OUTSOURCE ... outsource ... OUTSOURCE - that's how you work smarter

[call your clients]

Having started up my own telemarketing company or Call Centre a few months ago I can't say enough how important outsourcing your work is.

I make phone calls for various businesses and they all say at some point, why didn't I do this sooner. Makes sense that if you are out there doing what you do best, and usually like the most or you probably wouldn't have begun it in the first place, then you are making money and enjoying yourself into the bargain. So if someone can be making your appointments for you so you're not sitting behind a desk dreading making the next call why not outsource it?

An internet guru, SEO, key word optimiser type asked me to do her calling the other day of approx 10 hours per week. Now she charges $85 per hour for her services and is really quite busy so it make absolute sense for her to oursource her calls to us who charge under $50 per hour. She saves herself more than $35 per hour by outsourcing her calls and obviously leaves herself open to working more on her specialty.

We already outsource - accounting (tax and bookeeping), mechanicals, legals, webdesign, logomaking, virtual assistance work etc - so look around and see what else you can outsource and save some money, stress less and free up time to do what you love doing !! )

Agreed ???

[David Jardine]

I completely agree. I have encouraged 2 of my clients now to outsource all outbound calls to a virtual call centre agency, and 1 client has also outsourced all pipeline calls during their order fullfilment process. I mostly handle the social media side of business for them which can save them up to 15 - 20 hours a week or more. It makes sense to the business owner when they calculate what their real hourly rate is and see how much they can save by outsourcing work for less cost to specialist professionals.

Makes me wonder if there's a future job for someone to manage all the ourtsourcing agencies a business uses? hahaha

[call your clients]

Originally Posted by David Jardine

I completely agree. I have encouraged 2 of my clients now to outsource all outbound calls to a virtual call centre agency, and 1 client has also outsourced all pipeline calls during their order fullfilment process. I mostly handle the social media side of business for them which can save them up to 15 - 20 hours a week or more. It makes sense to the business owner when they calculate what their real hourly rate is and see how much they can save by outsourcing work for less cost to specialist professionals.

Makes me wonder if there's a future job for someone to manage all the ourtsourcing agencies a business uses? hahaha

Hey you're onto a great idea there David. I've heard of a company who will look for outsourcing in the construction field but not in this capacity. Might have to put my thinking cap on now. Clever man.

[call your clients]

Originally Posted by galewinters11

Outsourcing is indeed a great way to help your business grow, and to save money at the same time.

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Life Insurance Atlanta

I used to think that outsourcing was a clever way of saving you time really. You know like outsourcing your accounts or BAS to the Accountant or bookkeeper freeing up time for you to do other things but then I realised that it was also an ideal way of saving you money as well. Not only if your time is worth more per hour than the persons time that you've outsourced to but also because they are the specialist professional and ideally can do it in much less time than you ever could. Makes sense hey?

[WhereAreThey]

+1 on the Agree side here,

I owned and ran quite a large internet services business some years ago and did all the work myself in fact at one stage I didn't stop literally for 72 hours not even to sleep, which nearly killed me (just ask my doctor) it was that which made me realize it was time to outsource some of the work load, I did just that and it was the best decision I had made in a long time in fact you could honestly say it saved my life.

I know I know it all sounds a bit dramatic but my doctor told me if I had kept going the way I was there was a very strong possibility I could have keeled over, so outsOURCE outSOURCE OUTSOURCE and live long and prosper lol

[sean]

Outsourcing is very important especially if an owner handles so many transactions/activities for a day. Like what some experienced owners said, their role as owners is to think how they can make changes in their businesses.

[Big Col]

Seems like a consensus. It is a shame the laws make it cumbersome to simply hire someone to do the work in-house. Especially for customer facing activities like you describe. Not diminishing the value you add in training and managing these people of course.

[call your clients]

Originally Posted by Big Col

Seems like a consensus. It is a shame the laws make it cumbersome to simply hire someone to do the work in-house. Especially for customer facing activities like you describe. Not diminishing the value you add in training and managing these people of course.

Cumbersome and frightfully expensive - insurances etc are a killer.

[iaindooley]

My rule of thumb is that anything should be outsourced that's not your core business. I'm not sure if it's peculiar to the task of writing software but there are quite a few companies that are really nothing more than software outsourcing agencies these days and from what I've seen around the traps they usually produce pretty sub-standard work.

Generally, outsourcing works if you have a task that is easily defined. Things like PSD2HTML and cookie cutter wordpress blogs or adding a Drupal module into an existing site - those software tasks can be quite easily outsourced.

But when I hear about people starting a new product or company and planning on outsourcing development I always get a little worried for them.

In my experience the process of creating great software is all about the people involved so the notion that "it's just the idea that matters" and you can shop around for the people with the cheapest price to build it for you, then expect good results seems pretty ludicrous to me.

[peteract]

The best jobs to outsource (if you are in IM) are the simple but tedious ones, jobs a traimed chimpanzee could do. Obvious ones are:

Article submission
Posting on Facebook, Twitter
Uploading videos to lots of video sites

even setting up a Wordpress site for a client