Making Outsourcing Work: The Plan
If I were to be honest about my experience with outsourcing, some form of the word “dabble” might be able to be used with some form of accuracy.
Last Fall, I hired GetFriday, a virtual assistant company for about $9/hr. My experience was less than satisfactory, especially considering the level of my requests. Later, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the fundamental breakdown in my experience.
In retrospect, I believe it was because of two things:
- At the time I used GetFriday, I believe they were experiencing significant growing pains. I believe that my VA was relatively new and untrained. The VAs willingness to serve, follow up, and keep communication was impeccable. However, the ability to fulfill on my requests fell short. For those interested, I provided my assistant with a set of specific queries to use on Google which would provide results of only PDF files. I asked that the top 20 resulting PDF files be downloaded, zipped, and sent to me. When I got the files, they were not PDFs, were not at all the search results that would have come up for those queries, and I received less than 20 files per request. It was obvious that my request – despite being very specific and precise – was simply beyond the capacity of my VA.
- My requests were highly specific, but I realized that I would significantly benefit by finding VAs with specialized skill sets that matched the demands of the task. I had a range of tasks that I wanted completed, and the experience brought forth the idea that specialization, rather than working with a generalized assistant, might be the best way to go. This realization came after speaking with someone here in Boston who has had great success with teams of developers, designers, writers, etc.
Over the past few days, I have jumped back in to the idea of outsourcing from a new perspective. If you have any thoughts or experience with the plan I’m about to lay out, I’d love to hear them.
Step 01, Discover What’s Possible
As I was browsing eLance, I began to see that not only were people accessible who had very specialized skills to match my tasks, but it also began to give me ideas for other projects to outsource.
An example of this is copywriting. I’d always known that I could generally find inexpensive copy for $15 a page (300ish words). But, here I was, finding copywriters for less than $5 an hour. Editors? Same price.
One of the projects I’ll be outsourcing is full website development, content writing, design, etc. I have specialized skills that I’ll be inserting into the project, but no one wants to read ecommerce copy that I write. (People love reading my blog posts, though.) The fact that I could get content written and edited for such a low price catalyzed a whole slew of ideas for where to go with it.
It also opened up the idea that….maybe I could get a designer, too? What about someone to update and manage/ghostwrite a Wordpress blog? Write an ebook? Check out the content section in eLance…you might be surprised.
Step 02, Find Available Resources
It’s become a part of my developed nature to research the crap out of things. I blame it on Science Fair.
So, when I saw such a great opportunity with eLance, I looked around for other resources. For this, I went to…Twitter?…for the first time.
I actually used Summize, and queried “elance,” reading peoples’ experiences, etc. Here, I also saw another resource mentioned on occasion: oDesk.
oDesk is a very similar platform for matching providers to jobs/tasks, but with some differences in how transactions are structured, etc. I won’t go into it, but in some ways, it seems like a more “trusted” system with nearly as many freelancers.
Finding oDesk, I tooled around there for a bit as well, and ended up getting even more ideas.
Step 03, Systematize Your Operations
Do you know all of the steps that happen in your projects? Do you know what specialization is needed for each step? Do you know what things that person needs to do the task? What they’re supposed to output for the next part of the process to work? What can run in parallel, and what must run in series?
Realizing that I had to get completely anal (not difficult for me) with my processes and how I broke them down, I got right to it.
In generalizing the idea of Projects and Tasks, I found that Tasks had their own generalization method and, thus, certain necessary components. For a Task, I found that it should be defined with the following properties. You may find otherwise, but this is what I found useful:
- Task Name
- Owner – Who’s responsible for this?
- Worker Skill - Skill needed. (This will help when posting job/task descriptions)
- Input – What document or information is needed before working on this task?
- Action (Task description) – What work is to be completed?
- Output – How should the work be formatted when it’s completed?
- Document Naming Format – How should the document be named, and where should it be stored? (This will save so much time for organization)
- Cost/HR – Cost per hour (For your records)
- Hours – Hours to completion. (You may want “Predicted” and “Actual” for performance measurement)
- Notes – I always find a general notes section to be useful. You might, too.
One thing I discovered: To launch a new website from scratch requires at least 8 specialized skill sets, including a project manager. Until I wrote everything out, I would have thought it was very much less.
Step 04, Write Job/Task Descriptions
FYI, this is where I am in my own process.
This is the step where, for each of the tasks, you write out a specific job description for the task that is completed, utilizing each of the task properties outlined above. I’ll be doing this in MS Word documents.
Step 05, Post and Fill the Job
So, I’m going to stop this post here. I feel like my understanding from here on out is distant enough that I will learn quite a bit through the experience of going through the process, so I’m not even going to try getting into it 
Final Notes
Hopefully, this gives you some ideas for figuring out how you can outsource some of your own work. I feel like outsourcing is one of those things that people generally look at as a big black box that they think might be valuable, but just don’t know how to use it.
Jump in. Figure it out.
And on that note, I’m going to wrap up some things before meeting with Ben Grossman at Andala…a meeting setup by my assistant at AskSunday, who also helped me reorder my business cards that were shipped to the wrong address (again).
Outsourcing Resources:
Jonathan,
I totally agree that “the IDEA is where the real money is.” In fact, I was talking about this with someone a couple of hours ago and was explaining that I hold no ethical issues with outsourcing (in regard to the idea of “taking jobs from the US”), because the US’s economy is rooted in innovation, not production. Outsourcing helps promote innovation in more than one way.
I just checked out your site and your story. Very interesting. It’s nice to meet others who were well influenced by the 4HWW and are figuring it out on their own.
What part of the world/country are you in?
Ben