An Outsourcing Framework — systemising and hiring with success [pt 2/2]
Part 2 of the six-figure sidehustle… and the 10-minute workweek
Lessons from Adam Stone: 21 year old serial entrepreneur shares how to outsource your job and make your time even more valuable.
Today I will teach you the art of clever delegation and how to efficiently offload work to others, without relinquishing control of your company (or your role, as the case may be)… Studying full time definitely taught me how to work smarter, rather than harder. I now spend less than 10 minutes a week on that project (mainly on keeping the books in order!).
This post (the second in the 2-part series) is a step-by-step guide to outsourcing the entire operations of your business. Click here to read the first part for some background as to why this is so important.
Disclaimer: Unfortunately outsourcing is still a dirty word, so let me clarify that I simply mean ‘in-house but offshore’. Even so, there’s no offshore requirement either as this guide applies to any type of employee, whether insourced or outsourced, and requires treating each and every person as essential elements to your company.
This means being willing to provide above-average salaries and bonuses in return for the extra responsibility you’re giving each one of your employees.
Seriously. It’s not optional, or everything will fall apart. You should be getting ‘best boss’ mugs and gifts FROM your employees at Christmas (yup, I am proud to say I receive those things almost every year… and I’m a Jew!).
To me, the most important skill in all this is the art of delegating. To quote Mark Zuckerberg,
“The question I ask myself like almost every day is, ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?’… Unless I feel like I’m working on the most important problem that I can help with, then I’m not going to feel good about how I’m spending my time.”
… and to me, that’s why delegating is so essential. It allows me to stand back and think about the important things, and ensure that I have the capacity to do only the work that I truly excel at.
My primary duty to my business is simply to take it to the next level.
Anything that can be offloaded I will offload, at risk of otherwise losing sanity, efficiency and focus, and falling behind on any task that remains in my responsibility… and losing a grip on my duty to the company.
So, here’s the process to leveraging your time, learned through trial and error (lots of error…).
It took 3 years to get from doing 100% of the work to 0% of it, but boy was it worth it.
Every minute I put into systemising and offloading my tasks I knew was a minute saved… in perpetuity
I am following this exact framework for Speedlancer and verified that a) it still works and b) it takes less than a month to get started. And as I’ll discuss in the 3rd part of the series, Speedlancer’s Bundles products are shaped on the same framework (in fact, we’ve built technology to automate this sort of human coordination in delivering campaigns of work).
People wonder what it’s like being a solo-founder. If you can get past the loneliness, following this framework you’ll be able to achieve most things — cheaper & more efficiently.
Step 1: Do the task yourself.
Begin a new (type of) task by doing it yourself — get a feel for each and every task you are doing. This is the default for most people, so I won’t go through this one. The moral is not to ask people to do anything you can’t do yourself.
[I understand you probably already have employees who are handling various tasks that you’d have no idea how to do. If that’s the case, and you’d like to treat them with tips for how to make their role more efficient and leverage their time, have them heed this guide too.]
Example: I used to do every support ticket myself on my 30 minute bus ride to school, until we received over 30 tickets per day when I decided to take on my first employee as a teenager. When a year later we were receiving 200 technical tickets per day, I was very thankful to have offloaded this activity. I haven’t opened a single support ticket in the last 3 years as frankly, our site has the best ratings of the industry and I wouldn’t want to intrude on our processes!
Story 2: With Speedlancer, all customer support, operations and recruitment are already documented following the processes outlined below. Next stop: marketing ops with the help of @Jon Westenberg and Speedlancer Bundles.
Step 2: Decide what to offload
I’d propose this as a checklist:
- Which tasks are the most routine, repeatable and highest priority at the moment?
- What’s bogging your day down?
- What’s costing your team time?
- Which of your company’s activities rely on one person to the extent that if you need to scale it on a dime (or if they left the company) you’d be screwed?
- Use with caution: which tasks do you despise doing?
Customer support, order fulfilment, operations, and personal assistant tasks are generally a good place to start. Later, individual workflows such as marketing-related activities can certainly be systemised and offloaded as well.
These are all activities that are weakening your business and will come back to bite in the future and will keep you up at night if you haven’t systemised everything successfully.
Almost anything can be outsourced, so long as you can create discrete tasks out of it (step 3).
Step 3: Teaching others
You know how to do the work, but do you know how to teach others?
Ensure you learn the intricate techniques/requirements for each of the tasks you’re looking to offload, as quickly as possible. If you’ve been doing the task yourself for a while, some elements may become second-nature and you won’t remember to document/teach them, so make sure to note down all of the conceivable areas of confusion.
Side note: make sure to consider if there are any elements within each task that you are not comfortable offloading, and save them for last (eg you may not want someone to handle large refunds or PayPal claims… until you have eventually progressed to building in an oversight process into the procedures!). Security comes first.
The more you can separate each task into its discrete sub-tasks, the more robust your procedures will become. Make them unbreakable (yup that’s right… you can make human processes unbreakable if the system is right). Again, it’s what we aim to do with our Speedlancer Bundles by breaking them into tasks (with the goal for them to be flawless product-services which we sell).
Step 4: Documenting
Begin documenting every step of the process for handling the task.
Obviously this takes time, but remember that once you delegate it you’ll never have to do it again. The return on time is massive as it will save you from having to ever do the task, in perpetuity.
The documentation should include all relevant screenshots, notes, comments, and flow charts, with the aim of totally systemising everything. That is to say, separate each task into its discrete components (just as we do with our Bundles, separating them into discrete 4 Hour Tasks to ensure consistent reliable delivery of the Bundle at large).
There are two approaches to this. The first option is creating a searchable knowledgebase. This can be done in Word, in Pipefy, or something like an internal HelpScout Docs. The second option is to set up a detailed training document which is designed to be read end-to-end, not searched. I’d suggest the former approach as each task can be discrete and it’s all searchable, but we’ve used both with success.
For example, we created a knowledge base containing instructions for troubleshooting various products, how to use the admin panel, where to do research, etc.
Here’s a screenshot of 55 pages out of almost 70 pages in our knowledge base, where every single process imaginable is systemised:
Step 5. The fun part! Hiring someone!
Hire someone with the skills applicable to that task. It does not really matter whether they are full time or not. Skills matter more than availability. This is because you are hiring them to finish documenting the process you started in Step 4! The whole point of this framework is to ensure that everything is scalable, and that you’re not relying on any given person, so their job from here on is to meticulously maintain the processes documentation for the tasks they are responsible for.
Tip: I’d recommend using Upwork for full-time hiring needs, combined with the guns of Speedlancer’s Tasks and Bundles for freelance tasks that scale.
Step 6.
Repeat steps 1–5 with each activity/task that is core to your business. Now your knowledgebase should be filling up with beautiful guides!
Step 7.
Once you find your top performing employee or freelancer, make them your point-person/project manager for delegating everything. The aim of this person is to be your number one oversight mechanism to hold the whole process together and make sure things get done. You should be able to offload any task you want to them and they can delegate to each specific person, and make sure they know they are accountable for getting the work done but that you’ll provide all the resources they need.
Congrats… if this point person lasts 3 years with you, they’ll be your most valuable asset and will be a fully-fledged Operations Manager for your business. Don’t worry, if they leave, everything is fully documented. Sounds like a dream, hey?
TL;DR (it’s a lot…)
Document EVERYTHING so you can scale on a whim. Start with first Ops hire, have them study your documentation, let them manage others almost immediately (if first signs are good). Then have them read this guide and document all other responsibilities. This should work for any business in some capacity.
I’m sure you’ll have questions, so fire away in the comments and I’ll answer them!
In the third part, I’ll tie this all into what I envisage is the future of work, and why I started Speedlancer, and what makes it so disruptive in my completely unbiased eyes! :)
If you enjoyed reading, please support my work by hitting that little heart!
I’d love to invite every single one of you to check out the platform. I believe in it, I love working on it, and I can’t wait to do some big things. Have a look, have a go, and find out what we can do.
