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Does Anyone Outsource Work to Save Time?

For the most part being a Small Business Entrepreneur means you pretty much do it all. If you don't know how you learn to do it and do it well. Being a small business means you're trying to save every penny until you'r Killing It!!

The only thing I've outsourced in the last 6 years of business are:

a) Designing my company logos and video stingers
b) I pay someone to do our taxes in order to make sure they are right and we are capturing every last penny
c)a company to mow my yard because we are too busy making $$ to stop and mow the yard

Everything else is done in house. Initially there was a learning curve for editing, marketing, social media etc but a few classes at the local Community College, some great mentoring, and YouTube we do everything in-house except what I mentioned above.
 
Hi,

I do think that is an old mentality. You can now hire skilled staff at a much lower cost than you could make flying a drone. The internet has changed the way people can run businesses.

Do you calculate your hourly income. If you can make $100 an hour flying a drone and you can pay someone $20 an hour to edit your videos or do marketing for you then it is much more profitable for you to spend your time flying a drone or out the office meeting new clients. You can hire people in Asia with excellent English for $5 an hour to do social media for you. Draft emails and letters etc or even edit videos for YouTube. You could free up time to scale your business or have time to meet new clients by outsourcing work.

Why do something yourself when you can pay someone $10 an hour to do it. That's how you can have more time away from work or scale your business. No need to do everything yourself. Spend your time doing what makes the most money.
 
For the most part being a Small Business Entrepreneur means you pretty much do it all. If you don't know how you learn to do it and do it well. Being a small business means you're trying to save every penny until you'r Killing It!!

The only thing I've outsourced in the last 6 years of business are:

a) Designing my company logos and video stingers
b) I pay someone to do our taxes in order to make sure they are right and we are capturing every last penny
c)a company to mow my yard because we are too busy making $$ to stop and mow the yard

Everything else is done in house. Initially there was a learning curve for editing, marketing, social media etc but a few classes at the local Community College, some great mentoring, and YouTube we do everything in-house except what I mentioned above.

Mowing your yard is therapeutic....
 
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You're presuming the business has the revenue to support that. When I was doing well as an aerial photographer using airplanes and film cameras, I outsourced the flying to companies that provided the aircraft and pilots (while doing the photography myself as a passenger). It didn't make economic sense for me to own an airplane and become a pilot myself, besides the fact that it wouldn't have been safe to do both. Also, I outsourced having large prints made. One year I paid $24,000 to a printing lab and I thought I should do my own printing and keep most of that, but it turned out that printing pictures took up much time and I didn't enjoy doing it. It was better to outsource that and spend that time on the more profitable part which was in taking the photographs.

That was in a different time and things have changed drastically regarding the aerial photography market. I'm using a drone to do most of my aerial photography work, but I'm not getting anywhere near the volume of work I used to get, so I have lots of free time to do everything. Besides, I don't know what I would outsource. I recently started doing video and I have a project I'm editing now. Sure, it's tedious and time consuming, but it's also part of the creative process, and I don't know that I could find someone who could do what I want for $20 per hour. Even if I could find such people, I wouldn't do that until my workload allowed for me to devote all my time to capturing the video.

The bottom line is that until the revenue and workload allows for it, I don't see any point in outsourcing anything that's consequential. I DO outsource coffee making since they do it better at the stand I frequent and I'd rather use the time involved in making coffee to do something else.

What are you outsourcing?
 
Hi, how do you market your business? Do you have website.

You seem to be suggesting that this a lot more competition slicing up your local market, maybe there are things you can do to offer better value than your competition and still charge a profitable price.
 
One of my fellow fliers subs his video editing out to one of the Asian companies.
I think he called it "fiver" (five bucks)
I have not checked it out yet, but have seen his content and it is really not bad.
Probably a google search for fiver, video editing, or something like that should find it.
It's so cheap to live there, I assume a few vids a day, and these guys are living the good life.
Maybe in a sewer, but at least it's in a nice neighborhood.
 
One of my fellow fliers subs his video editing out to one of the Asian companies.
I think he called it "fiver" (five bucks)
I have not checked it out yet, but have seen his content and it is really not bad.
Probably a google search for fiver, video editing, or something like that should find it.
It's so cheap to live there, I assume a few vids a day, and these guys are living the good life.
Maybe in a sewer, but at least it's in a nice neighborhood.

I've used FIVER a couple of times to create some "cheesy" content but you've got to remember they use templates for almost everything (otherwise how can they actually make $$?) and your contact will most likely look like several other people's content. I think I've spent maybe $25 for 2 different projects and like the results.

It's hard to get someone else to have your creative eye (this might be a good thing LOL).
 
I've used FIVER a couple of times to create some "cheesy" content but you've got to remember they use templates for almost everything (otherwise how can they actually make $$?) and your contact will most likely look like several other people's content. I think I've spent maybe $25 for 2 different projects and like the results.

It's hard to get someone else to have your creative eye (this might be a good thing LOL).

A VA will never do the job as well as you. But once you build a routine with a Virtual Assistant it often runs much smoother. There are many people spending 1 hour doing a job they can pay someone $5 to do. You have to outsource work to grow your business or improve your work/life balance.
 
I have looked into Subbing out photo editing if we get really busy. But for the most part we try to save as much money as we can to save money.


Right now were not big enough to justify subbing out work. It would be awesome to one day be there tho =).
 

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