Outsourcing – You Can't Do It All!
You can’t always do it all! I know, I know . . . sometimes you just have to. I’ve been there, done that, so I know exactly where you are coming from.
There are two problems with trying to do it all:
First, you just don’t have the time. One thing that small business owners can be really bad at is . . . assigning a reasonable value to YOUR time! You may have a really good understanding of the value you put on the hours of everyone around you. But we tend to feel that there is nothing we can’t make time for – there are 24 hours in a day, right?
You need to assign a value to your own time. If you are working on the most important aspect of your business, what would that be? Marketing, Sales, Consulting? Only you can answer that question. But then assign a value to that activity. $75, $100, $250 per hour? Once you have assigned a value to your time, you can assess whether you should be performing a specific task.
For example, if you can pay a company the equivalent of $15 per hour to answer your phones and your time is worth $150 per hour when you are working on mission-critical tasks – that’s a no-brainer, right?
The second problem with trying to do it all – - no matter how intelligent and business savvy you are, you CAN’T be great at everything. You have to admit to yourself that there are many cases where an expert in a certain area can do a better job than you can. They have applied themselves and focused on a specific area of expertise and can devote their time to knowing everything necessary to be really good in that field of study. For example, a CFO or a CPA will do a much better job than you will of managing your business finances (unless of course you run a CPA firm, in which case, switch out “Web Designer” for “managing your website” above
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I learned this lesson when I was working on my first eCommerce business. One thing I am not that great at is Web Design. When I finally decided to bite the bullet and hire a web designer for my site — My Sales Quadrupled!! When I did another Site Redesign 1 year later – guess what – My Sales Quadrupled AGAIN! What did I learn? My skills at web design were holding us back. If I tried to keep “doing it myself”, my lack of skills in this area would have hurt our business.
I LOVE to learn and master new skills. I am passionate about learning. But I realize I can’t learn and master everything – not even with 24 hours a day
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