The Growth Booth

#17: Outsourcing And How I Built An International Team Of 60+ People

April 29, 2022 Season 1 Episode 17
The Growth Booth
#17: Outsourcing And How I Built An International Team Of 60+ People
Show Notes Transcript

Imagine getting upwards of 480 hours of work done for you EVERY single day? Or permanently ditching the mind-numbing tasks you do on a regular basis… this isn’t just possible, it’s probable when you have the right system in place.

In the first of a two-part podcast series at #TheGrowthBooth (episode 17), Aidan dives into the topic of outsourcing and how it’s one of the most powerful levers a business can use. And if you’re unfamiliar with outsourcing, this episode will guide you on a simple path to getting started and the best and easiest platforms to use. 

Welcome to the 17th episode of The Growth Booth Podcast, a show focused on supporting budding entrepreneurs and established business owners alike, towards achieving lifestyle freedom through building successful online businesses.

Learn the approach to outsourcing that has catapulted our business success, and how it can be used in everyday life to free up more time, make more money, and allow you to have more lifestyle freedom.

Whether you're looking for step-by-step strategies to start building an online business, simple game plans to grow your business, or proven lifestyle freedom frameworks, you’re in the right place.

Stay tuned and be sure to join the thousands of listeners already in growth mode!

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:44 What Is Outsourcing?

03:57 Advantages Of Outsourcing

05:00 Objections To Outsourcing

08:12 Tasks You Can Outsource

11:40 Tasks You Don't Want To Outsource

12:13 Identifying Which Tasks You Can Outsource

13:15 Hiring Platforms

15:30 Where To Start With Your Job Post

19:00 Choosing Who To Hire

21:57 Red Flags To Watch Out For

23:23 Managing Freelancers

27:14 #1 Mistake In Outsourcing

30:48 Outro


Links mentioned in this episode:


About Our Host:

Aidan Booth is passionate about lifestyle freedom and has focused on building online businesses to achieve this since 2005. From affiliate marketing to eCommerce, small business marketing to SAAS (software as a service), online education to speaking at seminars, the journey has been a rollercoaster ride with plenty of thrills along the way. Aidan is proud to have helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn their first dollar online, and coached many people to build million-dollar businesses. Aidan and his business partner (Steven Clayton) are the #1 ranked vendors on Clickbank.com, and sell their products in over 100 countries globally, as well as in 20,000+ stores across the USA, to generate 8-figures annually.

Away from the online world, Aidan is a proud Dad of two young kids, an avid investor, a swimming enthusiast, and a nomadic traveler.

 

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Welcome to Episode 17 of The Growth Booth.

Today I'm going to be sharing some information about outsourcing. This is the first in a two-part series where we're going to be diving into much more about outsourcing and how we do it in our business and how you can start doing it as well using simple systems and processes. I want to kick things off today in this episode by sharing with you how my business has absolutely exploded and how that happened by starting to use outsourcing.

Now, I've got a team of over 60 people. It might even be over 70 people right now who are located all over the world. We've got offices in China. We've got offices in Pakistan. We've got an office in Chicago. We've got a team in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and a whole bunch of other countries as well that I can't even remember all of them right now. But the point is, I've been able to grow my business and grow a very efficient business through leveraging talent that is outsourced. A lot of our employees are full-time employees, and some of them are contractors. We use different types of people at different times depending on the type of task they're doing, if it's an ongoing task or if it's a one-off project of some kind.

In this episode today, what I want to share with you are the basics of outsourcing and give you a high-level overview. Then in Episode 18 of The Growth Booth, I will get into more granular details of how you can hire a virtual assistant and the process that we actually use.

As always, make sure you head back to TheGrowthBooth.com to see all of the resources and links available and, of course, a transcription that you can download for every single episode.

 

Now, what is outsourcing at a very high level? Outsourcing is the ability to pay someone to do a task for you. This might typically be through a freelancer or an agency online, and they can handle all kinds of different businesses for you. By doing this by outsourcing, it allows you to tap into talent that will not just free up your time, but allow you to do things that maybe you otherwise wouldn't have been able to do because you don't have to know how to do it.

You can also grow your business without needing to have a major investment because you can outsource in bite-sized chunks. You don't have to bring someone on staff full time from the get-go. In fact, when I think back to a turning point in my business, I've mentioned this in the past, it was when I started outsourcing, and it was probably around about 2006, 2007, and I started hiring people online and what they were doing was they were creating content for me, they were writing content, and they were researching, and I was able to wake up in the morning and have ten or 20 hours of work done from the couple of people that I had hired. My business absolutely exploded as a result of that.

There are lots and lots of advantages to outsourcing. It can allow you to grow fast. It can allow you to get work done 24/7. If you think about my business right now, I've got 60 or 70 people, each of whom are doing 8 hours or so of work every single day. If I don't get out of bed, I'm still going to get over 400, 450+ hours of work done every single day. And that's the power of leveraging a team. But it's more than that because it's about getting those expert skills. It's about being able to focus on the things that you enjoy and not have to do those things that you don't enjoy anymore. If there's a task that you do in your business that pisses you off, then this is a way that you can hand that off to someone else and have someone else do that for you.

It's also a way of automating your business. If you want to have a business that gives you true lifestyle freedom, then you want to have systems and processes and people in place that can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. That's what outsourcing can do for you. It can ultimately give you that time freedom.

 

Now, some people will oftentimes have some objections to outsourcing, and perhaps you can relate to some of these. For example, you might feel like you're not going to be in control anymore. I think that's something that is natural and sort of normal to feel, especially when you're brand new to it.

I think that the more you do it, the more you realize that you've still got ultimate control. You can still see everything that's going on, and there are lots of ways that you can track and monitor the performance of people who may be doing work for you. Another common objective for people who are starting out is outsourcing is expensive, and I think it's not really the case. Some things are definitely expensive to outsource. Some high talent specialist tasks can be expensive to outsource, but there are also plenty of tasks out there that you can outsource at a rate of $3 per hour, $4 per hour. In fact, in the Philippines, you will typically be able to hire someone in the range of $3 per hour to $5 per hour. You don't need to hire them on a full-time basis. You can hire someone just for 3 hours a week if you want to, or 2 hours or whatever it is. You basically just have to have an open mind to think about how you can get this working for you.

In Episode 18, the next episode of The Growth Booth, I'm going to talk more about how you can assign a value for your own time and use that to draw a line in the sand to sort of decide the types of things that you should outsource and maybe the types of things that you shouldn't outsource. Make sure you tune in to the next episode to learn more about that.

Another objection might be around Privacy and Security, and this is certainly a reasonable thing to be thinking about. However, I would say that there is almost always a solution to this right now. For example, you don't have to outsource things that are sensitive in nature. For example, I don't outsource people going into my bank accounts for the most part. If you do want to outsource things like payments, there are lots of ways to do this. You can have a special debit card set up that's got a special limit and can only be used by someone with a certain IP address for passwords. You can share credentials without actually giving the credential or the password away using tools such as LastPass. There are lots of solutions for these types of things nowadays.

 

Again, in our business, we outsource literally everything. I said a moment ago that I don't really outsource people going into my bank account. That's not actually true because in our business we've got a CPA who works for us, an accountant on our team, and of course, she goes into the bank accounts every single day as part of her role. But that's someone that I've got complete trust in. You can get to that level and little by little, you don't have to do things that make you uncomfortable on the very first day.

Another thing people sometimes think about are communication issues or time zone issues. This is not really something that you need to worry about to begin with. You can fleet a lot of this out in the hiring process, and that's something that I'll share in the next episode.

Right now though, the types of things that you can outsource. I mean, it's almost anything that you can imagine at this stage. But a great way to start is with any kind of written content. If you've got written content that you need for a website or a project or supplementary material for some kind of a project that you're working on, this is a great thing to outsource. You can find talented expert writers all over the world who are willing to work for you on either a per hour basis or oftentimes a per word basis. You can find these people that can write for you and create content for you in every language that you can imagine.

Graphic design is a great one. This is something that a lot of people try to sometimes do themselves, but that doesn't really get a professional result in most instances unless you are a professional graphic designer. There are lots of websites out there, like 99 Designs and many others, or of course using some of the other resources that I'll share with you here shortly, like Upwork, Freelancer.com, and onlinejobs.ph, where you can easily get graphics outsourced and you can do it in a very affordable fashion. This includes things like infographics, like logos.

In fact, by going to thegrowthbooth.com and episode number 17, I'll give you an infographic that we've got that has been designed to go along with this episode that will overview a lot of the key talking points here. I know that when you're listening to an audio, sometimes you're watching a video, it can be hard to sort of absorb everything. That's why I recommend that people head over to thegrowthbooth.com and to the corresponding episode, in this case number 17, to be able to download a lot of the good content.

Social Media Management is a great one to outsource. I used to do social media management myself until I got to the point where I was like, why am I doing this? This is a task that I can outsource for $5 an hour and I'm wasting hours on it every single week. I hired someone to do it for me and she is far better at social media than I could ever be. I get a better-quality result and I don't have to spend any time.  I save a lot of time and that's valuable time that I can spend on other things.

Social media and lots of things are related to social media, including creating graphics posts, talking, or communicating with your different customers and subscribers that can all be outsourced quite easily. Marketing and Promotions, so running paid ads, any kind of activity related to marketing and promotions can be outsourced these days and then even more complex things like software creation.

In my company, we've got multiple software startups. One of them is Cartzy and that's an e-commerce platform, and you can find out more about that by going to Cartzy.com. Another is NetBlaze, and this is software to help small business owners. You can find out about that by going to netblaze.com. These are software tools that are very sophisticated and very advanced. They're not entry-level projects. They're projects that have had hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars put into them, but they're an example of what you can also outsource. We've got teams of developers that spend all day, every day working on just those two software.

Again, whatever you can imagine is quite doable here. There are things that you might not want to outsource. I think the main one that comes to mind is things that are just too sensitive. Personal bank accounts, I think business bank accounts are easier to have, like a CPA or someone like that, sort of going in and doing things, making payments, doing tax returns, and so on and so forth. But anything that's too sensitive or too personal to you, maybe you don't want to outsource initially, but at the end of the day, you really can outsource whatever it is that you dream of outsourcing.

 

One thing that you can do to identify tasks that you might want to outsource is to create an activity inventory. By this, what I mean is throughout the day or throughout a few days, day after day after day, you create a log of everything that you're doing during that day, when you did it, how long it took, and what the task was. Then in a couple of columns next to that, you can write down, is this something that can only be done by you, or is this something that someone else could do?

If it's something that someone else could do, then that's a prime target to be outsourced. In the next episode of The Growth Booth, we'll get into the more granular detail of the exact process I use to get down to what a value of a task is. I think that'll help you a lot with this.

Any repetitive tasks are a good one to be outsourced. Anything that you do on a regular basis that maybe you don't like doing or that you think that someone else could do, these are great tasks to think about outsourcing now in terms of the key platforms, we use a few different platforms, and they sort of change over the years.

The ones that I'm using the most right now for general outsourcing onlinejobs.ph. This is the best one for finding a virtual assistant. By this virtual assistant, what I'm meaning is kind of like a Jack of all trades, someone who can help you with virtually anything that you want to get done in your business. It could be someone who becomes your right-hand man or your right-hand woman, and they can help you with almost anything.

Upwork.com is a website that I use for one-off tasks, typically, when I'm not looking for a specific sort of ongoing project. An example of this is we built a holiday home in New Zealand, and I had a lot of the architectural work done by an architect in Serbia.

You might be wondering, why didn't you use someone local? The reason I didn't use someone local is because the person that I found in Serbia was incredibly talented and she could do things that I just couldn't find from my local group of architects, like some of the 3D renders that she was able to do of my home in different areas of my home are just mind-blowing. They look so real that people think they're photos. That's the first thing. She was very talented. The second thing is that it was more cost-effective. I was able to hire someone for about maybe 1/5, 1/6 of the price of what I would have paid in New Zealand. That's another example of a specialist task that I've been able to outsource, which is not specifically related to my business, but is something that frees up more of my time and not just frees up my time, but enables me to get things done at a higher level.

Other websites that we sometimes use for outsourcing include Freelancer.com. That's essentially another competitor to Upwork.com, 99designs.com. This is one that's really all about images and design, so it's great for logos and things like that. Fiverr.com, Fiverr used to be all about different jobs that people could do for $5. It's really come on and has become a lot more sophisticated nowadays. You can hire people all around the world to do almost anything on Fiverr.

When you decide that you want to outsource something, it starts with creating a brief for the project. One of the most important things, regardless of the platform that you use, is a title for the job. If you've got people around the world who are looking at this platform and learning about the job that you're offering, you want that title to be clear and descriptive. Then you get into more of a description in the body of the job post where you talk about specifically what your end result is, what your requirements are, and the kind of person that you're looking for.

You then get the option to suggest a budget. You might say that you've got a fixed budget and you want this job done for $40. Maybe there's a specific deliverable like you're looking for a 2000-word report about diabetes and you're willing to pay $40 and that's it. You can set things up like that if you want to, or you can pay on an hourly basis, and you can say, "Look, I'm willing to pay X amount per hour on an hourly basis." I prefer for the most part when I'm doing a one-off job to pay on a project basis. Not per hour, but per delivery of the project. I normally like to sort of test people out before I give them a big project just to make sure I’m getting what I'm looking for.

Going back to that architect that I hired in Serbia, before I hired her, I got six or seven different architects from all around the world, and these were people that were shortlisted from 40 or 50 candidates to do a simple job for me. I used the results from that simple job and the communication with them to ultimately decide who I was going to work with. You don't have to go from not hiring someone to all of a sudden doing a huge project in one step. You can take small steps to get there. I think that's a good way to go.

Then another thing that you can do on these when you post a job is to ask a question or ask for a secret code or something. The reason that we do this is there have been robots and tools developed that will go into places like Upwork.com, onlinejobs.PH and so on and so forth. They will automatically reply to job ads that are published. If they automatically reply, it's just all cookie-cutter stuff. It says things like, "I can do this job, no hassle at all. I've done this before lots of times. You can check out my profile and you'll see that I've done thousands of hours of work and so on and so forth," but it's not specific.

What I normally do is say, "In your response or in your reply to this job, first, I want you to make sure that I can see that you have read the brief. I want you to use the secret word in the first line of your reply." That secret word is red tomato or whatever it might be. It could be anything. It doesn't matter. The whole idea is just to make sure that you can sort of filter out these robots that are out there these days and make sure that you're getting someone replying who has actually read the job post.

Now in the next episode of The Growth Booth, I will show you a more sophisticated way to hire a virtual assistant. That process is more designed for a virtual assistant, but you'll see how we get around this in another way.

Now, when it comes to actually choosing the person that you want to hire, there are a bunch of ways that you can look at this. Oftentimes you will get individuals who are applying for your job, and sometimes you'll be agencies. Now if you get an agency, you don't know if you're working with Janet, you can be working with Janet or Joe or John or Jack. You just don't know because you're hiring an agency. If you're hiring an individual, then you know the exact person that you're going to be dealing with. In most instances, I like to hire individuals because it gives me a more standardized level of quality that I can expect.

Definitely most of the time I prefer individuals, but there may be a case depending on the job, when an agency is absolutely fine, the country of origin is a big one. That's important because if you are hiring someone that you want to do writing for you, I would say that you want someone who is a native English speaker if you're looking for English.

If you're hiring someone that you're looking for graphic design, we find that people in Eastern Europe, I should say, are very good at graphic design. Generally speaking, Filipinos are also good at graphic design. But I've had less luck in places like India and China for graphic design, for whatever reason. For software and app development. I think Eastern Europe is also a great place, and we've got an office in Pakistan, in Lahore, where we've got a team of about 20 different developers. We've found that there's a really strong culture for it in Pakistan and there are some really good developers out there, but obviously in the Western world as well. You can find great developers in the United States and the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and so on. However, there's always a price, a higher price to pay if you're getting someone who is a Westerner.

A few final thoughts here. If you're looking for a specialist, you want to make sure that the person that you're hiring is an expert. This is not as important if you're hiring a virtual assistant, but it is important that if you're looking for something that's very specialized, that you really do sort of check that the person you're hiring has got the experience and the skills and the qualifications required.

Now, the good thing about using websites like onlinejobs.ph, Upwork.com is you can see a history of the projects they've worked on and you can easily get someone doing a test job for you just to sort of suss them out a little bit and find out if they're someone that's really good for complex jobs, you want to make sure that they've done a similar job before.

This is also sort of like vetting them a little bit and then you've got gut instinct as well. If you have to choose between several different applicants, sometimes you just have to go with your gut instinct.

Now, some red flags, things to watch out for. For most things that you can outsource, you never pay money upfront. Sometimes you'll pay into an escrow account, but that's not the same as paying the person who is actually doing the work. I always pay for the deliverable once it has been completed, not at the start of a project. Sometimes people will ask to raise the price after you've hired them. This is not really getting things off on the right foot because you've agreed on a price and you don't want to start haggling over that price as the project starts. If they're not happy with that, then they can leave the project and you can find someone else.

Typically, what I like to do once I've hired someone is either create a video for them explaining the project a bit more or at minimum just jump on a call with them and explain what I'm looking for and then also send over instructions. I think the output that you get is going to be directly correlated with the quality of your instructions. It's pretty important that you do a good job of explaining what you are expecting. That all comes down to managing expectations as well, to make sure that you're not setting someone up for failure because you haven't been clear about what you want. It really is a win-win when you can give someone really clear instructions and make sure that they know what they're trying to do there.

When it comes to managing freelancers, there are different tools that you can use. There are things like Hubstaff for example, which will actually film over the shoulder and do a screen capture and sort of film someone working. I think this is overkill and I think that if you're paying someone for the completion of a project, then this is self-correcting. Anyway, if you're paying someone on an hourly basis, I think it's also self-correcting because you can ask for details around what they did and how long it took them for each part of the job. If someone is not fast enough, then you're not obliged to continue using them.

Trello is really good for managing and for having transparency and conveying different tasks that need to be done. You can find out more about Trello by going to trello.com. We use a lot of Trello and our management of teams and different projects that we've got.

If you're using the likes of Upwork, one of the things that the workers tend to want is positive feedback and constructive feedback. Be aware of that. If you're ranking someone out of five and you give them a four out of five, that's not necessarily going to help them. That might be quite bad for them. If someone's done a good job or a satisfactory job, I would say make sure you give them a five out of five. Otherwise, it could be quite bad for them. I think you have to be aware that these people often live and die by the ratings that they get, and if they get a poor rating, they might not be able to get work that easily again. Now obviously you're not going to give someone a five if they don't deserve it, but if they've done the work that you asked for and they've executed it in a fashion that you're happy with, then I think you should give them a five.

Now one more tip is to not micromanage. The whole point of outsourcing is so that you can remove yourself as a roadblock and remove yourself from the project. It's okay to check-in, but if you're hiring an expert, then you should give them a bit of space to get in there and do what they want to do.

Now if it's more like a virtual assistant and sort of a Jack of all Trades or a generalist, then you might have specific ways that you want to do things. The best way to approach that is to create a detailed standard operating procedure or a video or some kind of a guide and then let them run with it. Try to avoid micromanaging. Other tools we've used for managing virtual assistants include things like BaseCamp. BaseCamp is one that we use in our e-commerce business. Trello for virtual assistance. Specifically, Hubstaff is another good one as well.

Now from time to time, you will run into issues like the work isn't up to standard, and the great thing about the likes of Upwork is you only pay when you're satisfied. If the work hasn't reached the level that's required and hopefully you were very clear about the level that's required, then you simply don't have to pay. There are processes in place with the likes of our work for dealing with this kind of a thing.

Deadlines is another issue. I always like to add a little bit of flexibility into my tasks. I will always ask when will a job be done by? If someone gives me a deadline, if someone says they can do it in seven days, then I will always assume that it might take a few extra days because there might need to be revisions and so on and so forth.

I think it's cultural as well. In some cultures, they just always aim to please and they are not very good at managing expectations. I think this is something that you need to have a frank conversation with your worker about when they come on to start a new project.

Now the number one mistake that I've seen when it comes to outsourcing is hiring too many people too soon. This is a good way to blow through a budget. I think it's better to do things on a slow and steady basis so steadily start hiring more people. It can be easy to kind of get addicted to it and be like, "Oh my God, I'm able to get all these hours done in a day and I'm going to hire more people and this, that, and the other," but you need to make sure that the people that are doing work for you are doing work that needs to be done, work that's going to get you closer to your goals. That's something to be aware of.

When you are building out a team of people, I like to think in a way in sort of a hierarchical structure where I've got a team manager and it's not because I like the hierarchical structure or anything, it's just that I can only effectively manage a small number of people and there might be six or seven people and if I was trying to manage every single person on my team, I just couldn't do that effectively.

Finding a smart manager and putting them in charge of a team of people is a really great way to scale and that's something that you can rinse and repeat. You can have different managers in different parts of your business. For example, Float Hosting is our hosting company. If you go to floathosting.com, that's where you can get different hosting by domain names and so on and so forth. But anyway, the point is Float Hosting has got its whole own team, its own ecosystem of staff that is different from the staff that works on Cartzy.com, and they're different from the staff that works on Netblaze.com. At the senior sort of strategic manager or director level, there's some overlap there, but most of the time it's specific managers that are employed to handle specific projects and they've got specific teams. That's how I look at scaling and I think that it really is a good way to go.

Again, little by little can get you to where you want to go. Just don't grow your outsourcing team too fast or it might end up costing you a bit of money. You will find that there are things that you don't expect and you'll find that there are things that are great about outsourcing and you'll probably find that there are things that are not great about outsourcing.

But on the whole, I think it's absolutely amazing that you can get talented people from all around the world to help you build your business - not just your business, but anything. I mean, there are so many different things that you can outsource these days.

 

A recent example I had was outsourcing my family's flights and logistics for a trip that we did and this was great. It took me a couple of hours and I also had an expert to call on if I had any issues. In fact, we did have an issue because when we got to the destination, we were not in the right room. But this person that I had hired was able to get on the phone doing the heavy lifting and actually get us into the right room. That's an example of something away from business that I've been able to outsource. Another example of this is something around the house. We're fortunate to be able to get some help around the house. For me, this is great because I've got a decision where I can choose to be doing 2 hours of vacuuming a week or I can have someone else do those 2 hours of vacuuming and that gives me 2 hours of time that I can be spending doing something that I enjoy, like playing with my kids or doing something that's truly productive and a really good use of my time.

We are going to continue on with this topic in the next episode of The Growth Booth. Right now though, you can head over to thegrowthbooth.com, Episode number 17, and you can download the infographic, which is a summary of everything that I've discussed in this episode. You can also get timestamps and you can download the transcription. Make sure you tune in to the next episode of The Growth Booth because we're going to be getting a lot more granular about the ultimate ten-step process that you can use for hiring a virtual assistant and the three things that you can do to make sure that you win the game of business.

I'll see you in the next episode!