Sunday’s Inspiration: Outsourcing and 5 Reasons Why You Should Do It Now

A quick one for you today folks but hopefully something real, personal and impacting to inspire you! As I hop on a jet in the city of London, bound for Brazil as I relax on the plane, other people (my staff) will be doing work for me. In the last few years, I’ve discovered outsourcing. Of course when I worked in broccoli farms in Tasmania, bars in Sydney and schools in Hong Kong I couldn’t exactly outsource someone to chop vegetables, pour pints and teach my lessons for me – I had to do things myself. But after being recognised on the busy streets of Tokyo in 2012 for my travel blog, it was time to make a few shifts in my working lifestyle.

Sunday’s Inspiration: Outsourcing, and why you should do it now!

I increased my personal productivity on Don’t Stop Living and my network of sites, eager to create a lifestyle where gradually my work could be outsourced. I worked hard on the things that I personally needed to do myself (I wrote more, I branched out, I wrote a shipload of guest posts). Then I outsourced the jobs that I could trust others to do. It was a big step to start with, I must admit. When I upgraded and redesigned DSL after 5 years (in October 2012), I did everything myself – bought the domain, transferred the posts to self hosted, installed WordPress.org. etc. It was hard work for a novice, I had to research things I had no idea about. Within a few months though I had earned a fair bit of money back. And I had outsourced my back end jobs. I have a cool guy working across my sites as a web designer and developer these days. I don’t do that work anymore and I don’t need to do it anymore – I tell him what needs done, he does it and I pay him. He’s an expert.

Sunday’s Inspiration: Outsourcing

Once I was confident it would work, I outsourced my article writing on my other sites. I still write for them and check the articles, but I manage a team of staff doing it, which frees up my time. The biggest barrier to outsourcing initially was that I kept telling myself I could do these jobs better myself. The truth is I could, but it would just consume my time. These days, I’m all about freeing up my time to enjoy my travels and concentrate on new projects. Of which there are many.

The beauty of outsourcing is that your staff do the work for you while you are sleeping, backpacking and concentrating on other personal goals. If you’re serious about running an online business, you need to consider outsourcing those banal tasks that you can pay someone to do for you. Once you get started on it, there’s no looking back. I was once the person that said I’d never get someone else to do a job I can do myself. But that was a mistake – I was wrong. I still write everything on Don’t Stop Living but most of my other online stuff gets outsourced now and I won’t stop there – I’ll be outsourcing a lot more now I have the experience of doing it so finally here are my top 5 reasons you should outsource now.

1. To Free Up Your Own Time
2. To Have Staff Working For You While You Sleep
3. To Make Faster Progress
4. To Expand Your Business
5. To Become Good at Managing People

Right that’s it for today as I catch up with some mates here in London and head onto Brazil.