The Complete Guide To Outsourcing
In late 2009, 3-time bestselling author, Tim Ferriss released a book called The Four Hour Work Week.
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It was one of the first concerted efforts to bring business process automation (BPA) and outsourcing down to a smaller scale for everyday businesses and individual consultants.
That book has been both the best and worst thing to happen to remote work. Ferriss’ book started a trend that many companies, consultants, small business founders, and lifestyle entrepreneurs have been trying to implement since.
This has produced the unfortunate result of a significantly large amount of customers "trying out" outsourcing without having any serious background on the sourcing process, remote interviewing, remote team management and operational procedures needed to become successful with remote employees.
This in-depth article will show you how and where to find the right resources you'll need to properly start outsourcing within your organization and formulate processes for outsourcing in an effective manner.
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Table of Contents
--What Is Outsourcing?
--What Should You Outsource?
--Specific Jobs You Can Outsource
--What Are The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing?
--How To Avoid Common Outsourcing Mistakes
Becoming More Productive
--Double Your Own Productivity
--Setup Rituals
--Effective Planning
--Determine Goals
--Set Milestones
--Get Into A Flow State Focus
How To Source Talent
--Where To Find Talented Freelancers
--Where To Find Virtual Assistants
--Top Countries To Outsource
--The Process of Hiring A Freelancer
--How To Write A Job Post
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The Selection Process
--3 Qualities To Look For
--Stages Of The Interview Process
--Interview Questions
--Trial Stage
--Common Hiring Misconceptions
The Training Process
--Hold Video Conference
--Create A Training Manual
--Assign Knowledge Building Tasks
Communicating With Freelancers
--Create A Wiki
--Sending Effective Emails And Messages
--Leveraging Project Management Tools
--Other Important Tools
--Create Common Chat Rooms - Slack
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Paying Your Freelancers
--How Much Should You Pay?
--How To Send Payments Overseas
How To Scale Your Outsourced Team
--Have A Selective Hiring Process
--Use Multiple Recruiting Methods
--Create An Onboarding Process
--Prioritize Communication
--Streamline Productivity Tools
Process Design
--How To Build Your Process
--Refining Your Process
--Virtual Training Is Different
Building Redundant Processes
--The 4 Main Types of Redundant Processes
--Effective Forum Posting
--Generating Leads Through Twitter
--YouTube Lead Generation And Optimization
--Check That Work Is Done
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How To Use This Guide
This smart guide is meant as a starting point for you and your business to use as a baseline framework. It's the framework I've used to build numerous businesses like Staff.com.
Depending on your product/service and industry you will need to add to this guide and can take personalized notes along the way.
It can and should serve both outsourcing newcomers and veterans as a great reference guide and as you work through the process time and time again.
This guide starts with Outsourcing Basics. This section will define what is outsourcing, list the pros and cons of hiring freelancers for certain tasks of your business and identify specific tasks that could be ‘good’ to outsource.
The next section, Becoming More Productive, will focus on an often ignored aspect of outsourcing: your current productivity and organization levels. Just as larger companies organize and streamline their activities and business processes before automating and outsourcing, you too have to better define different areas of your business and personal outputs. This will save you time, money, and set a solid foundation for outsourcing successfully.
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The third section, How To Source Talent, will introduce you to the newest and most trustworthy platforms that have been developed and used by millions of businesses since Tim Ferriss first wrote his book. I'll show you how to define your company needs, how to craft a compelling job description to attract world-class talent and what the overall (recommended) process should be when looking to hire.
The fourth section, The Interview Process, will dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of how to run effective interviews. Since you'll most likely be interviewing someone over the phone or through a video service, I'll point out what qualities you should be looking for, what questions to ask, and how to set up a trial phase to make sure both parties are satisfied before anything becomes permanent (if this is what you're looking for. The same process can apply to temporary freelancers).
The fifth section, The Training Process, will provide details on how to ensure that your outsourced team understands and completes tasks within a specific deadline and to required specifications.
The sixth section, Communicating With Freelancers, will walk you through tools and processes to ensure that your remote team delivers high-quality work and that you remain well-connected. Communication often makes the biggest difference in performance and final output.
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The seventh section is about Paying Your Outsourced Team. This will give you a great idea of how much you should pay your freelancers. The section will also provide details on some useful online money transfer platforms for paying offshore freelancers.
The eighth section, Scale Your Outsourced Team, will give you the means and the methods to quickly scale up your outsourced team while ensuring a smooth expansion process.
The ninth section is dedicated to Process Design. This will help walk you through the theory of how to design, build, and implement effective business processes to help make your business more effective.
The last section, Building Redundant Processes, will focus on actually applying the theory from the last section to help you create processes that will streamline your operations and make automation of simple or repetitive tasks possible.
Guest Authored By John Larase. John is a Content Marketer/SEO who loves to explore anything under the sun. Follow John on Twitter.
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Post Crafted By:Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, CO. where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends. My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
