Learning how outsourcing works should be at the top of every business owner’s priority list. Outsourcing frees up your time, your most valuable asset, so that you can allocate it to the things you love doing and to the activities with the biggest impact on your business’ growth.

In this article, we’ll cover in depth how outsourcing works, why you should do it, and where to start so you can say goodbye to cluttered desks, ditch the post-its, and take back full control of your professional and personal life.

What Is Outsourcing and How Does It Work?

Outsourcing is the practice of delegating business-related work to a party outside of your organization. Unlike traditional employment, where the norm is to find someone in your area and pay them a monthly salary, outsourcing allows you to hire talent from anywhere in the world on a per hour, per project, or per milestone basis.

Outsourcing is continuously growing, 59% of companies outsource to cut costs. There are three main reasons why many businesses are choosing to outsource over traditional hiring:

• It’s cheaper to hire talent only when you need them (instead of full-time)
• It saves the time usually spent managing employees
• They’d rather invest in experts over jacks-of-all-trades

It’s also important to understand how outsourcing works for freelancers and agencies. Truth is, independent workers also benefit from dealing with a handful of clients over having a single employer, since working this way allows them to:

• Focus on becoming world-class at one or two specific skills
• Polish these skills faster than in a regular job (which raises their professional value)
• Tackle a diversity of projects and choose what industry to specialize in
• Build an online reputation that empowers them as entrepreneurs themselves
• Potentially earn more money than in a 9 to 5
• Outsource their own work at some point too

Now that you have a grasp on what outsourcing is and how it benefits the parties involved, next is determining how much of your work you should outsource.

Why You Should Outsource Your Digital Marketing

Even if you can operate a full-blown business by yourself, that doesn’t mean you should. You may feel productive, but the reality is that you’re more like a hamster in a wheel.

Handling everything on your own will make your time disappear before you realize. That, paired with a lack of significant growth, is a shortcut to feeling burned out and frustrated.

What you should do instead is to progressively outsource anything, from menial tasks to things experts can do better than you, like marketing, graphic design, ad campaigns, etc.

That’s how outsourcing works in a nutshell: saving time by bringing in the experts. Then, you’ll be able to focus your time and money on anything that helps your business take advantage of the internet’s potential for infinite scalability.

Therefore, your goal should be to eventually delegate anything that leads you to:

• Stop doing the tasks that you don’t like doing
• Focus on the things that you actually want to handle as a business owner
• Free up more of your time
• Pursue ways to generate more revenue

Mastering outsourcing leads you to reach your goals faster by working less. In doing so, you’ll also get rid of the feeling that ‘you don’t have time’ and clear your calendar to pursue any exciting opportunity that comes your way.

While reading this may make you want to go from 0 to a 100 ASAP, you should take it slow and outsource progressively as you build a reliable network of freelancers to work with.

Why Most Entrepreneurs Have a Hard Time Outsourcing

Despite knowing how outsourcing works and its benefits, most founders put it off for too long. In fact, delegating work is one of the hardest skills for entrepreneurs to learn.

You see, it’s easy for anyone to get caught up in smaller, low-impact tasks (tweaking your website, answering emails, replying to comments on social media…), because these give us a false sense of progress, something many people are oblivious to.

On top of that, there are more reasons why entrepreneurs struggle with delegating work:

• Perfectionism (‘If it’s not perfect, it’s a disaster’)
• Pride (‘Not everyone can do it like me’)
• Money (‘I’d rather do it myself and save a few bucks’)
• Not knowing where to look for talent (‘I can’t seem to find anyone reliable’)

Because of these, outsourcing can feel as intimidating as taking a huge leap to someone not used to relying on others.

Rather than waiting to be ready, however, some situations set the pace for your business and should be your sign that it’s the right moment to start outsourcing.

For example, when…

• …certain tasks become repetitive and boring to you
• …you can’t keep up with your to-do list
• …you have more work on your plate than you can handle
• …your productivity is directly tied to higher revenue

If you’ve ever experienced these, you’re ready to put your work in the hands of capable freelancers. The only question remaining is: where should you start?

Ready To Outsource? Here’s How You Can Start

Now you know how outsourcing works, why you should outsource, and the reasons most entrepreneurs struggle to do so, you’re probably ready to outsource yourself.

The best part, though, is that you don’t even have to start on your own. Instead, you can take advantage of my 10+ years of experience outsourcing in over 1000+ projects by downloading Outsource with Confidence.

This guide sets you up for success by helping you create a personalized approach based off of what you need to outsource, what your budget looks like, and what will truly help you move the needle.

Ready to begin your outsourcing journey? Do so by downloading my Outsource with Confidence Guide here.

FAQs

Q1: What does outsourcing mean?

Outsourcing is the process of delegating work to external parties not belonging to your team or organization. A common scenario is when a business needs specific skills or knowledge that no one in their in-house team has. Another one is when they need more bandwidth than what their team can currently cover. The main difference with regular employment is that outsourcing is paid per hour, per project, or per milestone instead of a salary.

Q2: What is outsourcing in economics?

Economically speaking, one of outsourcing’s greatest benefits is that it’s both cheaper for clients and more profitable for freelancers. In fact, 70% of companies who outsource cite cost reduction as their main motivator.

Through outsourcing, clients from developed countries get access to talent from countries where services are cheaper. Simultaneously, talent from underdeveloped countries can secure clients willing to pay them more than what they’d earn domestically, creating a win-win situation for either party.

Q3: Why outsourcing is important?

Outsourcing is important because it’s a growing trend gaining worldwide adoption. Together with freelancing, it’s poised to overtake traditional employment to become the norm of work in a few years. After all, they’re two forms of entrepreneurship that benefit from the rise of remote work and from the remote tools a lot of tech companies are currently building.