Bringing Business to Retail
Where To Find Freelancers For Your Retail Store
-- Bringing Business to Retail podcast, episode 5. And I'm going to be hosting it Selena Night. And today, we're talking about how we go about outsourcing. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. On SelenaNight.com, stay ahead of the competition by opening your doors to business experts so you can learn, grow, and be inspired. Passionate about bringing business strategies to independent retailers. Please welcome your host, Selena Night. Hey there. Welcome back to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. And as in the announcement, today we're going solo. And we're in part two of our four-part series of how to outsource. And today, we're talking about the who to outsource to and where do we find those people. Now, I have mentioned in the previous episodes how important I think it is when you want to grow your business to outsource. So let's jump on in and find out who we're going to outsource to and where we're going to find them. Welcome back. And on today's episode, we're talking about the how. How do we go about outsourcing? After the last episode, I hope you made a list of the tasks that you'd like to outsource. And if you haven't listened to episode four yet, I'll link it up in the show notes for you. Or you can search B, B, T, R, 4 on SelenaNight.com. And you can listen to it. We talked about the what do we outsource. So where do we find these outsources? My first suggestion is that you don't try and do everything on your list at once. Start with an easier task that you can work out the processes that you need and who you're looking for. So grab something like creating a blog post for you. And you could ask them to research a specific topic and write you a 300 word blog post. So once we've looked at our list and we've worked out the what, what we're going to outsource, we need to work out the who. Who is it that we need to do this task? Now, whoever that person is, you need to have a list of priorities of the things you would like them to do. Now, the focus of today's episode will be on people that you're going to bring on board for a longer period of time. I'm not necessarily going to talk about someone who transcribes something for you or that you'll only use for a one off small project. We're talking about building your team. So we're talking about having people on your team for the longer term, people that are going to invest in your business. Think about their values. Are their values the same as yours? Are their values the same as what you're trying to perceive, the perception that you want for your company? Find out where they're located. And is this an issue for you? Because time zones do matter for some people. Sometimes you have priorities and sometimes you need work done. For example, if you want your email answered, you want it answered between your working hours, not overnight. So if that's important to you, write that down as one of the priorities. And you both need to be upfront about the working hours and the when the expected turnaround time is. So don't expect somebody else will work nine to five if you take them on, because maybe they work nine to five in their time zone. Or maybe they work 10 to two. You need to be specific in the job ad if it's a priority, that these are the timeframes and your local time zone that you're going to need this person for. And what's going to happen if they don't get their work to you on time? So you need to have outcomes and deliverables. You'll also need to train this person just like any other member of staff. My suggestion would be to start by giving them a list of your goals, your visions, and your customer avatar. Remember, the purpose of this exercise is to work out the who, who is it that we actually need. So if you're able to put together a package that will tell this potential person who you're looking for, what your goals are, your visions, who your customer is, what your priorities are, what your outcomes and deliverables will be, and what the values of your business are, you're instantly qualifying or disqualifying a potential candidate because if what you've written doesn't fly with them, if it doesn't strike a chord, if it doesn't make them feel yes, this is the kind of person that I'm looking for, then you don't want to waste your time interviewing them. You want to be able to put down a list of people who you think would be good for this job and nail it down to about three or four people at best. So when you actually have the criteria and you write your job description in terms of who it is you're actually looking for, not what the job is about. So we're not going to write a job that says, hey, I'm looking for someone to upload stock to my website and to answer my email and to reply to some comments on my blog. It doesn't matter what the what is in terms of, if you've said you're looking for an admin person, but these are the qualities you're looking for in that person. That is going to put you down to just a few candidates. It's going to easily make you see whether a person is going to be suitable for your position. Next up, we need to work out how long we need this person for on a weekly basis. Now remember, we're talking about somebody who will be part of your business long term, or for a decent period of time. So go back to your task list and work out how many hours roughly you think you'd like them to spend on each of those tasks in a week. And then you have an idea of how long you need this person for. Now you can hire a virtual assistant for anything from a couple of hours a week right through to 20 or 40 hours a week, but you need to know upfront so that you can tell them in your job ad. So you've got two options when you hire a virtual assistant. You can either hire them on an hourly rate, or you can hire them on a job rate. Once you've worked out how much time you need, you then need to work out how much you're prepared to spend to get those tasks done. Now an example of what would be an hourly rate versus what would be a job rate in my business is I have a virtual assistant who does a lot of work on our website, she answers emails and she posts some things on social media for me when I need her to. So she works on an hourly rate and when I hired her, the job description said that it would be for a set number of hours per week. Now that can sometimes be more occasionally it's less, but you have a commitment to this person. If you've told them that you want to work five or 10, or 15 hours, it's your job to find them that work. They've committed to you for that period of time. So it's up to you to make sure that they have enough work to keep themselves busy. An example of a job that's a one off job or a set fee job is editing my podcasts. So I have an editor who goes through and puts the beginning in and the intro in and the interview and then puts the music and the outro together and there's a set fee for that. So we've agreed on a price per episode and he will carry out that list of instructions for each episode for a set fee. Now it's not in my best interests or in his to necessarily have that as an hourly rate because I need to know that my production costs for a podcast are a certain amount. And he also knows that he has to get it done in the quickest time possible and still do a good job for this to be a good working relationship. So it means I get a really great turnaround time. I'm happy with my production and he will change things if I need him to. But I know that my set costs to produce a podcast are a certain amount. So have a think about the tasks and I'm guessing that in most cases you're probably looking at an hourly rate because the tasks that we are looking at outsourcing over this series tend to be more admin tasks. And in that case, you're going to be paying an hourly fee. So now you know what they're going to do and how long they're going to need to do those tasks. Hopefully you can also set a budget. And when you divide your budget by the amount of hours you want, you're going to come up with a rough hourly fee for this task. When you put your job up on one of the freelance websites, you need to put that as an indicator. So you might have anything from $5 an hour which you can get if you outsource to somewhere like the Philippines or to India, or you may be prepared to pay 20, 30, $40 an hour. It will totally depend on the tasks that you're asking someone to do. Now in the past I've paid $100 an hour for some copywriting work because I knew that I could get somebody who was really high quality and they would get the job done in an hour. So that is up to you to decide but for a general admin person, depending on whether you want someone who's offshoring a low socioeconomic country like the Philippines or in India or Sri Lanka. Those are usually lower fees. And then if you take someone from the US or Canada or Australia or even in Europe, you may be looking at anything from 20 to 30 to $40. So you need to set the budget to make it very clear that the person who's applying for your job is on the same page. Now you can see throughout today's episode my whole point of writing all these things down is to reduce the amount of time that you're going to spend looking for the right person. We're going to put it all up front. We're going to tell them exactly who we're looking for, potentially what they need to be doing and the amount that we can spend for these tasks to be done. Now when you're on the same page that's a great start to a working relationship. Now you don't have to remember all that. I'll pop that up in a list on the show notes for you. So now we know what we're going to outsource and we worked out who it is that we actually need. How do we find these people? Well, there's an easy way and a somewhat more difficult way. It depends on your approach. Easy and difficult are relative. So there's the do it yourself option. There's always a DIY option in small business or you can find a done for you service. Now I'm quickly going to talk about the done for you service because if you are new to outsourcing it may be the best option for you. So essentially what you do is you go to a company that specializes in hiring virtual assistants. They will ask you for your criteria and you already have that because you've just mapped out who it is that you're looking for and they will go to their own database and they will search out the clients for you. They will go and find you three up to between three and six people who look like they would fit your criteria. Now in most cases they've already done some testing on these potential staff members. They will have done some English tests. They will have done some typing tests. They may have done some WordPress tests but the idea is that for a small fee and you're looking at between two and $300 usually, you can get them like a recruitment agent. For that small fee they're going to go and find you the best candidates. Now is that something that you're prepared to pay for? That's up for you to decide. Just remember that your time is money. So think about this carefully about whether you need a done for you service. Now I have to admit I haven't actually used a done for you service because I've always used the DIY approach and that's my preference because the done for you service is relatively new. But I asked around to a few of my fellow entrepreneurs and I found I think there's three or four companies who do do the matching service and I'll pop those up in the show notes for you. Now when I asked my friends I wanted someone who was reputable, someone who was affordable and I wanted people who'd actually hired from these services. So when you go to the show notes you can know that at least we've tested the people on these lists. Now the second option is a DIY option. And that means that once you have your criteria you go to an outsourcing website. And there are a few of them. Again I'll pop them up in the show notes but we're talking freelancer, E-lant, O-desk. They're just the top three that come to mind. And you pop your job up there and you get people who apply. And again there's usually two options for these. You can put your job up and then get people to apply or you can go and search for somebody that you thinks meets your criteria and then you can invite them to apply to your job. So you can either have a private job or a public job. Now here is my big tip if you're going to do it as a public job and get people to apply. You will be amazed at how many people apply for your job in those first couple of hours. You will literally get, if it's just a general admin job and you've written a really good description you can get anything from 10 to 50 to even 100 responses in an hour. Now that is way too overwhelming for you to sift through. Now hopefully when we've written our criteria we've made it really specific as to the person that we want. But to make it even more tailored my suggestion is you ask them to include something personal or something that proves that they've read the ad. Now for a general virtual assistant in the past I've often just written into the job description two plus two equals and question mark and tell me why I've asked this question. Now the good ones know that two plus two equals four and you asked me this question to make sure I read the job description. That's what you're looking for and you could even say put this in the subject line. Alternatively you could ask them a more specific question or you could do one of the tell me a time when you were in a certain situation and how did you respond. But the idea is not to get a lengthy answer. The idea is to just make sure that they've actually read your job description because on these freelance websites you will get spammed. There are automated systems which just reply to any job advertisement regardless of whether they are who you are looking for and who they are not. So put in some sort of qualifying question that allows you to easily pick the good from the bad or the wheat from the chaff. So my suggestion again would be to put it to ask them to put it in the header of the email or if they're replying through the online form to put it in the first paragraph because you want to be able to see from the outset whether you press delete or not. Now if a person looks like they might be a good fit and they haven't answered the question I do strongly ask you to think about whether it is this person that you want on board. If they don't have enough attention to detail to actually read your job description are they going to have enough attention to detail moving forward to actually do the tasks that you've set out. Because these people are going to be working remotely. They're going to be working on their own and they have to have a sense of autonomy. So think about whether that perfect person who hasn't answered your question is actually the perfect person. Now my idea here is not to scare you or to overwhelm you. It's to try and tell you about the situations that I've been in in the past and the systems that I've put in place to streamline the hiring process. Now, if you want to talk more about hiring process I actually have a whole module in my course that's launching in May called the launch pad. And it teaches you how to open your own store. But that's an aside. What I'm trying to point out is I've made a lot of mistakes when it's come to hiring people and I'd like to help you not make so many. Let's be honest, you're probably going to make a couple but I'd like to try and help you through this process and make it as simple as possible. And that's why you're listening to today's podcast. So now that you have a great big list of people that you've have applied to your ad hopefully you've culled out a great big chunk of them because they haven't actually looked at your job description. The idea is to nail it down to about preferably three people, five at the most. And once you've got to five, I then want you to go through and take out your outcomes, your deliverable, your priorities, your time zones and rank these people in order of who you think would be the best fit. Is there anything that one does better than the other according to their resume? And you can always go back and ask them for some more questions, ask them some more questions. You can always go back and say, look, knowing how to use a Magento website is really important to me. Can you tell me, you've mentioned here that you've got some experience. Can you tell me what extent of experience you've got? Like, is it just uploading stock or are we talking upgrades? And you can ask them questions. Don't be afraid to ask these questions because at the end of the day this person is going to work for you. They're going to work with you to build your business. And you don't want to spend time and money training them only to find out that your expectations were much higher because you misinterpreted or perhaps you misconstrued what it was, what they said that they could do. So now that you have a great big list of people that you've have applied to your ad, hopefully you've culled out a great big chunk of them because they haven't actually looked at your job description. The idea is to nail it down to about preferably three people, five at the most. And once you've got to five, I then want you to go through and take out your outcomes, your deliverables, your priorities, your time zones and rank these people in order of who you think would be the best fit. Is there anything that one does better than the other according to their resume? And you can always go back and ask them for some more questions, ask them some more questions. You can always go back and say, look, knowing how to use a Magento website is really important to me. Can you tell me, you've mentioned here that you've got some experience. Can you tell me what extent of experience you've got? Like, is it just uploading stock or are we talking upgrades? And you can ask them questions. Don't be afraid to ask these questions because at the end of the day, this person is going to work for you. They're going to work with you to build your business. And you don't want to spend time and money training them only to find out that your expectations were much higher because you misinterpreted or perhaps you misconstrued what it was, what they said that they could do. So I want you to get that list down to two or three people. And then I want you to go and get your list of tasks that you want them to carry out. And pick out a fairly easy task that could be carried out by all three of them. But one that you think is one of the most important. So one of your priorities. Then you can get them to go and do that job for you. You're going to hire these people in a one-off job basis. So remember how earlier I said that you can either hire them on an hourly basis or a one-off job basis? To begin with, we're just going to hire them on this one-off job basis. And I would suggest maybe a task that's going to take maybe one or two hours bearing in mind something that normally takes you 15 minutes is probably going to take them an hour or so because they have to learn your systems and your way of doing things. They may need to do some research. So just keep that in the back of your mind and hire them to do this one-off task for a set fee. Now that fee is obviously going to be determined by how intensive the job is or how much research they have to do. But just do a small job for a small fee first and get your final candidates to do the job. And then when they've submitted the job back, you can go over and see who you liked best. You can see if they asked any questions. You can see the quality of their finished work. You might want to be looking at their English skills or their presentation skills. As long as you are upfront with them at the beginning to say you've been shortlisted, you're down to my top three and I'd really love it if you could do this task and from there I'll be choosing my successful candidate. Then they'll be happy with that. The other thing you have to remember is you don't have to just hire one person. You can have more than one person. It doesn't mean it's going to cost you anymore, but you may find that one of the candidates has a particularly strong background in, say, admin. And that's something you're really looking for, but maybe they don't have experience with your shopping cart. And you really wanted this person to actually do some uploading of products onto your website. So you can break those two jobs apart. Don't actually reject somebody just because they don't meet every single criteria. Have a think back to your task list and go over what it is that you've prioritised. Once you've gone through this process and you've chosen who you think will actually be great to work with, go through and give them a contract like you would any other employee. So you can use a contract that you've used for an in-store employee and just modify it, or a lot of websites will give you a sample contract that you can use for freelancing websites. But what is important to remember, as I've stressed right throughout the interview, is that you need to have common ground. You need to have outcomes and deliverables. And if you don't have that, it's easy for the whole process to go off the rails. Now, I've outsourced a lot of times, and I can tell you that sometimes you still get it wrong. Even if you have the process in place that other people work differently. And I've just had this problem, well, not a problem. I've just had this little stumbling block with one of my assistants where I had given a bunch of tasks for her to do, but I hadn't actually asked her to go ahead and do it. Now, that sounds silly, but in actual fact, when I looked back at the wording, I had asked if a certain set of tasks could be done, and she had replied, "Yes, she could do them." But on my behalf, I hadn't gone ahead and said, "Well, can you focus on these tasks "and spend two hours on the first project, "three hours on the second project?" So you can't just assume that everybody else thinks the same way that you do. Now, there's always going to be a little process, a getting to know you process, I call it. So you just have to take that in your stride, and both learn from each other as to what's acceptable, what's common in terms of what you're expecting, if you give instructions, and you need to make sure that you actually verbalize this. And this is where it comes back to being a leader and a manager, because if you can't see this person, you can't expect them to just go ahead and do work that you haven't authorized them to do. They don't want to jeopardize their job, and it's the same for an employee in your shop, they're not going to go ahead and start doing things that are outside their usual job description if you haven't already given them approval to do it, or you haven't said, "Hey, if you've got some free time, "I'd love it if you could upload some products "to the website." So you need to set those boundaries and set those guidelines regardless of who your employer is, whether it's a virtual employee or an in-store employee. So that's kind of bringing me to the end. I think I've made it pretty clear that outsourcing is going to give you a, a new found sense of independence, because you're going to have so much time freed up for all those other things that you've been putting on your to-do list, and b, it's also going to put you in those manage issues, or those owner's shoes. In fact, if we want to move out of a manager, we want to become the owner. We want to be looking after our organization as if we don't have to work in it at all. So we're putting these systems and processes in place to extricate ourselves out of working in the business for any length of time. And that should be your ultimate aim. Your ultimate aim should be to get your business into a position where you don't have to work in it. You only need minimal input, if any, to keep this business running and earning you an income. And you've heard me say it before, but if you haven't, I'll say it again, that if you have to work in your business every single minute of every single day, it is just a job. It is no different than working for somebody else, except the pay might be less at the beginning. So your ultimate aim for your small business should be to extricate yourself out of it. And I'll leave that with you to have a bit of a think. If you haven't already, we'd love it if you could share this episode with somebody else. And don't forget, if you subscribe on iTunes and Stitcher, that you won't miss any episodes at all. Head on over to the blog and tell me if you think I've missed something out. Is there something that you desperately need to know or that I didn't cover? Maybe I just glossed over it and didn't go in detail. Pop me a comment and I'll make sure to review it for the next episode. And speaking of the next episode, I've actually got a great lady coming on, Erin Howard, and she's going to talk to us about how to protect our data when we're outsourcing. So stay tuned for that one and I'll see you next week. (upbeat music) I'll catch you on the next episode. Have a great day. Bye. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)