Bringing Business to Retail Podcast, Episode 4 with me, Selena Knight, and we're talking outsourcing. Welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail Podcast on SelenaKnights.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 Knight. Hey there, Sel from the Bringing Business to Retail Podcast here. And on today's episode, which is the first part one of a four-part series, it's the first in the series, we're going to be talking about outsourcing. We're going to talk about how, as busy owners in our business, we can use outsourcing to free up time to either spend on our business or in our personal lives. So let's jump on in and learn about why we should outsource. So in today's episode, we're going to talk about why we should outsource. Now I mentioned in the intro that it's great for business and it can also be great in your life. Now the biggest thing that I find with business owners, the reason they don't tend to outsource is because they find the whole process scary. They don't know what this person should be doing. They don't know where to find the people, they don't know how to actually manage the people, and they don't know what to expect or what to pay. So we're going to go over those things in our four-part series. So today, plus another three episodes on outsourcing. We're going to talk today about why we're going to outsource. Next week, we're going to talk about where we can find out sources. In the following week, we're going to talk about how we protect our content, how do we protect our mailing lists, our customer details and our websites. And in the last episode, we're going to talk to some really successful people who have used outsourcing to grow their businesses dramatically. Now, is it scary? Are you doing it already? Do you have a cleaner or do you have a bookkeeper or do you have, say, a graphic designer? If you do, you are already outsourcing work without even knowing it. What you're doing is taking on someone who is specialized at what they do and can do the job far better in far less time and probably for far less money than what you would do if you were going to be doing the job yourself. And this is why we outsource. We outsource when we're overwhelmed with work, when it is not worth your time, when we can get somebody to do that job quicker, easier, faster, better. It is your job as the business owner to focus on what you're good at, what it is that makes your business money. And that is not necessarily cleaning the toilets. Outsourcing will also add technical skills to your business that you don't have. Think about if you need to update your website. Do you need to get some graphic design done? Those things you or anyone in your team may not be especially good at. And even if they can manage to fumble their way through it, you may not end up with the outcome that you're looking for. So in this case, whilst it might cost a bit more, you may end up paying a graphic designer $60 or $100 an hour. They may well get the job done in one hour. So for that $100 you've got the brochure or the poster that you need, rather than you or one of your staff spending a whole day trying to fumble their way through it, not having it up to standard for the printer, not having it up to standard for what you want in your store, and in the meantime, we haven't actually done a whole bunch of work that we should be doing. So we've added money, we've added technical skills, and it's the easy way for you to add an employee into your business without having the overheads. So when we're outsourcing, we're bringing on a freelancer or a contractor. Those people generally don't attract the overheads that a staff member does. So they're not getting sick pay, they're not getting holiday pay, they're not getting superannuation. It is up to them to actually work that out for themselves. You're hiring them to come in and do a job either on an hourly or a project basis, and they have to build that into their costs. If you don't have employees yet, having an outsourced worker or a freelancer or a contractor is a great way to work out how you go as a leader. It's going to force you to work out what needs to be done. You're going to have to be clear in your instructions. You're going to find your strengths and your weaknesses when it comes to employees. Now this is a great way to test how you're going to be a manager if you're not already. Now hands up if this is you, and this is what I tend to find with business owners and entrepreneurs, you think that it's going to be easier if you do it yourself. Now we're talking about the basic mundane repetitive tasks like answering emails where the same questions come in over and over again. You think that nobody else can do it as good as you. It is quicker just to do it yourself. Now let me tell you something that I have discovered. You're right, nobody else is going to do it the same way that you do it. It doesn't mean it's not going to be as good. It could even be better, but it's not the way that you would do it. And this is one of the things that you have to learn as a business owner is to relinquish control, to delegate these tasks to somebody else. Let me give you an example of something that I outsourced right from the beginning of this podcast. When I record a podcast, I simply upload it to a Dropbox folder. My assistant is then notified that there's new material in that folder. She'll send it off to the editor and then she also listens to it herself. And this way she can put it together, the show notes and the links on the blog post. The podcast then has to be tagged and uploaded to a file server and then copied across to our website and scheduled for release. She'll pop all of this information into a blog post. Now if I had to do all of that myself, regardless of the fact that I don't even know how to edit a podcast, I think it would take me days. It took me several hours just to learn how to tag a podcast, which, now that I know how to do it, takes about a minute. But I don't know how to use the editing software and I don't want to know how to use the editing software. It's not my forte. I'm not interested in it. I could be doing something else like another podcast, or I could be creating my course content, or I could be consulting. Something that is more productive for my time and it will earn me money. So bringing on these two freelancers has actually freed up at least one day of my week, perhaps even more. Now if I hadn't chosen to do that, I would probably get extremely frustrated with the length of time it was taking. I would get really annoyed that it wasn't meshing together because I don't know how to edit. I wouldn't know how to put the pieces together properly. I would probably skip over some of the resources that are supposed to go into the blog post. And there's a really good chance that it wouldn't come out on time. So for the small amount of money I pay for my podcast, I get back a whole day. All I have to do is spend the time to record the podcast. And whilst I do actually go out and find people to interview, a lot of the scheduling is done by my assistant. So even that part, the back and forth of emails of trying to work out when everybody's going to be free, she'll look at my calendar, see when I'm free, see when the time zone works for the other person, and she will actually schedule the time in. And I just pop into my calendar and see when I have that. She also does a lot of research on the person that I'm going to interview. Now again, that can take hours. I have done it before. But the idea of someone giving me a one or two page document that talks about the person and their background, I can then go off and click on some websites and get some information if I need to. But the fact that I have a complete description there is great for me to actually work my podcast out. What am I going to ask this person? Now, when I've actually chosen a person to be on the podcast, I usually have something in mind about what we're going to speak about. But the idea that we have some information on their background means I've got some more points of reference. I can go back and say, "Look, because you've done this, this, and this, how did that translate into what we're talking about?" It means you end up with a more interesting podcast. I end up with a much more engaged guest and all up, that has been done by my assistant in time that I have been doing something else. And you're probably thinking, "Oh, that's great. She does a podcast. She can just outsource all that technical stuff." But I also have freelancers in our retail stores. It was one of the first ways that I actually brought on employees so I could get more done. My first ever freelancer was a virtual assistant. Now, if you haven't heard of a virtual assistant, it is exactly what it sounds like. It is an assistant that you have who works virtually. Now, they can be located anywhere in the world. And this means that you have a choice of people who aren't just in your local area. They are all around the world working for different amounts of money and they have a different skill set. Each person is going to have different sets of skills that you can take and put into your business. I thought I put together a quick list of what you can outsource. So I just sat down for two minutes and wrote a list. First off, graphic design. There's a good chance that somebody in-house is not able to do this. Social media. If you haven't already got your social media set up, a virtual assistant can put together your Facebook, your Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and they can use apps like Buffer or Hootsuite to actually schedule your posts. What does this mean? This means that you can actually look at the content before it gets published. So if you're having trouble letting go, you can get them to schedule all of the posts to go out to those social media sites. And you can actually go through and have a look and see if they're okay. If you like them, you keep them. If you don't, you can take them out or you can ask them to change them. So it's a great way of kind of handing over the work to somebody else, but you're still there to actually vet the work. Now, if you've got a website, how bloody boring is it to upload new products? I mean, I don't know about you, but we have to resize images because our website works with a certain set of images. We have to write the descriptions, we have to put the pricing in, we have to put the weights in. Now, a lot of that information is already there. We just have to upload it. And for us to upload a new product, by the time we put it into our Point of Sale system and then onto our website, it can take anything from three minutes to ten minutes, depending on how much of that information is actually given to us on an invoice or on a supplier's website. So if you get a batch of new products, if you get, say, 20 new products from a supplier, you now have anything up to 200 minutes that your staff are going to be doing, putting stock into your system. Now, that could be done by somebody who could be doing it a lot cheaper, and your staff could be doing things in their store that's actually going to make you money. You can also get the backend tech upgrades, so sometimes you need to upgrade your system, and if you've got a website host or a website manager, sometimes these people will do that for you. But occasionally you might just want to add a plug-in in or add an add-on to your website, but you're not quite sure how to do it, and you're a bit worried about stuffing it up. So you could actually get somebody else who knows the system, knows your program, your software, and can tell you how long it's going to take, whether it's going to conflict with anything else, and then they can go ahead and do it for you. And other simple things, like if you've got a slider on your home page, changing those images, it can just take ages by the time you've resized them and put the text in. Imagine if you just had a bank of images and somebody did all of that for you. How much time is that going to free up? But keep going. Admin. Email answering. There's always going to be a set of questions that get asked over and over and over again. I found this out right at the beginning, so I developed an FAQ page for that product. But the other thing that you'll find is simple things that people just don't look at. What time are you open? Do you have this in stock? Can you tell me what hours you're open? Can you tell me what days you're open? All these things that, or can you tell me the directions to get to your store? All these things that you don't need to answer. You could answer those once. And you can do that because if you're already answering your email, you're going to know those questions. And if you haven't already put a standard answer together and stuck them in a Word document, you should. But you could give that Word document to somebody else. And somebody else could filter all of your emails. So you only get the important ones. And eventually you could train that person up so that you don't even have to answer the emails. The only emails that come through to you are the ones that are outside of your general admin duties that you've given to your assistant. Now, one of the things I discovered by accident is having a virtual assistant is great for handling refunds and exchanges because they do not have any personal attachment to your product. They're not going to get upset if somebody doesn't like what they receive. They don't like the color, they don't like the style. I mean, you've put a lot of thought and a lot of effort into what you're going to keep into your store. So don't be upset because it is really easy to get offended when somebody doesn't like the product they received. They will always be somebody who is not happy. Now, your virtual assistant doesn't care. They didn't spend the hours working out what you're going to keep in store. They just have a process that you've put in place for them to implement. So you may have a return authorization system. You may have no refund. You may only offer exchanges. But one, it's going to force you to make sure that you've got that policy in place. And all I'll say on that is to make sure that you actually work in terms of your local laws. But you're going to put that system in place and you're going to give it to your assistant. And she or he is going to handle any returns or exchanges. So again, straight away, you're going to free up time. You're going to free up some emotional energy. And if you're listening and you don't own a retail store, this applies to everything. If you have a book that you wrote or a course that you launched or a service that you provided, there will always be somebody who doesn't get what they want. Don't be upset. It's not necessarily you. Quite often, it's them. So if you have somebody else handling returns and exchanges and queries, you're able to be completely detached from the situation. But back to our admin assistant, what else could he or she do? They could book our travel to a trade fair. They could book us into the trade fair. They could transcribe a tutorial that you've put together. Now, one of the things, just as an aside, one of the things that we talk about in the launchpad and the being a kick-ass retailer course is how you can add more value to your customers. And that could be something as simple as a tutorial on how to use a product. But some people learn by watching and some people learn by reading and some people learn by listening. So if you've made a video on how to use a product, your assistant could actually transcribe that into your tutorial. Now, the other thing that's great for you and for your customers is to write blog posts. Now, if this is not your specialty, you could hire an assistant who specializes in writing blog posts in your field. Or, like we said, they could take something that you've written or recorded and turn it into something like an e-book, which is great. All of a sudden, your product range has expanded. Now, getting into something a lot more specialist, we could have a marketing person. You may not have the budget to bring on a marketing person full-time. You may not even have the budget to bring a marketing person on part-time for 20 hours a week. But what you may have a budget for is for someone to work on a one-off project. So you could get a freelancer or contractor to come in and work with you for a set budget on a marketing project. We talked about bookkeeping at the beginning. Now, this is not something I would just hand off to anyone because these are your numbers. You need to know your numbers, so bookkeeping needs to go off to a specialist, but you can outsource this. In fact, unless you're an accountant and that is your job, this is what you should be. This is the first thing in your business that you should be outsourcing. PR, maybe you've got a new product and you want to do a product launch. It is so easy to be tempted to do all of this work yourself, but PR people and marketing people do this for a living. They have the contacts and they know what those people want. Again, this is one of those things that I would often leave to an expert. You could put a plan in place so that you're reducing the amount of time that they're going to spend and they know exactly what it is you want. But these people, you hire because they know who and they know what. Copyrighting is so easy to think that you can do the writing. A lot of times you're just going to pull content off a supplier's website and stick it into yours. But it doesn't tell the story of your brand. It doesn't tell why you love that product. And it doesn't tell the customer about you. So what I do recommend is if you can't get a copywriter, and this is one of the things that we're talking about outsourcing, in the least just go and find some free tutorials on how to write copy for your website. But I digress. Research. We all know what it's like when trade fair season arrives, trying to get pricing, distributors and new products. Imagine if you didn't have to wait for trade fair time. And let's be honest, we don't. We get products in all year round. And some of these products brought to us. But sometimes you want to be ahead of the crowd or you want to be doing something a little bit different. So you could hire an assistant who could go off and research new products in a certain area. They could give you the pricing of the product. They could contact the distributor, find out if they do wholesale. They could get a line sheet. They could get the MOCs. They could get any other information that you need because you're going to have set out the information that you need and you want. And they're going to bring it back to you in a format that you can easily digest. Now, we all know you can spend hours, days and probably even weeks if you wanted to, researching new products. Imagine if you were paying someone a whole lot less than what you're worth to actually do this for you. Newsletters. Do you send newsletters out? Because if you don't, you should be. One of the biggest content areas of customer interaction is through your newsletter. Now, you may not have time to put that newsletter together. An admin assistant can put together a template for you. Or perhaps you're going to put the template together because you're having trouble relinquishing control. And then you can just mention what it is you want to go in there. If you've got somebody who's working in your business quite well, they may even be able to put that newsletter together for you based on the information that's coming through to them. It's up to you to work out how you want to get it organized. But if you're not already doing a newsletter, this is a great way to free up hours of your time and be engaging with your customers. One of the other little things that I, at the beginning, spent ages trying to perfect was called deep etching. It's putting the images on a white background. Sometimes your supplier doesn't even send images and sometimes you might want to take those images and use them in a poster in store or on a post display. And if you aren't an expert editor, it is so much easier. I often pay one or two dollars per image to get the images cut out and put on a white or transparent background. So that's called deep etching and you can have an assistant or a freelancer do that for you. If you've got a website or a blog, you need to have SEO. That's search engine optimization. We won't go into that now. But this is something again that I often leave to the experts. It's great to have a knowledge of what keywords you should be using in your descriptions. But the big stuff I leave to somebody else. So there's just a few things that I jotted down in two minutes on things that you can outsource. And I'll put together that list and I'll stick it in the show notes with anything else that comes up between now and when the podcast is released. But how do you know when it's time to outsource? I asked a friend and she said to me, "When you feel like you can't do it anymore, then it's time to outsource." And I thought that was a great example of when it's time to outsource. How do you work out what to outsource? So I put together a little list of, now grab a pen and paper, or I'll put this in the show notes for you. But if you're doing it as we listen along, what do you love doing? What is it that when you go to work every day, makes your heart sing? Why did you open your business? Now I want you to write a list of the things you love doing. Now don't be upset if that is literally working on the shop floor. If that is your passion, write it down. Now in the next column, I want you to put a list of what you put off doing because you really don't enjoy it. It is not your strength. Now for me, it is bookkeeping, which is why the first thing I ever outsourced was bookkeeping. In the next column, you're going to put a list of what you need to do as in nobody else can actually do it. For example, you may be the only person who decides which of those new lines will come into your store. You've outsourced the research and you've defined what you want, the type of product, the wholesale price, the recommended retail price, the account terms, the order turnaround, the indent ordering and the colorways. Now once you have that research, it is up to you to choose the products that you bring on board. Or is it? So if that is you, I want you to write in this list the things that you do not wish to delegate to anybody else. These are the things that you feel as the business owner you need to make a decision on. Now in the last column, so we've got four columns on our piece of paper, what do you need to do, but in reality, you could be getting someone else to do. And it could be something as simple as answering those general customer inquiries on email. It could be dealing with refunds, it could be uploading the new products to your website. So I want you to look at that list and actually work out, do you need to be doing it? If you aren't doing it, are you going to be using that time to earn more money in your business? And will your business become more efficient if you actually outsource something that you put off doing because you don't enjoy it? Now I've talked a lot about freeing up this time to be doing things that earn you money. But I can't gloss over the fact that sometimes you're going to outsource to create time for yourself or for your family. So outsourcing one of these projects or many of these projects is allowed to be able to free up time for you to spend on yourself or on your family. It is not always just about business. So if that means getting somebody in to do your book work so that you're not spending two or three hours every week doing it, you can be at home with your family. You can be out with your friends or you could be enjoying a leisurely walk. Do not forget about the you. Outsourcing is about increasing the value that you get out of that time. It is up to you to put the value on the time. You're still there? It's always good to wait until the music's finished and see what happens on the other side. I just want to tell you a quick story about how my life has changed from outsourcing. Now obviously from business side of things it's changed but also from a personal side. So you see my husband and I decided to get a cleaner about six months ago. And at the time it felt like a really big decision to make and we were worried about how hard it was going to be to get the place tidied up before the cleaner came, all those things. But what we worked out was we were spending sometimes an entire weekend trying to clean the house, doing a pretty poor job of it and getting really snappy at each other at the same time because I didn't like to do that and he didn't like to do this. So in the end it was decided that we'd get a cleaner and we'd see how we go. So what it has done has mean that A) we have to tidy up once a fortnight before the cleaner comes. B) we've got a really nice clean house for once a week and C) I don't feel guilty about the fact that my floors haven't been mocked for maybe two or three months. But the other thing it's done is it meant that our family goes out for dinner on cleaner night. This means that I get to have a clean house for about or 16 hours. But it also means that we can actually spend the weekend doing things that we enjoy as a family instead of cleaning the house and getting snappy at each other. So I just want you to keep that in mind when we talk about outsourcing. It doesn't just have to be about business, it can be about things in your life. Anyway, you go and have a great day or a great evening and I'll catch you on the next episode. Bye! (Music)
