Growing Your Small Businesses With Remote Labor

By: Michael | Published: July 15, 2010 | Filed under: About small businesses, Entrepreneurs, Small Business Advice, Small Business Tools

When it comes to starting or successfully operating a small business, there are some tricks to help keep your small business not only afloat but awash in black ink. With global and even local competition becoming fiercer and fiercer in this down economy, it helps to have a few tricks up your sleeve that will help you keep a leg up on the competition while keeping over head costs low. Due to the emerging resourcefulness of the internet as well as the global workforce being brought closer and closer together through the internet, it has become easier and more cost effective for small business owners to outsource a significant portion of their daily tasks, tasks they generally have to pay handsomely for if completed within the states. When it comes to effectively outsourcing work for small business owners, here are a few tips, tricks, and pointers to get you going in the right direction.

First off, you need to take a look at the daily tasks that take place within your business no matter how miniscule they are. Quite often, it is the smaller tasks that are actually the most time consuming when the amount of man hours that goes into completing them daily is tallied up. On an average day, head to the office with a simple mindset- “Could someone do this task instead”. As you complete your daily tasks, jot down in a notebook different tasks that you think could be completed off site and sent back to you. At the end of the day, compile this into a list and go through each one and give each some serious thought. Think about how the task would be completed, how much it would cost you to have it outsourced, as well as how long the turn around time for completion is.

Do you employ email marketing? Do you use a website and have an in house webmaster? What about E-Commerce, do you sell anything online through your website? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you could easily find someone to efficiently complete outsourced tasks.

Once you have this list narrowed down, take to the net or fellow small business owners and ask around about the different merchants they use for outsourcing. Gather another list, this one of vouched for outsourcing merchants and contact them to see what services they provide and whether or not their services would be conducive with the work you need outsourced. When looking at pricing for merchants, don’t dwell exclusively on price. You need to find a good balance of price, quality, and turn around time so that you don’t end up with either poor quality yet cheap work or good quality yet overly expensive work.

After you have found the perfect merchant for your small business it’s time to get down to business. Draw up a contract that allows for you to test the waters. You don’t want to sign a long term contract without knowing for sure if the tasks you need completed will be needed for a long duration and also you don’t want to end up signing a multi year contract before you are 100% sure the cost effectiveness of this merchant is present. If you follow these steps as well as research others, you will be on the path to more profits for you and your small business.

We want to hear from YOU! Have you ever successfully outsourced tasks? Any outsourcing horror stories? Let us know in the comments!