247 Holly Worton ~ What, When, Why, and How to Outsource

Today’s Guest

Table of Contents

I’m back again, with another solo episode! Today I talk all about outsourcing: what to outsource, when to outsource, why to outsource, how to outsource…and when you might actually want to do stuff yourself. I also talk about how to make outsourcing easier.

This was inspired by Louisa’s request in the Facebook group for an episode on: “Outsourcing. I’m sure many small business owners could do with more time and outsourcing pieces of work is the obvious answer to that. But maybe we aren’t all aware of how much stuff we can outsource (I don’t think I am) either to people or to apps etc. Plus I think there’s a whole lot of Mindset stuff around outsourcing about your own judgments, about “get her” paying other people to do stuff for her and around money paying for servicing.”

Listen to this episode

What You’ll Learn

What is outsourcing, and why you might want to start doing it
Why outsourcing is a problem for some people
What fears, blocks, and limiting beliefs people can have around outsourcing
What to outsource, when to outsource, why to outsource, and how to outsource
When you might want to do certain things on your own (and stop outsourcing them)

Things I Discussed

Connect With Holly

How to Subscribe

Click here to subscribe via iTunes
Click here to subscribe via RSS
Click here to subscribe via Stitcher

Help Spread the Word

If you enjoyed this episode, please head on over to iTunes and kindly leave us a rating and a review! You can also subscribe, so you’ll never miss an episode.

Related episodes

Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello and welcome to the Business Mindset Podcast, episode 247. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode.

Today, I am going to talk about outsourcing, the ins and outs of outsourcing and the mindset crap that can get in the way when you start thinking about outsourcing stuff in your business. However, before we get into today’s episode I wanted to mention a podcast that I was recently a guest on, it is called The Write Word Podcast, with Janet Groom, we talk about writing, reading and my books. Janet is a great interviewer and we had a really interesting conversation, so I highly recommend that you check that out and you can easily do that because I have embedded that episode into this podcast feed. So, if you are subscribed to my podcast, you should see this episode a couple of weeks back and you can take a look at that and subscribe to Janet’s podcast as well, if you are interested in reading and writing.

So, as I mentioned we are going to be talking about outsourcing today, actually it is just me because I am alone. I think it was Louisa who asked me to write about this, it was someone in the Facebook group, unfortunately I just copy and pasted into Evernote the different topics people sent me rather than who said what. The request was for an episode on outsourcing and she said that: I’m sure that many business owners could do with more time and outsourcing pieces of work is the obvious answer to that; but maybe we aren’t all aware of how much stuff we can outsourcing, I don’t think I am, either to people or to apps etc. Plus I think there is a whole lot of mindset stuff around outsourcing your own judgments, about: ‘get her, paying other people to do stuff for her’, and around money paying for servicing. These are all really, really, good points and I am going to be talking about that today. I am going to talk about: What is outsourcing? Why is outsourcing a problem? What stuff can come up for you when you think about outsourcing? What fears, blocks, limiting beliefs, do you have around outsourcing and how to take action today in terms of getting started with outsourcing.

But before we get into the main episode, and I am sorry to interrupt myself just again, but I wanted to once again share a really quick message from my friend Jo Casey, who you know from this podcast, she has got a really, really, great, it is more than online program, it is a membership program that can teach the basics around business, and this is really, really, important, because a lot of people go into the online business world, or try to start a business not knowing anything about business and it is really hard when you are setting up a business from scratch and you don’t know what you are doing. So, Jo’s program is fantastic at really teaching you the basics, giving you the templates that you can use and adapt for yourself and I highly recommend that you check it out. So, right now, a quick word from Jo and then we will get into the meat of this episode:

We know that building a coaching, healing or holistic business can be challenging or isolating, so at the Meaningful Business Academy we don’t think that you should have to go it alone, we have pulled together all of the tools, training and support you need to get more clients and make more income, without you having to resort to the dark arts of sleazy manipulation techniques. Instead you will find done-for-you templates, master classes, guest expert interviews and a supportive like-minded community, all for a low monthly price. Check out the Meaningful Business Academy, at http://meaningfulbiz.com – it is time to do business differently.

So, I’m back and thank you Jo. So, what is outsourcing? Outsourcing is basically when you and your business hire someone else, whether it is an individual, freelancer or a company, to provide a service for you, or perform tasks for you, or handle operations for you, that you are not doing yourself, or that you are doing in-house with your own employees, assuming that you have them. However, I think most people listening to this show are probably solopreneurs. So, outsourcing is something that is really, really, important, it is incredibly powerful in terms of giving you more time to run your business and it is something that most people do I would say later than they should. It is something that a lot of people struggle with, coming I to terms with: can someone else do this as good as I can? Can I trust someone? There is all kinds of stuff that can get in the way here.

So, I will start out by sharing my own story, this as you may know by now is not my first business, my first business which I ran for just over ten years was not an online business, it was a brick and mortar business, I was running, owning and operating three Eco hotels in Mexico, we eventually expanded to South America, we opened up a central reservations office in Buenos Aires, it was a big thing. And we had about 150 employees spread across three countries. So, that was a big operation, it was complicated and complex and it was not something that I ever want to do again despite the fact that I had a great time, worked with some amazing people and learned a lot. That’s not the kind of organisation that I want to create right now. So, I have considerable experience with managing people, not to say I was good at it, but I have experience at it. So, when it came time to start this business, obviously I started out on my own, but I knew from the start that there were certain things that I wanted to outsource, things that I didn’t want to do on my own. I probably waited longer than I should have to outsource some things, but like I said other things I outsourced right off the bat because I knew that I did not want to do them. So, let’s take a look, or give you some examples of some things that I have outsourced in my business:

One of the first thing I probably outsourced was getting my taxes done by a professional. I do not enjoy doing things like taxes and there are people who do that for a living and that’s all they do, and they should be doing my taxes so I hired someone to do my taxes. And I have changed accountants a couple of times in the last few years, but it has always been really clear to me that that is something that I am going to outsource always because I do not want to do that. However, related to that is bookkeeping, and for the longest time I did my own bookkeeping and I did it just using a spreadsheet and I kind of…I didn’t enjoy doing it myself but I justified it that by going through my accounts every month and looking at the expenses really gave me a clear idea of what I was spending money on in the business and what perhaps I could discontinue spending money on, whether or not I was spending money on things that I needed to be spending money on, that kind of thing. Because I was going through these expenses every month, it helped me see what was going on. Now to be honest I didn’t need to be doing my own bookkeeping I could have just looked at a printout, or even on my screen, of what I was spending money on. But it wasn’t until this year, it wasn’t until last month that I outsourced to a bookkeeper.

What happened was I had been running a partnership with my husband, because some of our work is related, so we were just running all of the business stuff under one partnership and then this year we decided to form a limited company, so we did and then of course tax stuff is a little bit different and you have to be a bit more organised and so I decided that I was going to get Xero, which is a kind of bookkeeping software, signed up for that imported my PayPal, my bank accounts, started reconciling things and then realised…what am I doing? And then my US accountant emailed me and said: we need your spreadsheets for this year to do your US taxes, because of course as a US citizen I have to file taxes every single year, even though I haven’t lived there since the 90s. So, and since the tax years are different in the US and the UK that always means that I have to get my stuff ready for the US many, many months in advance of when I have to have them ready for the UK. So, that was kind of crunching point where I said: I can’t deal with this anymore, I do not have this time in my schedule to get this bookkeeping up to date, to get Xero up to date, I have this whole pile of receipts, they are all very nicely organised, month-by-month, but I can’t deal with this. So, I contacted the guy who does my taxes and I said: you mentioned one time you had a bookkeeper, he said: yeah, just get in touch, tell me what you need. He referred me to this fabulous women and she took care of everything, it was so beautiful, in a week she made everything beautiful, she got in, cleaned up my Xero, I posted her my whole packet of receipts and she went through everything, found the stuff that wasn’t in Xero, stuff that I paid for with my personal bank account instead of my business account, straightened everything out and it was so beautiful and I am just so grateful that there are people who are willing to do this work. I am never going back. Now that I have got Xero in place everything is going to be easier but it is just invaluable. So, I highly recommend, if you are the kind of person who puts your bookkeeping off until the last minute, and maybe there is a little bit of shame there, because I was kind of afraid to send her my envelope of receipts because I thought: this is horrible, it is a mess, even though it was beautifully stapled together month by month, I thought it was not good enough. But she did not complain and she fixed everything in a week so I would say again, if you are the kind of person who procrastinates on your bookkeeping just hire someone, it is probably not as expensive as you think it is and if you stop and think how many hours it is going to take you to sort out your bookkeeping and multiply that by your hourly rate, I’m guessing that it is still going to be cheaper to hire a bookkeeper because the hours that they are working on your books, are hours that you could be marketing your business, getting clients and serving clients. I highly recommend you get a bookkeeper, it is so fabulous. And I also recommend looking into not only outsourcing to a human being, such as a bookkeeper but outsourcing to a system, like Zero, or QuickBooks, or one of those well-known software systems that can help you get your books all organised beautifully. For the first time in years I actually feel really, really satisfied and at peace and at ease with all of my accounting and bookkeeping stuff. It was something that always would stress me out, I always had a couple of hours blocked each month to get my bookkeeping together I have now deleted that from my calendar and I feel so much better. So, when you outsource this kind of stuff it is like it removes a weight from your shoulders. So, can you tell how happy I am? Do it for yourself. So, that’s a couple of things that I have outsourced.

At the beginning, I think it was my first website in my new business I did on my own, but then when I started my Tribal Publishing business that website I outsourced to a designer that I knew; when I rebranded to Socially Holistic I outsourced to him again. And then, I would handle the management of the website myself, because I have been messing around with websites since 1999. I always had someone do the websites for my previous business but I would always do the management myself. It is something I know how to do and it is something, I have been using WordPress since 2006, so I am kind of used to that. So I would outsource the original design but then do the management of the site myself, until three years ago, when I let go of the socially holistic brand and went back to my own name and my hollyworton.com website, I designed that myself from scratch in one Workcation weekend. You may have heard me talk about Workcations before I will include the link to my Workcation Guide in the Show Notes, I find it easier to just do it myself and I enjoy doing websites, I would not ever want to do them for other people but I enjoy doing my own website. And then last year when I rebranded the website from teal colouring to green I did that myself in a day and a half. So, this is kind of a different example when I went from outsourcing something to doing it myself because it is something that’s easy and enjoyable and fast and I wanted a fast change, I knew I could do it myself and I don’t think most people are going to give you a fully complete website turnaround in three days. That does not often happen. So it was in alignment with what I needed – to do it myself – and I enjoyed it. Again there are some things that you want to outsource, because you don’t want to do them, or you don’t enjoy doing them, and I am sure that some people would say: even if you enjoy designing your own website, you shouldn’t be you should be focussed on your zone of genius. But, honestly, it was fast and easy and I did it in a Workcation, so I’m very satisfied with my decision to do my own website. Also, I think I need to say that I did my own website using Divi which is a really great WordPress theme which makes it easy to design really beautiful websites. So shout out to Divi I will link to that in the Show Notes.

One thing I started doing myself and then have outsourced a couple of times is pitching myself to podcasts. Every once in a while I spend some time putting together a big spreadsheet and I pitch myself to a bunch of podcasts. And in the beginning, despite the fact that I had a bunch of mindset crap and did a bunch of mindset work around it, it was still really challenging for me to pitch myself. So, I ended up reaching out to a PR person and said: I’ve got a spreadsheet of contacts can you please do these pitches for me. She quoted me a price, I took are of it, and I got few interviews out of that, not so many perhaps four or five and that was great. Then a year later I did the same with a different person, again, I got a few interviews out of that, it was fine. Now that I have done that a couple of times, I think this is kind of like the website thing where I would prefer to do that myself. I have really gotten over the fear of pitching myself to other people. As a podcaster I no longer do interviews on the show, as you know, but I still get pitched, because apparently some people can’t read, I state very clearly on my contact page on my website: do not get in touch with me if you want to pitch yourself or someone for the show because I am not doing interviews. But, people can’t read so they pitch me. And I find it so much more interesting and I am much more interested in hearing from the person if the person who wants to be a guest is the person who pitches me. When people are using a PR person I don’t know, something about that is off-putting to me, I think because having someone as a guest on my show is a very…it is like a personal connection, you are connecting with the person and I think some people see it as just an opportunity to get free publicity. And so, it obviously makes sense to hire a PR person but honestly I value the connection with someone so much more than just me getting to promote myself on someone else show. So, I am going to do say that this is another thing, the next time I go to pitch myself to someone’s podcast that’s something I am going to be doing all on my own. If you are the kind of person who is terrified to pitch herself and wants to get started on other peoples podcasts, by all means hire someone to do it for you so that you can get over that initial hurdle and start getting featured. I have a blog post on my website about how to pitch yourself, how to not pitch yourself, to podcasts that might be useful if you are getting started on this, so I am going to link to that in the Show Notes as well. I am just going to close this chapter by saying that the two most memorable podcast pitches that I can think of were from people who wrote to me directly themselves and the pitch felt really genuine and warm and as someone who is really interested in connecting with me rather than just promoting her shit through the podcast. So, again, do what works for you and if you have got a big hurdle outsource it, do what works for you. I am sharing my story so that you can see different examples of things that I have outsourced and things that I have done myself.

Podcast editing, you know I have said this before, or maybe I haven’t said it on the show, but I have said it a lot online from day one, when I decided that I knew I was going to start a podcast I started looking into audio editing and I realised that I had absolutely no desire to edit my own podcast and I know a lot of people do and that’s fantastic. I did not want to learn this, I did not want to do this, and I am 100% convinced that the reason I have been able to do this podcast every single week without fail for 247 weeks is because I hired someone to do the editing for me. I could not have done this for 247 weeks if I had been doing the editing on my own, I don’t know how to do it, I don’t want to learn how to do it, I don’t care. I outsourced this from day one. Now maybe you love audio editing maybe you love the idea of learning something new, power to you, give it a try, if not outsource. And if you find, I think this is a good example, because if you are the kind of podcaster who finds that you don’t have time to do your podcast or you find it hard to be consistent and you are doing your audio editing and you really want to podcast but you just can’t stay consistent, outsource the editing to someone else please.

Next is graphic design stuff, I am not a graphic designer, I do a lot of stuff on Canva.com which you have probably heard of, it makes graphic design easier if you have a good eye for design. If you don’t have a good eye for design it is still going to look like crap, I am sorry. Graphic designers exist for a reason and it is not just because they have the technical knowledge of how to use photoshop and all that fancy software, it is because they usually have a really good eye for design and they know how to design things that look pretty and attractive and appealing to your ideal client and harmonic in a design sense. Again I am not a designer, so I am not sure how to express what I am tying to say, but they know how to make things pretty. Whereas the average non-designer sometimes can and often can’t. I see a lot of graphics online that people have done on their own, very obviously, and it doesn’t look super professional. However, you have to start somewhere, so if you can’t afford to hire a graphic designer do it on Canva. Graphic design is… you can pay $5 on Fivver and get someone to do it really cheap, or you can hire a proper design person to help you with your branding and create a whole look and feel for your website and for all your branding stuff for your business. Obviously that’s going to be more expensive. When you outsource to your graphic designer the most important thing is: know what you want, know what you like and communicate it clearly. Because no matter how good a graphic designer is they can’t read your mind, so it is really, really, helpful if you are getting a website done, if you are getting business cards done, or if you are getting a book cover done, because you are writing a book, come up with at least four or five examples of stuff that you have found on the Internet, of stuff that you like. So, when I first had my first business books, I put together a Pinterest page and a Pinterest board, of a bunch of probably more than five, about 15-20 book covers that I really liked. And in addition to that I said to her: here’s what I like about these things, I like the colour in this, I like the font in that, this is the kind of look and feel that I am going for. This is my ideal reader. And from that my designer created a really great first draft, we tweaked one tiny detail and then it was perfect. We went through a similar thing for my walking books. Now, I have found that walking books often have really terrible covers so it was hard for me to come up with good examples, so I pulled all sorts of examples of non-walking books and tried to explain about what I liked about each example. Make very clear, very specific examples, if you are going to outsource stuff to a graphic designer, because again they can’t read your mind and by giving them feedback on whatever their first draft is, be really specific about what you like and what you don’t like and why. I am saying this because in the past I have worked with clients who have not been very specific about what they don’t like about a particular design, whether it is a website design, and it is excruciating to see the miscommunication between the client and the designer when the client doesn’t know how to say what they want and the designer can’t read their mind, so yes. Just be clear and be specific and provide clear examples of what you like and what you want, that can be really, really helpful. And, the more specific you are in describing what you want the easier the process will be, because the designer is probably going to get it right off the first bat and then you won’t have to go back and forth a thousand times to tweak little details. So, if you are going to outsource all kinds of stuff that I have outsourced, obviously book cover design, I do not think this is something you should do on your own, you should outsource that very specifically to a graphic designer who specialises in book covers. I cannot stress that enough. Book covers are a kind of special language of design and I have seen graphic designers who don’t specialise in book covers do very pretty book covers that are very attractive but don’t look like book covers. This is something that I feel very passionate about and important, so you need to go with someone who specialises in the kind of design you need whether it is web design or book cover design, business cards, whatever.

So, Fivver I mentioned earlier, I am sure you know what that is, I mentioned in the show earlier, but it is cheap stuff. Most people have a number of listings that are minimum $5 but I have paid something like $250 for a video, like an explainer video. So, there are a range of prices on there, so you can get a lot of stuff done very affordable. However, when you are working with a designer on Fivver, even more so than when you are working with a normally priced designer, you need to be super, ultra specific on what you want and provide examples. So, I have just pulled up my Fivver account and I can see that in the last few years I have completed 75 orders on Fivver and I have used Fivver for stuff like removing the background…some of you may have noticed that some of the intro and outro stuff I use on my videos, I had that done on Fivver and I will link to that guy because he has done several of those before but he is really good. When I release a new book I have someone put the book cover on Fivverr, I have had transcription work done on Fivver and it’s been terrible so I don’t recommend that, I will talk to you about transcriptions in just a minute. I have had some illustrations done, I have had colour changes done on photographs, I had someone change the colour of my logo, I had a logo done, my hollyworton.com Business Mindset Alchemists logo, that was done on Fivver. A lot of the same stuff, removing backgrounds, getting my covers done on iPad, buttons for my website, now I have Divvy so I don’t really need that, but I have had those done. Yeah, all kinds of simple graphic design stuff. You may have remembered that I used to have another woman introducing the podcast, she was from Fivver, actually there were two, both of them were from Fivver. You can get all kinds of things done on Fivver and very inexpensively. Again, be super specific about what you want and need and you have a better chance of success.

So, onto transcriptions, you may have noticed that pretty much every podcast episode from the last year has a transcription and that is thanks to Naomi and will link to her in the ShowNotes, she does impeccable transcriptions at a very affordable price and I highly recommend her, I always mention online when I see someone needing a transcription because she is so good. I have had really bad experiences with transcriptions in the past, I had someone on Fivver do one and it wasn’t a five dollar one, I forget how much it was but I spent so much time fixing the transcription that it was just, it was terrible. So, better to start from scratch with the right kind of person and I will link to her in the ShowNotes.

So, that’s kind of my story of outsourcing. There are 1000 other things that you can outsource. You can get someone to help you with email management; go through your inbox and cleaning that stuff out and if you are the kind of person who has 92538 emails in your inbox I really recommend that you hire someone to help you get through that, because decluttering is really useful in your business and you might find new and useful and exciting things happen once you declutter that horrendous inbox. I get really anxious when I have more than 25 emails in my inbox, so I am good at keeping that down, but I know that a lot of people have thousands of emails in their inbox and they need to be archived or put in folders or however you organise stuff, or would like to organise stuff. So, that’s something that if you have got a disaster I really recommend outsourcing that to get you in a good spot.

You can also outsource your newsletter, so you can write the content and then have a VA make it pretty and set it all up to go out. You can have someone doing your booking appointments and calendar management for you, that can actually be a human being, like a VA, or you can use a system like Acuity, which is what I use and I find that so incredibly easy for allowing people to book into my system, it links to my Google calendar, which is where I organise my entire life and it is just absolutely fabulous, I could not live without acuity and I highly recommend it, it is really, really, easy to use. I find it really annoying when I am trying to book in with someone else and they don’t have a calendar and we are going back and forth by email, and we are different time zones and it is aghh so I highly recommend getting a calendar, it just makes it so much easier for people to book in with you especially, even if you are not doing one-to-one client sessions, but if you are you absolutely need a calendar. But for stuff like podcast interviews, discovery calls, all that stuff is so much easier when you have a calendar. So, Acuity.

Following up with people: I use, I think it is a Chrome plugin called Boomerang, and I think I pay $50 a year for it, I will link to it in the ShowNotes; my god it is amazing, it is so fabulous. It is so good, and I have been using it probably for a couple of years now Boomerang does a few things, so when you respond to an email to someone but it is something that you need to get a response on and you don’t want to forget about it, so you kind of tick a little box in Boomerang and ask it to pop that email back in your inbox If you don’t get a reply in X amount of days, fabulous! I use it three main ways, so that’s one way, the other way is if I am writing emails but I don’t want to send then right away you can Boomerang it to leave your Outbox and be sent at a later date, for example, I don’t know if you are responding to emails at odd hours, but you don’t want people to think you are working late for whatever reason, you can Boomerang them to go out on Monday morning. Third way I use it is when I am working on my inbox and say I have only got an hour to get through a bunch of emails today and I know I can’t get through them all, I will select the ones that are least important, or not timely, and I will boomerang them to go out of my inbox and come back at a later date whether that’s tomorrow next week, or whatever. That makes it so much easier to focus on the emails that are actually really important. So, that’s following up with people and managing your inbox.

Also, you could hire a VA to help you with database building, research, if you are researching a book, researching stuff in your field, I hate research. So, if you hate research too, that might be something that you want to outsource. Personal errands like online shopping, whether it’s for you, or for your family, whatever. I know, that when I had my first business, we had a kind of shared assistant amongst all the managers, I was so busy and I was always crazy hours and our fantastic receptionist/assistant guy would like do basic shopping for me and made my life so much easier. I am eternally grateful for all the help. So, sometimes you need someone to do practical stuff. What else?

Booking holidays. So, some people really love doing research for a holiday and planning it and some people don’t and there are people who specialise in that; so you could give that person the parameters of how much you want to spend, where you want to go, and they can do it all for you. That’s something that a lot of people don’t enjoy doing and so it is easier to have an expert do it for you, they can be really affordable and give you more time to work on your business.

PowerPoints, I love making PowerPoints, LOVE them, not that I do them that much these days because I haven’t been doing webinars, but I love PowerPoints, but if you hate PowerPoints you can have someone do it for you. Plenty of VAs who do PowerPoints, just give them your bullet points and your stuff and they can put them into slides and make them pretty.

Social Media Management, I really think this is something that you need to do on your own rather than hiring someone because you are not a big corporation and you want your social media to be personal, but I use a social media manager called Edgar and that makes it easier to share stuff on a regular basis. I have shared before that I am really not 100% sure how much longer I am going to continue to use it because I feel like I am just blasting out all this stuff and it’s not very social and I haven’t made the time to actually be social in between the times when that stuff is getting published so I am not feeling 100% great about that, but I have been using Edgar for a couple of years now and it’s good, so I will link to that in the Show Notes.

You can also hire a VA to post to your blog and format it and handle the comments and all that stuff; so you would just write the blog posts and they would take care of writing the blog post and making it pretty. The same thing for videos; they could edit it and pop on your intro and outdo and upload it to YouTube, upload it to Facebook; that’s really nice, takes that off your hands. You could hire someone to help you with launches which are a pain in the arse {laughing}, sales funnels, creating sales funnels. You could hire someone to help you organise your event if you run workshops or events. You could hire someone to help you set up affiliate programs. You could hire someone to help you with customer service for your products or services, there are so many things you can outsource. One of my favourites is getting a housekeeper, I love my cleaner, she is fabulous, she comes every Friday and cleans our house, she was just here this afternoon and it was amazing the house is all sparkly now. So, again, this is kind of like the other stuff, if you think about how many hours, or how much time you spend cleaning your house each week and multiply that by your hourly rate I can guarantee you that any housekeeper is going to charge less than that. They are often much more affordable than you think and it is so worth it to have a clean and sparkly house every week, especially if you work from home and you are there all the time. My husband and I both work from home, we are both at home all the time so it is nice to have someone come in and clean the house for us, it is fabulous, I highly recommend a housekeeper.

So, some of the stuff that you can outsource isn’t necessarily business tasks but life tasks that are outside your zone of genius, that will help you do your business much easier. So, that’s something to think about, what are the things in your life that you dread doing, that you procrastinate doing, that you hate doing. Make a list of that stuff and see, is this stuff that you could outsource to someone else, why are you procrastinating on it? Is it because it is outside your zone of genius, it is not your speciality and you shouldn’t be doing it, someone else should be doing it? Or, is it stuff that really you should be doing but you are afraid to? You are afraid to do videos because you think you look horrible, or you are afraid to do Facebook lives because what if people make weird comments? Or you are afraid to write a blog post because you think you are a crappy writer. That kind of stuff is mindset stuff that needs to be worked on. There are so many things, as I said, like cleaning your house, like making PowerPoints. You have obviously got to create the content because you are teaching your stuff, but putting the actual slides together is something that someone else can do for you I think one thing that’s really important to point out here is that people enjoy doing this stuff. Just because you hate bookkeeping, doesn’t mean that the entire world hates bookkeeping, there are people out there that like that.I hope they like it, or otherwise why are they doing it, at the very least they are good at it So, it is really, really, important to focus on what you do best and how you best serve your clients so you can outsource the other stuff to people who can probably do it better than you, because they do it everyday and that’s all they do and they specialise in it.

So, what are the problems that come from outsourcing? There’s a lot of mindset stuff that can go on around this. A lot of people think… people are control freaks and they think that they absolutely have to do everything themselves otherwise it will all fall apart and nothing will work properly, that’s not true. Some people are afraid that if they outsource things to someone else they are not not going to do it as well, they are going to drop the ball. Yeah, you have to know how to manage people, but no one was born knowing how to manage people and every manager in the world has had to learn how to manage people. So, that’s something that you can learn, you can either read a book about it, you can follow one of my favourite blogs which is the Ask A Manager blog with Alison Greene who was a guest on this podcast, all the way back, episode 37. I have learned so much about managing people from that blog and I only wish that I had known about it when I had my first business because it would have helped me so much. So, Ask a Manager, I will link to that in the Show Notes.

Outsourcing is such a big deal for people that I have included that as one of the ate glories of beliefs, or categories of blocks in my two books: Business Beliefs, and Business Blocks, categories known as leadership and outsourcing. So, if you want to look at some beliefs that you may or may not have, or beliefs that you may need, check out those books to see what limiting or enhancing beliefs you may have, or blocks. A lot of people just believe that they don’t know know how to manage people, they don’t know how to outsource stuff, they can’t trust people, they don’t deserve to have a team to help them, that they have to do it all themselves because they have a lot of hard work beliefs that they have to work hard to make things happen in their business. A lot of people have issues around being a leader and that goes beyond just managing people, but being a leader in their field, so that is related. A lot of people feel that they don’t deserve to outsource the personal stuff like housekeeping. A lot of people may think that it’s their house, it’s their dirt, it’s their job as a woman to clean it; that is absolute bullshit, there are fabulous professionals who can clean your house for you at a very reasonable price, please if you have any limiting beliefs around the fact that you need to clean your own house get rid of those, it can free up a lot of time for you in your business. Again, as a practical thing, I have said this a number of times so far and I am going to say it again, when you stop and think about how many hours a week you are going to pay this person, and you multiply those hours by your hourly rate, compare that to what the other person charges, it is probably going to be a lot less to outsource than it is to do it yourself. Now, one of the practical things that people struggle with is that when you are first starting a business you might not have the cash flow to outsource a bunch of stuff, and that’s fine, that’s normal; so, you are probably going to have to start doing everything on your own and then start outsourcing little by little. That’s probably the natural flow of things and when you outsource things little by little you learn how to manage people, and you learn how to ask for things and you learn how to follow up, you learn how to be a good manager. So, you don’t have to start with a big team, you don’t have to start by outsourcing everything and it can be very helpful for you to start outsourcing certain things on your own, so that you can then train someone else how to do them. One of the easiest things that I have done to train people is I create a screen capture video using Camtasia, which is screen capture software, I literally do the thing that I need them to do, and I walk them through it and explain and I walk them through it and I do it, and I give them a link to the video so that they can watch it and have it as a reference. A lot of people will recommend taking that one step further and having the VA or person that you outsourced to, take that video and write a manual, a step-by-step manual of what to do so that you have that as an operations manual for your business. I don’t do that but lots of people will recommend it so you might want to do that.

I am aware that this episode is getting long but I think this is really important to talk about because I think that it is a big issue for a lot of business owners. So, I would like to invite you to take action today. What are you going to do? Spend some time making a list, so sit down and write a list of all the stuff that you hate doing in your business, that you procrastinate on doing, that you avoid doing, that you just can’t bear the thought of doing. The stuff that you time block in your calendar and then you find yourself pushing it further and further and further, like what I used to do with my bookkeeping sometimes. Make a list, and then add to that list over the next week, as you see yourself hesitating to do stuff or wanting to procrastinate, add those things to your list and then take a list and see shall I do that myself or could I hire someone else to do it? Forget about whether or not you have the only to hire someone, just see could I hire someone to do that or could I do it myself? Because again, stuff like recording the video of you speaking about your thing, you’ve got to do that. That’s got to be you, you can’t hire a model to do your videos for you. I mean you could, but that would be not very effective, but then the editing of the video you could outsource. So, really get clear on the details: do I really have to do this myself or could I outsource it? Then, take a look at the stuff that you absolutely have to do yourself, like this is using the video as an example: you have to the videos yourself because it is you, it’s your business, you are the expert, you need to be talking but you procrastinate all the time. So, what’s stopping you from making those videos? Why are you procrastinating? What are you afraid of? What’s the worst that can happen if you just did it? What limiting beliefs do you have around your ability to do that? What blocks do you have that are keeping you stuck and preventing you from making videos? Ask yourself questions about each of those things that you have to do yourself and then do the mindset work. What do you need to believe about yourself in order to easily do those things, instead of procrastinating on your videos, what would you rather have instead? Would you love to enjoy doing videos? Would you love to look forward to doing videos? What do you want instead? Really get clear on that stuff.

And then, with the stuff that you don’t need to do yourself that you can outsource, take a look at those things and look at how much it would actually cost you to outsource that stuff? And maybe do some research online, make some notes on your list of how much it would cost and then pick one ting and outsource it. Maybe something small, something you perceive as easy to outsource, but pick one thing and outsource it, even if it is like I don’t know a graphic thingy on Fivver, to get you into the habit of working with other professionals to do stuff and getting help with your stuff, outsource one thing. Commit to doing that one thing and again, it doesn’t have to be expensive it could be a five dollar thing on Fivver, I will link to some of my favourite people in the Notes and you can pay them five dollars to do a thing. Get yourself into the habit of getting stuff outsourced because little by little as your business grows you need to be outsourcing more and more things because your business isn’t going to be able to grow, isn’t going to be able to scale if you are not outsourcing more things.

So, in summary, I am aware that this podcast is a longer one and I didn’t expect that, I think this is the longest solo episode that I have done, so I am kind of impressed with my ability to speak to you for this long, on a topic that I didn’t think that I would have this much to say on. So, outsourcing, get clear on what fears, blocks, limiting beliefs you have, make that list of stuff that you are avoiding and then go though all those questions, I will put those in the ShowNotes so that you know what you need to be doing step-by-step and please take action today, do that list and get clear on that stuff. Outsource on thing this week and please let me know if you have any questions. I also have a really good blog post, it was like the super-tech-recommendation post that I wrote last year, and it has got a lot of tech stuff that I outsource so I will link to that in the show notes as well, because that links to a lot of the tech stuff that I use, because you can also again, outsourcing is not just outsourcing to another human being, like a VA, but it is using systems and tools in your business that frees up time for you so that you can spend more time doing the things that you absolutely need to do in your business, which is serving your clients and doing the things that you are here to do.

So, that is it for now, please drop me a line and let me know what you thought of this week’s episode, you can email me at: [email protected] or you can find me online on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram and get in touch, I would love to give you a shoutout on the show.I would also love for you to join me in my Facebook group: Business Mindset Alchemists, so we can continue the conversation there. I have just spent the last 52 minutes talking at you and I would love to hear what you thought of all that: do you have any questions? Do you have any thoughts? Do you agree with me, do you disagree? I would love to see you in the Facebook group, if you head over to https://www.hollyworton.com/group you will be redirected to the Facebook group.

And, finally if you have listening to this show for a while, or whether you have just heard your first episode, if you are drawn to learning more about how you can work with me, please get in touch or head over to http://HollyWorton.com/call and you can book in a call with me to learn more. I would love to work with you, I would love to talk about mindset with you and help you transform your mindset.

Thank you listening, if you enjoyed this episode please leave a quick review on iTunes it would mean the world to me, and remember to visit hollyworton.com/247 for the show notes on this episode, there is a ton of stuff going to be linked in there, so if you missed anything when you are listening it will be in the show notes.

Next week

And I look forward to seeing you next week for next week’s episode which is a co-hosted episode with the fabulous Joanna Hennon. I liked her so much that I decided to keep her on as my quarter two guest because we have such great conversations together, so Joanna is back and you will hear from her next week.

Thank you so much for listening and have a great week.

247: Holly Worton ~ What, When, Why, and How to Outsource