Why Knowing When to Outsource Is Essential for Your Success as a Digital Entrepreneur
*** Contributed Post
The digital age has brought with it an unprecedented number of ways to make it as an entrepreneur, not to mention a virtually limitless number of fields that an entrepreneurially minded person can choose to specialise in.
Of course, the other side of that coin is that the digital age has also brought with it a large number of ways to make unfortunate business mistakes and hamper your professional progress via your own inability to effectively handle and adapt to the nuances of your field.
While some of these issue and stumbling blocks are, indeed, rooted in the internet and digital technologies themselves, a good number of others are simply the result of timeless mishaps that have dogged entrepreneurs and small business owners for just about as long as people have been working and earning money.
One of the classic blunders that afflict many entrepreneurs — digital and otherwise — is an inability to outsource, or the overwhelming desire to micro-manage every aspect of the business to the point where any other team or staff members are essentially left unable to do their job.
As it so happens, learning to outsource effectively might be even more essential for digital entrepreneurs as for others. So, if you notice a tendency in yourself to try and “do it all yourself” to the detriment of your business, consider hiring a company like Scarlett Group to take care of IT and other branches of your business, so that you can focus on your core competencies.
Here are some reasons why knowing when to outsource is essential for your success as a digital entrepreneur.
The business world is more complex today than ever before
One undeniable feature of the hyper-connected digital world which we all currently inhabit, is that things are simply more complicated than they’ve ever been before, across a wide variety of measures.
Whereas it was once the case that virtually every job was constrained by certain practicalities, borders, and technologies, virtually everything is up in the air now in this age of never-ending innovation, lightning-fast global communication, and the endless flow of information that characterises 21st Century living.
If you don’t police your productivity and your attention ruthlessly, you could spend all day, every day, fruitlessly trying to identify and apply different business strategies, new technologies, and so on.
Likewise, if you run a moderately successful business of almost any type, you could easily spread yourself far too thin by going above and beyond the call of duty in order to act as a fully-fledged team, all by yourself, while seeking to perform all the increasingly nuanced and specialised roles of a full team, all with the time and likely energy levels of any other normal person.
To put it simply, the digital age has made the business world more complex than ever before. It’s absolutely essential for any entrepreneur who wants to be successful, to know how best to spend their time in any given moment, while also having a good understanding of where their time is only wasted.
Outsourcing can be the key to ensuring that you don’t get swamped trying to do an endless number of jobs that you’re not specialised for.
You only have as much time in the day as anyone else
Tied in to the point above, is the clear and evident fact that you simply don’t have an endless amount of time. In fact, it’s one of those weird and wonderful facts of life that every single person who lives today, and who has ever lived, and who ever will live — the most ludicrously productive, and the laziest and most prone to procrastination alike — all have the exact same number of hours, minutes, and seconds in a day.
It may seem bizarre at first glance to think that you have just as much of this vital resource as someone like Richard Branson or Warren Buffet, but there’s something empowering in this fundamental understanding, too.
That is, it’s empowering if you understand the fundamental lesson of this. Which is that you need to treat your time as the most valuable and essential resource you could ever possess, and then you’ll be able to appropriately handle it, by doing the most essential thing you can with each moment you have available.
This is pretty much the same as saying that you really need to learn to outsource and defer tasks to others as and when it’s appropriate and expedient to do so.
If you waste this vital resource on tasks that are not very important, or that you’re not very good at, while neglecting those tasks that really need your attention, you’re setting yourself up for a disastrous failure down the line.
Other people can do things that you can’t
This point should be self-evident, but a large part of the reason why many entrepreneurs try to do it all themselves, is often that they’ve convinced themselves that no one else can do anything for their business quite as well, and with quite as much attention to detail, as they can.
While it’s certainly likely to be the case that no one will be as invested in your business as you are, it’s a complete fallacy to think that no one could do a better job in handling a particular aspect of your job than you can.
It’s highly unlikely that you will be a brilliant administrator, an excellent marketer, a superb IT specialist, a product development pro, a logistics maestro, and be otherwise proficient to a high degree in everything that goes into running a successful business.
If you put your ego and paranoia aside and are willing to explore outsourcing as a feasible option for various “departments” of your business, you can benefit greatly from the expertise of people who have developed their careers around becoming proficient in one or two specific areas, which in all likelihood are going to be different from the areas in which you’re proficient — no matter how much of a renaissance man, or woman, you might be.
