My recent post about time versus money brought up quite a few comments about outsourcing the project to somebody else and this is a topic I have seen discussed quite a lot around the blogosphere lately. In this post I’d like to discuss my own views on the topic and present arguments both for and against.

What is Outsourcing?

For those not familiar with the term, outsourcing simply means paying somebody to do some work for you. Currently there are two areas of work that I outsource – I pay somebody to re-write articles that I have written for submission to article directories and I pay somebody to do all my graphic design work.

In most businesses, especially online ones, there are many aspects that can be outsourced. Link building, any kind of writing such as articles, blog posts, ebooks, copywriting etc, technical work, design work, and of course the subject of my own project – software development.

Why Outsource?

Quite simply to save time. There are 168 hours in a week and every single person on this planet has the same amount of time. What we do with it determines the substance of our lives and the income that we earn. Lets assume a working week of 50 hours (which is way more than I work but hey, it’s a round number!) If you do work that pays or earns you $10 an hour then you will earn $500 in that week.

Now what if you could pay somebody else to do some of the work you do? Let’s say that you could outsource 30 hours of the work you do and you have to pay somebody else $8 an hour to do it. That will cost you $240 a week but that now frees up 30 hours of time. The big question is what do you do with that 30 hours. In purely financial terms it is only worth outsourcing if you can spend your time doing something that will bring in more money.

For example if you have a new task to work on which earns you $15 an hour but you still want the $10 work done, you can outsource 30 hours of $10 work costing you $240 but you are now earning $450 from your $15 work so in total you are now bringing in $710 a week instead of $500.

There are other reasons too – I outsource my article re-writing work because I simply hate doing it! It bores me to tears and I just don’t get it done. I also outsource things in the real world too. I like having a clean car but I don’t like cleaning it so I pay somebody else to do it for me!

Why Not Outsource?

The biggest obstacle standing in the way of outsourcing is simply lack of income to pay for it but I will assume that is not the issue for the sake of this post. Why else may you not want to outsource? It seems like a perfect solution so surely once the income is there you should outsource as much work as you can? There are two main reasons I can think of not to outsource certain aspects of your work.

You Can’t Outsource Yourself

This is not a generic Internet Marketing blog – it’s Caroline Middlebrook’s blog. With the exception of the odd guest post here and there, only I can write it. This is my personal touch and I cannot outsource myself. I could if I was Britney Spears or something but last time I looked in the mirror I wasn’t even close :-)

Where this becomes a woolly area is knowing where you need that personal touch and when you really don’t. My brother owns a landscape gardening business and it’s been going for over 30 years now. He hates it and really wants to retire yet he doesn’t because he moans that nobody else can do what he does. In other words, he refuses to outsource. Personally, I highly doubt that is the case. I’m sure somebody else could be trained to do what he does, he could outsource his work and retire.

If you are developing some kind of course where you are teaching something and it is your hard earned knowledge that you want to impart then you probably want to do that work yourself but if you are developing a website to generate AdSense income then outsourcing the content creation for that site is perfectly okay because it really doesn’t matter who has written it.

You Are Learning a Skill

Everything you do requires some kind of skill. With blogging, one of the most common aspects to outsource is the techy stuff – getting it setup, installing plugins, designing the theme and so on. These tasks require specialist skills. If you outsource the work you need to hire somebody who has those skills and of course it means that you won’t be developing them yourself.

This is the reason I am not outsourcing my software project – because I want to learn all of the skills involved in developing a website myself as this opens up a whole load of possibilities for me in the future, and not necessarily just related to Internet Marketing. These are skills I really want to learn and therefore I have no desire to outsource the work even though the project would probably get done much faster if I did.

If you are in this position ask yourself if you actually have a need and desire to learn the skills that are required for the task at hand.

Now in some cases, you may simply not be the kind of person who can develop the required skills. For example, I get all of my graphic work done by Linda from eCoverSource.com and she is brilliant. Even though I could in theory learn a package such as photoshop, I have absolutely no artistic flair whatsoever and so I’d never be able to do what she does. This is a perfect candidate for outsourcing.

Similarly, most people wouldn’t be able to learn software development unless they had done it before which is probably why many people who comment on my project are confused as to why I am doing it myself. It’s all about evaluating your own skill sets really.

   


from Caroline Middlebrook