Outsource Your To-Do List

As a business owner, you are used to wearing many different hats, and you’re constantly weighing the pluses and minuses of how you use your time. Should you take that meeting face-to-face, or do a phone call instead? Should you spend more time communicating with your customers better, or will your extra investment of time produce only marginal results? Your time is your most valuable resource, and you’re constantly reminding yourself to focus, focus, focus.

Sound familiar? Here’s some good news: One of the bright spots in the current economic environment is the wealth of talent looking for new professional opportunities, and their willingness to explore creative—and inexpensive—employment arrangements. Right now, you can get a superior level of talent on a part-time, short-term, flexible, and even virtual basis.

As a small business owner, a job at your company provides a job-seeker with an incredible opportunity to get hands-on experience that he or she would not otherwise get at a large firm. In addition, there are many that are willing to work for very little, or even for free—just for the chance to gain skills, network, and fill resumes. In short, it’s a buyer’s job market. In making the decision to outsource, consider the following:

• How much is your time worth, and how much can you afford to pay? (For more information on assessing what is a waste of your time, visit nyreport.com RL #813 and read “How to Position Yourself for Future Growth by Cutting Back Time Wasters.”)
  



• How much time can I devote to hiring, training, and managing a part-time employee or intern?
  



• How many people do I need? Can I group tasks together so one person can handle a couple of tasks? Or, would it be better for me to spread the work around to several people?

The answers to these questions will help you structure the new part-time or intern position. But the key element to making these new positions work is to decide what to delegate. The most important decision is what needs an owner’s touch, and what you can oversee. As small business owners ourselves, we understand that control over any aspect of your business is hard to part with. Having said that, here are some suggestions:

Social Media. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are highly popular methods of developing business and connecting with customers. What few want to admit is that they’re also a total time drain, and once you’ve developed your social media strategy, the execution of it can become somewhat repetitive. Hire someone for a few hours a week to be your eyes, ears, and voice in this social media world, but make sure you are monitoring progress, and carefully instructing your intern or part-timer on the tone he or she uses.

Customer and Market Research. In today’s economy, it’s anyone’s guess as to how your customers are going to choose to spend their next dollar. You’ve got to be ahead of the game, and it’s the perfect time to hire a savvy college grad or graduate student who understands research to conduct surveys and focus groups. Do it before your competitor does, and you’ll come up with the next big thing.

Content Creation. Nowadays, everyone’s an expert and everyone’s blogging about it. Whether your business is selling a product, or providing a service, consumers expect that you’ll also have an online presence, complete with a blog. Whether you analyze trends in your industry or evaluate news that’s relevant to your users, your blog will need constant love and attention, not to mention time. In addition, you may be including podcasts, web seminars, and email newsletters in your marketing strategy.

These are all great ways to stay top-of-mind with clients, and to reach your target market. On the flip side, content creation is time consuming and arduous. The good news is that there are people out there who LOVE doing this stuff! Find one, educate them well about your product, and let them do what they do best, so you can too. One way to find someone who will write passionately about your business is to find one of your “power users.” People love to evangelize about products and services they’ve used—perhaps you can turn a customer into an employee!

Administrative tasks. Needless to say, in order to be an effective business operator, you should not spend your own time booking travel or FedExing packages. Consider hiring someone on a part-time basis, sharing an administrative assistant with a colleague, or combining administrative positions with one of the functions above to make it a more robust position.

Web design and development. It’s a given that your website is the front line of communication with your customers, so it better reflect your business’s personality, and be easy to use.