A classic sentiment uttered by many mentors. If we break it down it simply means that you are more valuable to your customers when you spend your time putting your expertise, skills, knowledge and insight towards the work they’re paying for.
For example, a florist has trained to become a skilled arranger, and a shopper is looking for that beautiful unique bouquet. Does the florist want to spend their time doing the bookkeeping?
If you offer a service and charge in the area of, let’s say £40 an hour, how many hours would it take, and therefore cost you to do your invoicing?
Ask yourself: Am I better off using those hours to earn money on customer work? Is this task one of my high pay-off activities?
It may be the case that you started a business so you could learn all aspects of it. I certainly wanted to know what every department was responsible for and to feel confident that I knew what the reports meant when they were presented. However, there might be a trigger point at which you decide it’s time to ‘do what you do best and outsource or delegate the rest’.
Experts do it more efficiently and economically
When you’re looking to free up more time for customer work or to spend on the execution of your high pay-off activities, outsourcing the jobs you don’t want to do is a great place to start. So, what can we look to outsource?
You can use this chart to help you determine whether your activities are worth holding onto in-house, or whether you would be better off outsourcing them.
If you have the capability and it is more cost effective to retain the task in-house, and at the same time there are advantages to keeping it in-house, then it’s obvious what to do.
However, with a low capability and little to no advantage to keeping the same task, then your decision ought to be to outsource it, so you can get on with your high pay-off activities.
Some things you could consider outsourcing:
- Accounting
- Bookkeeping
- Reporting
- Analytics
- Appointment and diary management
- Research
- Data entry
- Social media
- Cleaning.
And I’m sure you can think of a few more in your own business!
Keep the monkey off your shoulder
By this, I mean that many business owners keep all their problems on their own shoulders and don’t delegate effectively.
Think: Rather than outsource to an external company, can you delegate within your team and make more effective use of someone else’s skills?
We could talk for hours on the subject of outsourcing and delegation as a method of using your own time more effectively and concentrating on high pay-off activities for personal and business development, but I shan’t say anymore in this article. Instead, I invite you to consider joining the Online Business Development Programme, a series of 12 video-led modules that you can work through at your own pace, designed to help entrepreneurs like you to improve your business.
If you’d like to discuss whether this is your best option, or whether you’d prefer 1-2-1 mentoring, please contact me to arrange an hour of free business mentoring. I hope this has been of use to you, do follow me on social media for more helpful and insightful tips and information to help you effectively start, develop and grow your business. Just scroll down a little further to find the links.