Business Fit Magazine August 2017 Issue 1 | Page 46

44 Article
W
e hear it constantly, “You need to be outsourcing,” “outsource
the tasks that force you to work in your business”, and “auto-
mate your business by outsourcing!”. Fine, we get it, outsour-
cing is important.
But where to start?!
As the director of StoryWand, I outsource a lot of the book production
to others more skilled in certain tasks… and have had my fair share of
disasters.
What I’m going to share with you today are the five biggest mistakes
I made when I first started outsourcing and give you the tools to not
make the same mistakes I did.
01
I went too cheap
My first error was being a stingy bastard.
Naturally, when you’re running a business, you want to reduce
overheads as much as possible. There is nothing wrong with this
strategy. I used sites like Fivrr, Upwork, and (back in the day) Elance, to
find the cheapest, best, worker I could find.
In my furious flurry, I completely forgot about the engineer’s triangle:
This triangle holds true even
for outsourcing. If you need
high-quality work done quickly,
it’s going to cost you. If you
want something done well and
cheaply, it’s going to take a
while. And if it’s fast and cheap,
don’t expect it to be any good.
If you go for the cheapest
option, you’re going to have to
spend a lot more time than you’d
like on fixing errors, managing
the outsourcer, and generally
having a miserable time.
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