In the last one year, because of the change in the nature of my business, I’ve managed to work without any full-time employees. I work with more than 20 specialists from across the world who take care of different functions of my business.
This strategy will be very useful if you are a solopreneur like me or run a startup company. Any company will need different people managing different functions. You’ll need customer service staff who are good at making phone calls and answering email. You’ll need admin people who are good with excel sheets and word documents. You may need designers, developers and a whole bunch of other people. When you are a startup, you’ll not have the resources to hire so many people. Even if you hire one or two employees, it won’t be fair to expect that person to perform so many different roles efficiently. Therefore, after a point, the company begins to suffer due to lack of good talent. I have a solution for this problem.
Watch the below video to find out how:
(Click here to watch on YouTube)
I currently have 3 virtual assistants for my publishing business Happy Self Publishing (previously called Awesome Life Resources). I have Sushmitha and Swekcha working in India (they live in Hyderabad) and Nilisha lives in the US. Among the 3 of them, they take care of the writing, editing and marketing for my books. i call them my Awesomeness Army 🙂 I have a bunch of designers working for me. There are 2 boys in Sri Lanka who are very good with logo & banner designing. There is one girl in Israel and another in Bahrain who design the book covers for me. There is another person in Philippines who is very good with sketching. Depending on the type of task, I decide whom to allocate the work to. I’ve just worked with a person called Jessica, who is a voice artist from the US. She did the narration for one of my audiobooks. I am currently working with a girl called Holly from Australia who is doing the editing for my Job Escape Plan book. In fact, yesterday, I hired a person from Nigeria who is doing the transcription for all the video interviews i did.
All these people are professionals and experts in their area of work. This saves me a lot of time because I don’t have to micro-manage them. It also saves me a lot of money because if I were to hire all of them full-time, it would cost me a bomb. By just hiring them for specific tasks, it is costing me just a fraction of that amount.
You may be wondering how I manage to find all these people. I can give you 3 resources on the internet that I keep going back to for hiring virtual staff:
You can get all your small tasks done for just $5. I have an entire team of freelancers from Fiverr helping me with various tasks in my business.
Elance (now called Upwork.com)
A great place to find all kinds of freelancers. Obviously, it’s more expensive than Fiverr, but the quality is also far superior.
Odesk (now called Upwork.com)
Very similar to Elance. Infact, both the companies have merged now. I use this site as a backup when I don’t find people on Elance.
I sometimes just post a status on Facebook mentioning my staff requirements and I end up getting a lot of job applicants. So, there are plenty of ways to find great talent on the internet.
I believe that if your business doesn’t require your staff to be interacting with your customers face-to-face, you can very well manage your business by just working with virtual assistants. Make use of the power of the internet and hire great people from across the world.
If you have any questions related to outsourcing, please post them in the comments section below. I would love to help 🙂