If you re a small business owner like me, you already know how important it is to have documented, repeatable systems in place, whereever possible, to handle day to day business tasks in your operations.
Without systems, your business can never operate at its full potential for efficiency and effectiveness.
One area that has become increasingly popular and important to systematize is that of managing your outsourced projects and providers.
If you re not familiar with how to use outsourcing in your small business, its basically the process of farming out different time consuming tasks or one time special projects to an outside provider, in a location and at a pay rate that provides the maximum benefit to the small business owner.
There are a few different steps that you want to follow as you begin outsourcing:
The first item we are going to go over is how to prioritize projects that make you the most money. You always want to choose tasks that first would require the most hours of your time and then outsource those. You re immediately removing yourself from the equation. You can have other people do time intensive tasks which will give you more time to focus on more important things.
You next want to choose projects that will immediately increase your reach. By reach I mean, adding a new product or product line, increasing your marketing, etc., things that will bring your business out in front of more people that are apt to buy.
You need to take yourself out of the day to day activities associated with your business so you can focus on things that build your business and grow your business for the future.
Next you want to systematize your outsource training. Sometimes you ll have to go through two to three people to find someone you want to do a particular task. You might want to record a screen capture video that shows exactly what you re looking for.
You re building a module that you can send to future outsourcers so you do not have to repeat yourself. You want to build step by step videos; you ll need to upload them to website hosts where you can add all those successfully to a web page, instead of having to send back and forth those large video files through YouSendIt or FTP files, you always want it to be flash based on a website somewhere.
You also want to develop a standardize product description, where you can cut and paste so you won t have to rewrite them each time. They define your criteria, things you are not looking for, and how you want to interact back and forth.
Finally, you need to standardize job postings so when you need to find a new provider, or group of providers, you can cut and paste that description on the site. You also need to post in the optimal place for any given job. You don t want to waste your time posting on a site where you will not get the quality of people that you are looking for. Don t waste your time.
Knowing how to effectively outsource tasks and projects in your business will provide a huge ROI, and can many times, be the key component in differentiating your business from your competitors...
Finally, the only way to ensure that you re receiving the maximum benefits from your outsourcing system is to become educated on small business outsourcing from a reputable outsourcing training institute like Outsourcing University...
Author Resource:
Kyle Grant runs http://www.OutsourcingUniversity.com where he offers free "how to" training videos on how outsourcing can used by entrepreneurs just like you to grow your business' sales and profits...today! Claim your 100% FREE Outsourcing Training CD at http://www.OutsourcingUniversity.com