Outsourcing, the word so popular in the 1990’s and today everything is “disruption”. Two different things of course but have many crossovers to life and business.

When was the last time you evaluated your business processes in detail with financial modeling and a “time” rate to determine the potentials of outsourcing. Outsourcing on shore or off shore may be a fit especially if you look to moving your business to another level. The same can occur with your personal life and enough already of those words “I don’t have enough time!”

The biggest concern is always the cost component vs. the potential benefits. The non-outsourcing mentality is that you can just do it yourself and save the money. The world of outsourcing has evolved to everything today.

Personally, I have outsourced various aspects of personal and business tasks for the last 10 years (only in certain key areas) and it clearly allows additional focus and available time to pursue other impactful and fun objectives.

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Business Outsourcing:

  1. IT department
  2. Finance department – Legal
  3. Taxes
  4. Sales
  5. Social media
  6. Content management
  7. Database work
  8. Web design
  9. Manufacturing
  10. R&D – engineering

Personal Outsourcing:

  1. Grocery shopping
  2. Grass cutting – gardening
  3. Everyday Errands
  4. Bill paying
  5. Driver
  6. Cooking
  7. File management
  8. Virtual assistant

Next Steps and Action

  1. Ultimately, it comes down to what’s your personal hourly rate and this might take some time to evaluate but just do it now! What’s your lost opportunity cost?
  2. Review the list of what you don’t like to do and would rather have someone else do it so you can focus on other things.
  3. Place and ad on Craig’s List – There are plenty of websites such as Guru, Elance, Fiverr, Peopleperhour, etc.
  4. Be 100% clear with written instructions and tell the individual or company what needs to be done
  5. Set up a simple accountability system – cloud based or just Google Doc (business and personal)

Outsourcing is not just something that goes on auto-pilot, but needs a bit of management no matter what. The biggest challenge in most cases is lack of communication. It might take some time to find the best fit or right person, but the time may be a good investment short and long term to allow more freedom to do what you want to do!