So far most of the posts I’ve put up on the blog have been about the iPhone, but today I thought I’d touch on a subject which relates more to lifestyle design. Outsourcing!
When I first read Four Hour Work Week in December last year one of the things I got most excited about was the idea of outsourcing tasks that I don’t necessarily have to (and/or want to) do myself. While there is a cost to this of course, for most people living in Australia or the first world today, there is a great deal of benefit to outsourcing some if not most of the simple and menial tasks that we face on a day to day basis.
At the time I first read the book, I didn’t really take on the concept however. There were too many reasons why it might not work for me, even if I could see that it might be a good idea for someone else (like Tim Ferris).
That was until a couple months ago when I met a guy named Matthew, through a seminar I was attending. Matthew had told me about a web related project that he was working on and he mentioned that he was looking at outsourcing the creation of the site. From there I mentioned Four Hour Work Week and ended up lending him a copy of the book which funnily, he hadn’t read yet. When he did Matt loved it so much he ended up purchasing three copies, one for himself and two to lend to friends.
From there Matthew started encouraging me to take on more of the outsourcing ideas in my own life and business, which I finally started to do with tremendous results. It started with outsourcing my ironing, a relatively simple project. While i used to iron a shirt whenever I wanted to wear one, I now save probably 10-20 minutes a week by taking a stack of shirts in to be ironed once or twice a month (average cost is about $1.80 per shirt) and that frees up at least an hour a month, which I can charge out at 5 times the cost that I pay to have the shirts ironed, or simply use to free up more time for myself.
From there it moved on to getting a cleaner in. I’d been living with a flatmate who had very different ideas to me on when and how often we should clean the house. We both agreed that it should be done regularly, but where I preferred to do a little regularly, she liked to clean the whole place at once, even if it was only one time a month. So to take the frustration out of the situation and with a recommendation from Matthew, I hired a cleaner who now comes in 2-3 times a month and does all the cleaning I can ask for at less then what I would charge for 1.5 hours of work. Time saved? Approximately 10 hours a month and boy is the house clean.
After those two moderate successes I thought I’d try the idea on my own business and I haven’t been disappointed with the results there either. I now try to outsource most of the technical work in my business, which I’d often found hard to find time for after working a full day at the office already. Now, I spend most of my time making new contacts and chasing up leads, while others work around the clock (and the world) developing the sites and software that I spec up. End result, turnover is up by 300% and I don’t spend much more time on my business then I did 3 months ago.
Okay, so many of you will be wondering, where do I outsource too? Well the opportunities are pretty endless, from outsourcing your cooking by eating out, to outsourcing car maintenance or yard work. However, I can probably provide a few links that might also be useful to get you started:
http://www.odesk.com
http://www.elance.com – outsource design, programming or web related work
http://www.tooeasy.com.au – a local site for outsourincg your more mundane tasks
Have any sites that you use for outsourcing and can recommend or would just like to tell us what you’ve been outsourcing, register as a user and leave a comment on this post. I’d love to hear your experiences.