is Cindy. Cindy's a veteran now, and she trained everybody we have on our team now. Because once I trained her she cascaded it across all our new hires. Every time somebody new came along, all you got to do is train somebody once and then from there that person could train the next person. I also want to touch on the fact that when your company starts growing and you start building your product or service, you need to focus on the future, on the innovation of your product, on improving it. And you need to have a very positive outlook to be able to do that. And it's very hard to do that if you're stuck in customer service tickets. Why? Now you're going to have a great product or service. So your customer service tickets are going to be pretty standard, nothing to worry about. But on occasion, you're going to get a customer who's irate, that's upset, that thinks that they should have got something when they didn't. Anytime you deal with the public, you're going to deal with people that are just upset, irate. Having a bad day. And it can really mess you up. If you're answering these tickets on a day in, day out process, you need to distance yourself a little bit. Doesn't mean you're out of touch. You still talk to your customers, you know, you still are in touch with them. But if that's all you see, you know, every few days you see somebody who's upset, which is going to happen. If you're selling and you have volume, it's going to bring you to a place that you don't want to be in. It's not going to help you innovate, it's going to help you push your company forward. So by having somebody take care of customer service, outsourcing that task, it's going to allow you to be a better leader and be a better innovator. So keep that in mind. All right, Outsource task number four. And it's a combo task. I'm going to call this web design and development. Not everybody's a tech whiz. I love to fiddle with design and development. I love to do everything myself with the WordPress site and the sales site. I love, you know, doing all the graphics and the sales page layouts, all that. But I slowly have given that up. We have a full time designer, Irina. She's fantastic. She's much better than I am. We have copywriters, we have people working on the team that can do the job. But if you're not a tech whiz, if you're not somebody who likes to fiddle with things, if you're not somebody who feels confident in that, then you're gonna wanna outsource that task because it's gonna take a lot of your time trying to fiddle with your website or try to fiddle with the design or try to fiddle with, you know, graphics you're trying to put together, whether it's, you know, an image of your product or service or for marketing reasons or maybe a feature image for a blog post. So having somebody who's good at both the design and implementing it on your website, and that's not super hard to find, especially when you're talking about the website level. If you're not creating a, you know, an app or some sort of big software company, you can get somebody who can design and implement, you know, HTML CSS quite simply. And you can find people on Upwork Freelancer very, very easily. And if you're running a WordPress site, this is even easier. Okay, so definitely, I would recommend, if you're not somebody who knows your way around the tech world, if you don't know a bit of HTML css, you're not a big designer, you're not a Photoshop geek. You can hire somebody to take care of these tasks. It can be one off tasks or it could be a retainer. It could say like, hey, I want to pay you $400 a month. I want you to help me and always be on call to fix any issues I have or help me out with updates on my website or new graphics I need. Again, this is a lot of time saved and a lot of headaches. You don't have to worry about how long it takes to find some sort of creative image to use and make sure that you have the license to use it or if it's royalty free. All that kind of stuff frees you up. To be a better leader, to be a better entrepreneur.

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All right, the fifth task I highly recommend you outsource to save you time and headaches, is sales. Sales is the backbone of your business. If you're not making money, you are in trouble. You will not be in business for long. You gotta be making more money than you're spending so you can be profitable, so you can stay in business. But you might be thinking, I don't have enough money for, you know, a salesforce team of people to go out and knock on doors. You don't need that. Especially if you have an online business or an online website presence. An affiliate system is great. And you can have an affiliate system set up for you and run by an affiliate manager. By having an affiliate system, you will be paying commissions on anybody who makes a sale for you. They have their own tracking link, and therefore you can track all that stuff. And there's a lot of tools for that type of software for that kind of tracking on your website and your sales tools. We like idev, Affiliate. There's a lot of other ones you can use. But the point is, is that you can hire somebody to set that all up for you and to run it to find people that are interested in selling your product. People with large email lists, people that have a audience that would be interested in your products or services. And they get a commission. They get a percentage of the sale. So you don't pay them until you make money. So you obviously can afford it. Now, obviously, that's for the actual affiliates that are signing up that you pay after you get a sale. But the affiliate manager will need to be paid, and you can give him or her a commission on all sales and you can work out the numbers with that person. But the point here is, is that, you know, commission is something that is very lucrative to a lot of people, especially if you have a great product or service that you believe in. And an affiliate manager can really get people behind your product and have them sell it for you. So definitely consider hiring an affiliate manager and setting up an affiliate system in your product. You can also get somebody to work with you to do direct sales to run your webinars. Now, we run a webinar software company, so obviously we run webinars to sell our software. And I did it for a very long time. For years I ran all our webinars. But then I realized, you know, I need to focus on Other things in the business. As the business was growing, we were getting more employees. I had to manage people, I had to manage the team, how to grow the team, had to see the direction it's going in. So I decided to hire somebody who's a whole lot better than me. Tim Page, who has done over a thousand webinars, has grossed over $100 million doing webinars. And I'm happy to pay him to run our sales webinars, obviously because he's making sales so his salary is justified. I see an roi. And on top of that, it saves me time and the responsibilities of doing those webinars. So getting somebody to run your webinars is a great way to invest and outsource sales as a task that you don't want to do, but it's also one that you can see a direct impact. You pay X amount of dollars, you're gonna get X amount of dollars back. Another indirect way of hiring somebody for sales is a content manager. Somebody who's gonna write content, manage the content, create opt ins, create some epic posts on your blog so that they can attract people via SEO. This is a great way to get organic traffic and get people to sign up for your products and services now and log into the future. People don't understand that when you write great content on your blog, it's great, actually does better in the long run than it does in the immediate, you know, time in the, in the here and now. So getting somebody to write you great content to really go and have in depth articles and how ToS guides, opt ins, content upgrades. These are great ways to invest in sales via content marketing. Well, there you have it guys. My top five. Let's review. Number one, accounting. Getting somebody to take care of your accounting is going to save you a lot of headaches, a lot of stress. Number two, a va. A virtual assistant can help you take care of all those administrative tasks that are bogging you down. Scheduling appointments, email. Number three, customer service. If your product or service is doing well, you're going to need somebody to take care of customer service. As you grow, they'll be there on task and make sure that you'll have great service with your product. And on top of that will free you up to think bigger picture. Number five, a web designer, slash developer. This can be very time consuming if you like to dabble. Even if you like to do this stuff. I like it, but because I like it, I spend so much time time on it and I fiddle and I look at other things and I get Distracted and it's just too time consuming. So getting somebody to take care of it for you is great. Either on retainer or per task. Fixing things on your website, updating your graphics, making feature images for your blog posts. That kind of stuff. And number five, sales. We talked about having an affiliate manager with an affiliate system. We talked about getting somebody to do direct sales via a webinar or even via phone calls. We didn't mention that. But you can get somebody to make phone calls for you and close deals on the phone. That still happens and it works. And you can get somebody to do content marketing for you to get you some SEO juice to get evergreen sales. All right, those are my top five tasks I would outsource. I definitely felt a whole lot better when I started outsourcing. These tasks freed me up in terms of time, freed me up in terms of headspace and stress. It also improved my business because the quality was more consistent. I got experts in each area so they were better than what I was doing. It also allowed me to focus on what I'm supposed to focus on. Management, leadership, growing the team, growing the company. Looking forward. Innovation, guys, I hope that was helpful. I hope that you can take these on and start implementing these tasks and start, you know, outsourcing them. If you love the show, let us know in an itunes rating and review. We'd love to hear from you. When people drop a review on itunes, it allows us to learn more about how we can improve the show, what they like, what their favorite episode episodes are, and allows us to know to do more of that. So don't be a stranger. It takes two minutes. Let us know. And remember, if you're not subscribed, whether on itunes or stitcher or overcast, you do not have access to over 900 episodes that are in our archive. The only way you can get download access to all those is to hit subscribe so it'll show up in your feed. Otherwise, you're just getting the last few episodes. So make sure you hit subscribe right now so you can have a. Well, free of knowledge, literally a wealth of knowledge from all the episodes we've produced over the years. All right, guys, thank you so much for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Yes, it's time consuming to hire somebody and to find the right candidate and to train them and to give them the tasks and to oversee them and to manage them. Yes, but it's just one off. It's not reoccurring. And remember when I told you when I hired Cindy on customer service. I trained her. We showed her everything she has to do and then she just took on and she started training everybody else. So make sure that you document the process when you're training somebody. Make sure they document the process so they know they're going to be training somebody the next time you're making a hire. It's an investment and you have to put up something in an investment so you can get a payoff later. All right, I'll check you in the next episode. Thank you for listening. Take care.

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