6 Things Every Entrepreneur Needs to be Outsourcing Right Now

by mandyythomas4, posted in Increasing Business Productivity, Scaling Your Business

This post may contain affiliate links. Please refer to my Disclosure for more information.

6 Things Every Entrepreneur Needs to be Outsourcing Right Now

Two people shaking hands and the back of a laptop

 

In this blog post I am going to share with you, 8 things you need to be outsourcing in your life right now, to get your time back, to help you focus on the most important things in your life and to feel less stressed and far behind.

 

When it comes to outsourcing, the biggest problem that I see is when entrepreneurs just look at it as an expense, you need to be looking at it as a return on your investment. Are you going to get back time and energy to be able to focus on the most important income producing tasks in your business?

Remember the 80/20 rule where 20% of the things you spend your time on create 80% of your results. Having more time, allows you to have other people doing the 80% of the smaller tasks that need to be done, but don’t need to be done by you. The 20% of tasks could be content creation, promoting yourself, increasing your visibility, partnering up with others, taking on more clients, expanding your services and products, etc, all tasks that actually move your bottom line.

#1 Housecleaning

Housecleaning is something that someone else can easily come in and do for you. You don’t have to be doing ALL of your housecleaning all the time, just yourself. Honestly, I don’t think you should be. Of course, tidying up and cleaning up after yourself throughout the day will need to be done by you, but there are many other tasks that you can have someone else come in and do.

Like scrubbing your bathrooms and your kitchen for example, you could definitely have someone come in and do that. You don’t need to full on hire a full time cleaning lady, but start small. Even if you had someone come in 2x a month for 3 hours they would get the tasks that you want to do the least (like scrubbing your shower, sinks and cleaning your fridges) and during this time, you can do the tasks that only you can do.

Think of it this way, after you have finished scrubbing your bathtub, showers, cleaning your kitchen and everything else, do you really want to sit down for 3 hours and work on a harder task that takes a lot of brain power? I am going to say, probably not. You are feeling drained from the housework that you did and you aren’t going to be as productive as you need to be on your important tasks.

When it comes to outsourcing in your life, housecleaning is the very first place that you should start.

Something that has saved me tons of time when it comes to housecleaning, is my Roomba Vacuum. Even though I do have a housekeeper come into my house, I want to be as efficient as possible with her time and the money I am spending (because I am all about productivity and efficiency!), so I don’t have her sweep my floors. I just turn my Roomba vacuum on and have it clean the floors while I am working or while I am away. I have it set to automatically start cleaning at a certain time each day and wow does it save me time! With having a dog in the house, it is nice to know that every day I will have clean floors and I didn’t have to put any effort into cleaning them. I am not joking when I say that my Roomba vacuum is a great time-saving hack for me!

It is really important to me to have a Roomba vacuum because clutter and mess really add to anxiety and this is another way that I can help reduce my stress and anxiety is knowing that my floors will be clean, but not having to stress over them!

Click here to download my Realistic Budget template! 

#2 Grocery Shopping

It is becoming more and more common, that you can order your groceries online ahead of time and either pick them up at the store or have them delivered to your home. This is such a fantastic option for multiple reasons.

  • It saved you a ton of time, you don’t have to walk around the grocery store and then stand in line waiting to pay.
  • It can actually save you quite a bit of money.
  • When you order groceries ahead of time online, you have a much greater chance of only choosing what you need versus in person you are more likely to pick up more foods that you don’t need such as snack foods, simple carbs or “munchy” type of foods. When you order online, you likely aren’t as “hangry” when you go to the grocery store, which means that ordering online you will have a different cart of food than what you purchase in person. You will make more conscious choices which means they will have a greater chance of being healthier AND at the same time saving you money from all of the things that you didn’t buy.
  • Some grocery stores will deliver your groceries for a small fee. Now you might be thinking to yourself that you will be increasing your grocery costs because of this fee. But I want you to see it from this perspective. Even with the fee for delivery, you are going to be saving money. Because you will only be purchasing the items that you need because you aren’t wandering around other aisles and getting bored and grabbing foods that are more snack types, Also, this could save 20 minutes-1 hour every time you go for groceries, which means you can either use that time for cooking your meals or anything else you need to do.

Hack for Those Who Live in Small Towns for Grocery Shopping

Now I know online grocery shopping isn’t an option for you if you live in a small town, so in those cases, I want you to think about when you do make trips into the city, when you are going to be picking up groceries on those trips. Typically, you purchase your groceries near the end of your last errands because you have produce that needs to be refrigerated or food that needs to be in the freezer, so you do them last.

Think about ordering your food online ahead of time and planning to have it ready near the end of the day, so you can pick it up when you are in the city and have this option available. Also, I know what it’s like not living in the city, when I go in, I have 100 errands to run and by the time I go grocery shopping it’s already the evening and to be honest, I already want to be home. This is a huge time saver and then I’m also less likely to go and buy chocolate while I am there, if I have ordered my groceries online and just stop to pick them up.

If you are ready to take action and get your business more organized, automated and systems in place so you can make a bigger impact and increase your income, check out my Business Productivity Coaching.

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#3 Social Media Scheduling

When it comes to your business, it is so easy to spend hours upon hours on social media working on your marketing, but then you get to the end of the day and you feel like you haven’t accomplished anything. This is where scheduling your social media content comes into play. Scheduling your content ahead of time so it is ready to go, allows you the time and brain power, to focus on the most important tasks. I always schedule my social media content because then I am not worried and then all of a sudden asking myself, “what am I going to post?” This means that my audience and tribe get the best from me, which is what they should be getting. I want to show up every day for them with immense value and this allows me to do that and to show up with the energy that I want to.

When it comes to scheduling posts on Instagram, I have tried many different ones, but my favorite is Planoly. I can schedule my content in there and because it is actually partnered with Instagram, it can actually automatically post your posts FOR you! There aren’t any other apps that can do this with Instagram, you can schedule others but you still have to physically post it.

Planoly is an amazing platform that is partnered with Instagram, that allows you to automatically schedule your Instagram posts. This saves you tons of time, energy and helps you to remain consistent when running a business while also being time efficient. Planoly helps you to provide the most value for your audience while running a productive business that can become more profitable. You must check out Planoly for helping make marketing your services easy and simple!

If you have a blog, girl you need to be using Pinterest to get more eyes on your blog posts! But I am also all about time efficiency and spending hours upon hours on Pinterest just doesn’t fit into my schedule! That’s where Tailwind comes in and you set it up to work for you! It does the work of promoting your Pinterest and your blog posts and is the system to accelerate your blog growth on auto-pilot once you have it set up. It is also extremely affordable and is a huge time saver while growing your business while you sleep.

Just from this one task of scheduling my social media ahead of time, I have got back so many hours in my day and month and I no longer have to feel bad about spending time on social media when I should be spending it with my loved ones an being more mindful in my own life.

 

Click here to download my Realistic Budget template! 

#4 Scheduling Client, Potential Clients & New Introduction Appointments

It is so easy to waste hours and hours each week, scheduling client and new introduction appointments, but it doesn’t have to be this way! This is one of the quickest ways to get time back in your day! If you have a business where you are meeting with clients (online or in person), you need to have a scheduling system to book in with you!

Acuity is a fantastic scheduling system that will honestly save you hundreds of hours! Instead of going back and forth with what days you are available and then a client/potential client/someone new you are meeting checking their schedule and then getting double booked in the meantime, Acuity syncs automatically with your Google Calendar to seamlessly schedule your appointments. The paid version is 110% worth it because of the added features of automation that will save you so many hours. I use it for my onboarding system as well as you can have an e-mail automatically go out once a client has booked in and in that e-mail you can attach all documents that you need a client to sign and you don’t have to physically stop during your day to send that information, which actually takes a lot of time! It will also send out reminder e-mails which are great for your clients and at the bottom of their confirmation e-mail, they can add their appointment right into their Google Calendar.

Acuity has not only saved me time but also money. I don’t have to hire someone which would cost me a lot more, to manage my schedule. Acuity literally pays for itself every single month!

If you decide to use Acuity to schedule your clients in and you use my affiliate link above, send me a message (mandyy@mandyythomas.com) and I will send you for free, a video of me walking you through how to get Acuity set up behind the scenes, to save you tons of hours!!

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#5 Marketing Yourself & Your Business

When it comes to growing your social media to grow your business, you don’t have to be doing all of it yourself. Think of a brick and mortar store, they don’t just have one person doing ALL of the tasks and aspects of their business, they have multiple people! This allows you to do what you went into your business to do, to serve people and to help change their lives! There are many parts of your business that need to be done, but don’t need YOU to be the one to do them. Marketing falls under one of those hats. Yes, you will have to do a lot of it yourself, especially as an online business owner, but the parts that you don’t need to do, you can have someone else do!

Look at your business and write down all of the ways that you are marketing yourself and all of your social media and other outlets that you use to market. Write down the ones that you need to do and which ones you could outsource to a virtual assistant to do.

Instagram Hashtag Research

Something that I know I needed to be doing because I learned it in a great Instagram course that I took, was to be researching my hashtags. The only problem… this took SO much time and I dreaded it. I felt like I was wasting my time doing it, even though I needed to be. Except that I didn’t need to be the one physically doing it. I could outsource this to someone else for cheaper than I could do it myself. So I paid for a monthly membership to the #Hashtag Files Society and I was able to get a huge variety of hashtags that HAD been researched, every single month.

This is an incredible resource to help get your content and message in front of more people on Instagram. You need to be changing up your hashtags A LOT on Instagram in order to reach more people and not to appear so spammy in Instagram’s algorithm. But the amount of time that it takes to find so many different hashtags that apply to our specific businesses and then to have variety, takes SO much time. That’s why I love the #Hashtag Files Society, there is so many different categories of hashtags that Courtney (an Instagram guru and the Hashtag Queen herself) has and the best part, every single month she adds new ones (she also takes suggestions so if you don’t see a category there that you want, she will add it for you!). There are over 5500 hashtags in here and it is growing every single month! She will also let you know when a hashtag shouldn’t be used anymore because it has too many posts and your post would be buried, so she also has a “retired” section, so you don’t have to figure that out on your own.

When I started using the #Hashtag Files Society, I had so many more hashtags and I started reaching more people on Instagram that I otherwise wouldn’t have reached. For the low price of the monthly membership it saves me literally hundreds of hours that I don’t have to sit researching on my own so I can focus on more important income generating aspects of my business! Seriously, I’m sure hashtag research isn’t your zone of genius, have someone else who it IS their zone of genius do it for you, for so much cheaper.

#6 Graphic Design

When it comes to creating graphics for your business, if this is not your area of expertise, then this can be a huge time and energy drain.

When it comes to creating e-books, graphics for your website and social media, you can have someone else do it for you, who it is their zone of genius. They can get it done much quicker and save you hours of struggling and ending up with something that you don’t even like.

There are many places that you can outsource graphic design to, you can start by looking on Fiverr or Upwork, asking for referrals in Facebook entrepreneur groups or even some virtual assistants offer this service as well.

#7 All of the “Little Things”

When it comes to little things in your business, you can hire a virtual assistant to do many of these. When it comes to editing, proof-reading, updating your website, updating graphics or links, SEO work, blog management, blog formatting, inbox management, uploading, sending contracts/invoices, client onboarding process set up, transcribing for podcast or video, event planning, market research, updating spreadsheets, etc.

These are all things that may need to be done in your business, but once again, they don’t need you to physically do it. One thing to keep in mind when it comes to outsourcing and delegating, someone can do the work of creating whatever it is you would like, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t look over it to make sure that it is the way that you want it, before it is released to the public.

#8 Making Sure Your Business is Legal

I know this is the side of your business that most people don’t like, because it can be really confusing. You should work with someone who can help to make this a breeze and to walk you through what you need to have in your business in order to protect it and to protect you. I see many online entrepreneurs who don’t have the legal side of their business taken care of and this is scary to see! There are absolutely people out there who can help you with this. I recommend Christy Westerfeld, she is an attorney who has been amazing to work with and she will literally walk you through step by step, so you no longer feel the anxiety of not knowing what you are doing when it comes to the legal side of your business. You need to make sure that you have legal documents that aren’t just printed off of Google or put together yourself because I can guarantee you are missing a lot of really important information.

This goes for client contracts, your website, any programs, courses or products that you sell (including anything digitally). Not having these important pieces in place can cost you so much more than it costs to get these created! Christy made the whole process really great to go through and she was fantastic dealing. You don’t want to leave yourself exposed and wish you had taken the time to do this before! If you are a health, wellness, life, business coach, etc, you need to check Christy Westerfeld out! She will help you figure out exactly what you do need and how to take precautions to protect yourself and your business!

 

Outsourcing and delegating in your business is what will take it from where it is at now, to being able to grow and scale. You should be the CEO of your business, not your own personal assistant.

When you ask the most successful business owners what they wish they would have done differently, most of them would say that they wish they would have asked for help sooner.

Click here to download my Realistic Budget template! 

 

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If you want to grow your business faster, getting your personal finances dialed in will allow you to have more money available to outsource tasks, hire help and purchase more courses and coaching that will help you to grow your business faster. Click here to read more about my Financial Coaching where I can help you save money, to be able to reinvest it back into your business to become profitable, faster.

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Do you have any questions or anything to add? Leave me a comment in the comments below and I will respond back to you!

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