Outsourcing Vs. Virtual Teams

Now, let's say for example that I had decided the week before I left that my client needed this done, and I tried to patch together a team in a week. I probably would have ended up in a disaster and a nightmare, and I'm sure the event wouldn't have been transcribed within 48 hours of the event being over.

Some people have said that they're worried either that they won't have enough work, or they're worried about the cost of the contractors. To avoid a fuss you need to be very specific when you hire your contractors and as most of them were freelancers, they are going to be familiar with the fact that you're probably not going to have the same amount of work every week.

We kind of work like that - on waves of work. We'll get a bunch of files in and then we'll have a couple days off. Then we'll get a bunch more, and then we'll get a couple days off. A lot of times that works very well for a work-at-home mom anyway, because if you can anticipate that, like we knew this event was coming up, our girls could schedule their childcare and their events around it, so they knew when I needed them and they knew when it was going to be over. You can schedule in your playtime which is fantastic, when you have small children like I do.

Back to outsourcing, because I do some outsourcing as well. I don't keep everything in-house. For example, tonight, I outsourced the creation of a logo. I can't draw a stick man. I have no creativity when it comes to logos. You would outsource graphics, if you weren't doing graphic design as your business. You would outsource article writing, website design, SEO, or your press releases.

There's a big one that most people don't think about. You can also outsource your online business management. The course that I'm teaching on virtual team management is basically teaching you some tactics to be a more effective business manager of your own business, because I know people that pay $60 to $80 an hour for their online business managers. With my business, for example, if I was to hire an online business manager to do what I do, and what my project manager does, they'd be working 60 hours a week or more.

Which would end up being $2500 a week, and close to ten grand a month. You're looking at $120,000 a year to hire an online business manager for what I'm doing. I don't make quite that with our business. And that kind of overhead for a small business like mine could kill it in an instant, because obviously the online business manager would be making my profit, honestly.

You have to assess whether you could do things more effectively than someone else could because a lot of times these online business managers are going to be having to go back and forth between you and your contractors or you and your clients, because they may not know everything about your business, and you may not be their only client. How much of that volley can you take out of the equation, by simply doing it yourself?

Now, there's always things that you should outsource. Email management is one that people like to do, where they have someone go through their email once a month and delete all this, or unsubscribe from all the newsletters they get. Some people have their VAs or their virtual assistants do that every day.

When you're selling a service, such as transcription, copywriting, a virtual assistant business, graphic design, where you have a team that stands behind you, helps you function and sell your service. It doesn't have to be a team of 30 contractors like mine. It could be a team of five copywriters You probably are still going to have to do some outsourcing, because as a small business you probably don't need a full-time bookkeeper, a full-time IT guy, or a full-time graphic designer. If you're doing transcription like I do, I on occasion have to hire somebody for website customization. You're always going to have a need for different things like that, and it's always going to be something interesting that you can't do yourself, that you'll have to outsource.

So I hope I made it clear what the differences between outsourcing and a virtual team is, so that you can get a better example and a better idea of how you can grow your business with a virtual team. Outsourcing is wonderful too, and of course you're going to need to outsource to grow your business as well. But you can skyrocket your income by instead of having 40 or 50 hours a week that you work, you can multiply that times five and sell your service, and once you have a good set of clients who are just raving and referring people to you, you will get more business than you can handle.

Is it better to have a three-month waiting list so that you can do the work yourself, or to have a team behind you where you work together to do the work in a fifth of the time? For example, I've used the same graphic designer for nearly a year now, and she has such a long waiting list right now that she had to turn down my last project, and I had to find somebody else to do it. Because I needed several graphics, she basically lost $100 or more from that one job she turned down. Now that she's not accepting new projects and I'll keep using the new person that I've found. I have no issue with that provider and I loved her work, except that she's so busy and I can't wait three months for this graphic. With copywriting, VA work, or transcription, if you're telling your clients they're going to have to wait three months, they may sign up for your waiting list but then they're probably going to go find somebody else that can do it now. In turn you're just losing money, and then you're losing clients, even established clients.