Is outsourcing a great idea? (Business-owner edition)

As a business owner, it’s important to realize what you can and cannot do. For example, my specialty is in bookkeeping/accounting and personal finance. I enjoy reading articles on these subjects and I enjoy doing the work.

But as a business owner, there’s other things that need to be done as well. For example, you can’t have a business without customers, therefore you need to market your business, which can result in social media, website development, SEO optimization or another part of business, data entry, etc. the list goes on!

So, when should I be doing everything myself?

When you just created your OWN business! For the first several months, it’s a great idea to do the basics yourself. Your website or other things might be causing you to lose some potential clients, but in the early stages what’s important is building a reputation! It can take weeks/months/years to establish a reputation and 5 seconds to destroy it.

I’m writing this as recently a UFC fighter who made his debut, BIT his opponent. It took him years to get to the UFC level, trained years to get to this point and in his first fight he lost it all. Great ways to establish a reputation starting out as a business owner is finding a family member/friend who’ll support you and maybe give you a review, of course as long as they used your product or service.

Once you start bringing in cash flow, then you can look at outsourcing to help grow your business. If of course you want to scale your business, which I think most people do! 😊

This can also be referred to as investing in the growth of your business! Look for people who match what you’re looking for, more likely than not you’ve never hired anyone before! I know I hadn’t, it was fun getting to meet contractors who were interested in helping me.

When it comes to this stage in your business, whether you’re looking for help with your marketing, help with data entry, bookkeeping or whatever it may be. Do you research and have an idea of what you’re looking for in someone and have a budget in mind. Don’t go in like it’s an interview, go in like your two people sitting down for a coffee trying to learn how you can help one another.