The Importance of Outsourcing Everyday Tasks

As a small business owner, it’s likely you will try to do it all yourself. In the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey that’s a feasible task to take on, but as your brand grows, where you spend most of your time will often change. While this is a great problem to have, you don’t want those aspects you can’t focus on to be forgotten about so outsourcing may be a great tool for you.

Choosing Tasks to Outsource

Outsourcing can sound scary – leaving your tasks in someone else’s hands when you’re used to doing it all yourself. It doesn’t have to be scary though! In fact, in can really work in your favor. When choosing tasks to outsource start by making a list of items you do daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly. Then break each list down by the percentage of time you spend on those tasks. Now you can see all your tasks and the time they take up in one place. Next, choose tasks either you like to do the least or ones that can easily be outsourced. You’re the boss, so you get to choose which tasks to outsource!

Common tasks that are outsourced may include:

• Social media – hire someone to create your social media calendar, create the content and/or schedule the content
• Weekly/monthly reports – hire someone to pull and send your reports that take up your Monday’s
• Data entry – hire someone to finally log all the data you have sitting in your inbox
• Bookkeeping – hire someone to review your books and get you back on track
• Answering phone calls/emails – hire someone to respond for you so you aren’t interrupted in the middle of a task anymore

These are just a few tasks you can outsource and depending on the time you need to spend on each, you can likely find someone to take on all of the tasks for you or split the tasks up between two different individuals.

The Next Steps

Now that you’ve selected tasks to be outsourced it’s time to hire someone! For basic items such as social media, reports or data entry UpWork is a great tool to use. You write up a job description, can set your budget, set the hours per week/month you expect worked and then interested individuals will apply for the job. You can see their profiles and background and even set up an interview before hiring them. Since tasks like bookkeeping are quite a bit more detailed and confidential, we recommend hiring a professional company for this task.

Professional bookkeeping companies like us, Profit Meadow Bookkeeping, have different levels of assistance they can provide to fit any budget. We offer everything from bookkeeping to bill pay, payroll and back work. Interested in learning more? Schedule a free review of your books.

Once outsourcing is checked off your list, it’s time to focus on how you are going to use your spare hours. All those tasks you have been pushing off or new things you wanted to try, now you have the time for!