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Building a Hierarchy of Outsourcing Needs

Lesson 8 from: Outsourcing Workload to Grow Your Business

Stacey Trock

Building a Hierarchy of Outsourcing Needs

Lesson 8 from: Outsourcing Workload to Grow Your Business

Stacey Trock

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Lesson Info

8. Building a Hierarchy of Outsourcing Needs

Lesson Info

Building a Hierarchy of Outsourcing Needs

We're gonna start talking about building a hierarchy of outsourcing needs. So all those things I just mentioned that are kind of like at the bottom of your do to list, we're gonna start talking about how to streamline and hire out those items. Okay, so I want to talk about, I'm using the bags because we all know what purses are and it's sort of like a really tangible description. Taking those numbers we sort of worked with, I want to talk about two completely different ways to run your business given your personality. So, person number one, absolutely loves sewing the bag and coming up with these great, funky ideas for making these super expensive bags, okay. Person number one can make a living sewing custom, high end bags, only doing one bag a week, one bag every two weeks, who knows. These bags cost a lot. And hiring out absolutely everything else. They have a marketer, they have a whatever. Their jam is sewing these bags, right? So, when you're thinking about your best selling produ...

ct, can you make it work to sell one item that's super expensive? And you would earn a ton per hour, and you'd therefore have to sell less. It's a completely different business from person number two. Person number two just, she likes sewing the bag, but the stress of working with a person who wants this really specific thing, and the cost of stocking really high end materials just isn't working. But she makes this beautiful bag that tons of people want, and they're going to pay 110 dollars for this bag, and she's happy to make these all day long, and because it's so streamline, she can hire help for the actual sewing. So she makes loads of these bags, they get featured in magazines, whatever. She's sewing oodles of bags and she's making the same amount of money. And she's able to outsource really streamlined components of the production. So these are two completely different businesses that have the ability to bring in the same kind of money, but they're just run totally different. Okay, this person, she doesn't mind doing the marketing, she's doing a lot of the aspects of running her business, but she has people helping her with production. Compared to this person who loves sewing the bag, and don't talk to me about the marketing, just let me do my bag sewing. And these decisions are going to guide your entire business forward. One person's going to be hiring production staff, one person's going to be hiring businessy, kind of marketing people. So these are things you want to think about. What is the heart of your business? So this is a super great example from Alyce from Blossom Heart Quilts, she makes quilting patterns, so these are digital download, instructions for how to make a quilt. So she's not producing the quilt, I mean she makes one, but she's not producing quilts for sale. And it's important to know we're talking about digital products too. I know I'm mentioning bags, which are a physical product, but we're talking about digital products too. She's hiring out something she can't stand doing. So she sells quilting patterns, and she says, I've paid a freelance technical editor to edit my patterns. It's helped me to relax and feel more free to create the patterns I want, where the instructions are more complicated because I know she's gonna go through and make it all make sense. Right, so she's hiring something out that is causing her some stress, and now she's more free to make the quilts that she wants to make, cause she's saving this time. Outsourcing isn't always about a major manufacturing deal. That could have been the tagline to this class. The freelance editor, she's probably paying, I'm just guessing, maybe it's an hour per pattern, a half hour per pattern, she's not having a full time staff member, she's having one person do this task that's like really nagging at her. Another, we saw Gale earlier. So Gale Zucker does photography, she travels all around the place, she does really great sheep photos, so she's a knitwear photographer, and sheep. And she has to hire people for things she can't do herself. So a yarn company will hire her to take photos, or a designer, of these garments. She can't sit in the chair, the photography world doesn't like selfies, she can't sit in the chair herself. She has to hire someone. Cause that's part of the job. She hires tons of people and I had to put this in there, cause when else do you get to talk about animal wranglers. I hire models and photo assistants regularly. I also hire stylists or styling assistants, and sometimes hair and makeup artists, and occasionally animal or baby wranglers. Same category. So there are going to be times you have to hire people to do things that you just physically can't do for your business. But her photo business would be a disaster if she didn't have a model or a baby wrangler around. So what I want you to start thinking about now is picking the low hanging fruit, like what are the things you want to hire out that are just no brainers. So things that you don't like, you're not good at, things you're spending so much time from your time sheet on, things you're just dumping all this time into it. Pull out that amount you earn per hour, right. If someone can do it for cheaper than you can, bam, get rid of it. And I want you, my goal for you for today, pick a no brainer thing that you really could concretely hire out this week. And then we're gonna talk about more long term, what are the changes we need to make to our business. This is the hard one, and it's the point that you brought up earlier about hiring this expertise. It's never as easy as saying "Oh that person only costs X and X and X and hour". I'll throw it out there because hiring expertise is a real investment. So when we're thinking about that, we want to talk about where are business is plateauing, what kind of person has the expertise to bust through that plateau, what do you need to do before you feel comfortable spending that kind of money, do you need to get to a certain point? And fill out an action plan, it may be "I need to sell more whatevers to set aside the money to hire that big level expertise person". Because this is an investment in your business.

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