LD Staff Writer
In Part 2 of this series, we discussed the importance of picking the appropriate outsourcing provider for your tasks. Once you have found your perfect provider, it’s important that you commit to making that relationship work.
Too often, we speak with small business owners who view outsourcing as an experiment.
Their first question is: “Is there a contract or commitment?”
When they find out there isn’t, it’s something like: “Okay, I’ll test you guys out and see how it goes.”
With that attitude, we’re already off to a rocky start. There’s no magic to outsourcing and delegating. It’s very much the same as hiring someone to work at your business – there is an amount of effort involved, especially at the beginning.
You wouldn’t hire someone to do a job unless you were fully committed to training them and helping them do the work. That’s the same level of commitment you should bring to an outsourcing relationship…
It’s going to be work. It’s not easy outsourcing and delegating, but if you fully appreciate the benefits of outsourcing, you’ll have the motivation to put in the required effort.
It’s important to keep a couple of things in mind here:
- You are giving up control. For a small business owner, that’s a hard thing to do. You’re going to have to fight back the urge to take your pet projects back under your wing. You’ll have to let go of scrutinizing and overemphasizing minor details that don’t really change the quality of the work. You’ll have to resist deciding it’s not perfect because it is not exactly the way you would do it.
- You are going to have to give feedback and be patient. Again, no magic here. You’re dealing with human beings, and it’s unlikely they’ll do a perfect job right off the bat. Their job is to keep you happy. If they didn’t do something right, it’s probably not for lack of effort or intelligence – it’s probably due to a misunderstanding. You should expect to shape and fine tune the results of your outsourcing provider over time through feedback and tweaking processes.
In the beginning, we strongly recommend at least weekly check-ins to discuss how things are going, brainstorm ideas, get questions answered, and provide feedback.
Depending on the complexity of your projects, you may want to do daily meetings as your provider gets up and running. When giving feedback, it is important to be specific – and make sure that changes are made to the process in order to prevent those mistakes from happening in the future.
The point is that you’ve got to commit to putting effort in at the beginning to achieve the best results. Over the long-term, you’ll have to keep putting in effort to keep the relationship healthy – and ideally, so will the provider you choose.
We’ve seen clients do a great job of getting things set up in the beginning, just to disappear for 8-12 months. We can’t reach them with questions. We don’t hear a peep from them, despite our efforts, and they eventually come back dissatisfied – realizing what we’ve been doing isn’t correct anymore, all because of changes in their business they didn’t share.
After the initial set up and feedback period, you should schedule at least monthly check-ins. These are a good opportunity to meet with your provider and brainstorm about improving processes and delegating more work
The effort you put in as the client ensures that you get more bang for your buck over time, and that you can develop a lasting, trusting relationship with the outsourcing provider you choose. Effective outsourcing is a two way street!
Want to learn more?
[su_button url=”https://longerdays.com/2018/01/01/take-a-tour-of-our-features/” target=”blank” style=”flat” background=”#2F6690″ size=”10″ center=”yes” radius=”6″]Take a tour of our features![/su_button]