For as long as I can remember, outsourcing tasks in life has been a common practice. Outsourcing is using a good or service from an outside supplier. You pay the person and they provide the goods or service. The pandemic woke us up to all the services we usually hire out when the world shut down and those services were no longer available to us. In life we hire things out such as piano lessons for our kids (or any type of lesson we find valuable for our children), grocery pickup and delivery, food delivery, personal styling through companies like Stitch Fix, childcare, applications through our phone that we pay for, and the list goes on.
I am always stumped when I come across a small business owner who is trying to do it all. All the phone calls, meetings, bookkeeping, marketing, client relations, employee relations, deliveries, post office runs and so much more. No wonder the burn out rate is so high for small business owners. We are doing too much.
If we outsource so much in life in order to get all the things done, why are we so hesitant to do it in small business? I know the take home pay margins are slimmer but our mental health is better when we delegate and outsource tasks. As small business owners we must stop thinking we should and can do it all.
There are a lot of things to outsource but the first things to look at paying someone else to do would be things that are not strengths of ours. If social media marketing is your jam then keep doing that! Your words will come off really strong if it is something you love. If social media marketing gives you anxiety then hand it off to someone else. Even outsourcing within your own company is a great idea if your employees have strengths that can benefit your business. We just have to pay attention to those around us, see what their strengths are, and use them to the company’s benefit.
Writing in general is a topic that stresses people out. Business owners went into business to sell a product or service they are passionate about, not necessarily to write about it constantly. But with today’s overload of information we truly do have to constantly be getting our message or product in front of consumers. Copywriting is a skill that markets to your audience with newsletters, blog posts, social media posts, and email messages. The professional hired to write the “copy” is known as the copywriter. If your words are subpar then they are not making money for you. Anything we spend our time on as a business owner should be making money for the business.
Bookkeeping is the same way, it entails a lot of mundane tasks of categorizing business expenses, paying people, invoicing, etc. This could be a task that is very draining to a lot of business owners.
I encourage you to write down a list of tasks that are life giving to you and a list of tasks that drain you. Take a good look at the list of tasks that drain you and consider outsourcing some of those. It will be so worth it in the end and the monetary gain in your business will show quickly when you have people doing tasks they are all passionate about…including you!
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