You may be a regular around here in our Organise.Curate.Design. community or you may be new to our business, either way, you’ll likely have heard us talking about outsourcing at some point in time.
So what is outsourcing and how can it benefit you and your time management? Essentially outsourcing is the practice of allocating a task, in most cases to someone outside of your business, a third party.
This is different to delegating, which is the word often used when we share or transfer the responsibility of a task to another person, most likely a team member, or sometimes even our own children in the context of a household.
Sometimes we mix up these words and interchange using delegating and outsourcing in our communication, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter which term you use, the key is understanding the benefits of outsourcing and how it can free up your time to work on the tasks that are most important to you.
In our case, we have the best of both worlds. We are a company that people outsource their tasks to. Be it in their life or business our clients are supported by us as we tackle their never-ending to-do list. But even we can’t do it all when it comes to our own business tasks.
We often outsource our internal business tasks to third parties who have skills in graphic design, website development, printing, video editing, photoshop and even financial items like accounting and bookkeeping.
We pride ourselves on being very good at the tasks we action for our clients, but we know that we can’t be everything to everyone and would likely spread our time too thin if we attempted to upskill in every area that our business needs.
So how you can add outsourcing to your business? The first step is identifying the tasks that you do not have skills in, or wish to learn. Though there is a benefit in upskilling and learning how to manage a task yourself, this may take time, and if you don’t have that time spare it may be best to get an expert in to tick things off quickly for you.
Of course, outsourcing often comes at a financial cost which can be tricky in business, the thing to remember is that you can be more productive and have financial success if you focus on the things you do well and outsource the tasks you do not have skills in. A task that may take you four hours to complete could be done in one hour by an expert.
What could you do with those extra hours to benefit your business?
What will be the first thing you outsource to free up your time?
