One of the best things we did to accelerate our business was to outsource some of the work. This was a decision that we resisted for a long time but in hindsight it was something we should have done much earlier. What held us back was the fear that we would not have enough work for a full-time person. This has not been a problem.
Although on reflection, when we made the initial decision to outsource, we had decided to hire one person and share our team member with a friend. However, in the end we recruited two people and gave the first person we hired to our friend and picked up the other one. So instead of having 1/2 a person we ended up with one.
What led us to make this decision?
It turns out we were the biggest bottleneck in our business. It was easy to see why? When we looked at our business we realized that we were trying to be the marketer, website builder, researcher, copywriter, help desk, link builder. In short, we were trying to do everything and spread ourselves too thinly. We became generalists of everything and master of nothing (ok I confess I am a bit of WordPress master).
How we went about the process
The first step is to map out your business and identify where the roadblocks are. Once you work that out, you can work out your resourcing requirements and skills required. Then you hire and create systems.
Hiring our team meant that we had to train them in SEO and SEO writing as they were not very skilled in this area. This has meant we have had to document everything and do videos which initially was time consuming. My tip is that you should video the things you do as you do them to save time when you scale up as you will have a repository of training ready. You could also consider putting them through the Challenge Videos so they get the process. But we have developed process flow charts for this as well.
We then recruited our first team member from onlinejobs.ph. In fact, we paid online jobs a subscription fee so we could gain access to the job seekers. We got a better response from this service than from another free service. Once we narrowed the candidates down, we them on a trial and paid them for their efforts. We ended up hiring the first person we put on trial. We hired our second team member on referral from the first person we recruited and gave to our friend.
Once we hired, we had new challenges
Our biggest challenge was setting up systems and and developing training sessions and documenting our procedures and guidelines. We broke the system down into two major components: Platforms and Processes.
The platforms we use to help systematize our business include:
- BasecampHQ for project management
- Dropbox for remote document sharing
- Google docs (spreadsheet) for tracking backlinks and logins
- Google sites to hold training information
- Gmail (we have a google site with cname and have allocated email addresses to our team)
- Skype and GotoMeeting for daily calls
The processes and procedures we have put in place include:
- Having daily meetings with your team until you can hire a supervisor – 5-10 minutes should suffice unless there any pressing issues
- Set up a workflow in BasecampHQ to help manage your projects
- Ask your team to documents what activities they did in the day as well as outline any issues or questions they have
Some other tips include:
- Treat your team well and with respect. For example, we give our team members a day off on their birthdays and a weeks extra pay
- Consider questioning yourself and take responsibility if they make mistakes – sometimes it is because you were not clear in your instructions or failed to trained them well.
- Map out the general process into simple steps e.g. Step 1: Research and write articles, Step 2: Post on Ezine, Step 3: Put on Article and Blog Networks etc.
- Include little tips in the process e.g. keyword added to title and article content
- Don’t worry about it being perfect. You can refine as you go. I can guarantee that the process you set up won’t be perfect to begin with but you can adjust as you go. Just make sure you communicate it.
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