Costs of outsourcing > costs of doing everything in house.
Scaling up your creative commerce opens up a myriad of new demands and challenges that will often impact the day to day role of an entrepreneur. Forget having time to action your most mundane admin tasks, when there are more pressing priorities to deal with when the volume of work and buyers increase. It’s why outsourcing is something worth taking seriously should you want sustainable growth for your business.
Yet, the misconceptions around outsourcing being only for the cash rich is still rife within creative communities. The reality is that if you want to be more cash rich, then outsourcing will aid in meeting the demands scaling requires. We live in a world where we can access talent at most costs. Take a look at platforms such as Fiver or Freelancer, you’ll see the variety of talent from various disciplines available at all costs. Some you’ll find will be very cheap and don’t require additional costs that would usually be involved with official employment.
However, it would be naive to utilise your whole budget by throwing the kitchen sink towards outsourcing if your business is in its early days. There are pros to steering the ship independently to get it to a place where you feel content to unclutch both hands off the steering wheel. Outsourcing from a place of ignorance will see pretty disappointing results, so make sure you’re not only at a place of increasing sales, but also when you are familiar with your business. You should know what you need and understand the basic principles of the areas of discipline you want to outsource. You won’t get far hiring someone to create a new user interface for your app if you don’t have the user feedback to inform the design.
Identifying what you can delegate is a task in itself, but a good rule of thumb is tackling things that are of low impact but high effort. This is obviously subject to your own business, but if things seem complex, you are in charge of how you structure the work and feedback process. Writing copy for a social media account may be something absolutely instrumental to the success of your business, one wrong error and you’re ‘canceled’, so work to involve strong feedback processes and you will still feel in control. Another recommended tip I’ve heard from peers, is to also choose tasks that can be outsourced for the lowest dollar per hour, should you want to take things slowly.
