Episode 010: The Buffer Episode

We can never talk too much about outsourcing, but in this (short & sweet) episode I discuss two questions you should ask yourself to decide if your first thought should be DIY or outsourcing for tasks (new and old) in your business.

Giving you true transparency, this is totally a buffer episode.  I didn’t like last week’s episode and decided not to publish it, but this week’s episode already has ‘episode 11’ all over it.  So I need

The Business-First Creatives Podcast is brought to you by CRM and Dubsado expert Colie James. Join Colie each week as she discuss how to build a business that brings you joy and a paycheck! From business advice with fellow entrepreneurs to sharing automation tips and tricks, Colie and her guests are sharing industry trends and resources, along with a little bit of sarcasm.

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Here are the highlights…

[0:53] How do you introduce new offers & systems into your business?
[01:39] Things everyone DIYs in the beginning ?
[2:05] The switch flips
[2:36] What can you afford to outsource?
[3:19] Should you outsource your bookkeeping?
[3:58] Outsourcing THIS podcast
[4:58] When does outsourcing make sense?

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Review the Transcript:

Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. I’m just going to be real honest. This is a buffer episode. I didn’t like last week’s episode. It was a solo episode. You know how I feel about solo episodes, so I didn’t publish it, but now I have a guest episode coming up on Thursday where I’ve already done all of the social media assets and they all say episode 11.

So I am trying to just sneak this in as episode 10. So that I’m not missing it an episode. So today’s topic is something that has been on my list, but I was reminded of it again this week when I was in a photographer Facebook group, and someone asked how hard is it to set up Dubsado on your own? I’m not just going to talk about Dubsado today, because this is actually part of a bigger question.

So if you are thinking of doing something new in your business, improving something in your budget, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Do you sit down and try to figure out how to do it yourself? Or do you immediately try to find someone to pay to complete the task for you? Because I don’t know when that switched in my business, but at some point in the last two years, I stopped thinking of sitting down and figuring out how to do stuff on my own and I immediately jumped to trying to figure out who I could pay to do it for me. Not just for Dubsado, there are lots of things in your business that in the beginning, everyone does DIY. Let’s say your branding, your website, you’re editing, your social media content, you’re copywriting for your website.

I mean, there are so many things that we need to create as business owners that you can either try and DIY. To save money because in the beginning you probably have more time than you do money, because there is some point in your business where a switch flips. And instead of trying to save money, by using time and DIY thing, all of a sudden, it makes way more sense for you to pay other people, to do the tasks for you. Okay, if there’s a new thing in your business, how do you decide which path to take?

Like what pushes you from being a DIYer, to now paying an outsourcing people to do these tasks? The first question that you should ask yourself is can you afford to have someone else do the task for you? Is your business profitable enough to where you can pay another professional, they’re going rate in order to complete the task for you?

Now for photographers, one of the very first things that we outsource is editing. Editing takes the biggest chunk of time when it comes to the actual client service. I mean, if you photograph a client for two hours, one hour, it probably takes you at least that long to cull and edit their session. Or maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m slow, I don’t know.

The second thing that people tend to outsource and pay a professional for is their bookkeeping. And there’s two reasons. Number one, lots of people hate numbers. And number two, people have a very real fear of the IRS. Let’s be honest. Um, it’s probably why I started paying, bookkeepers.

But so are you profitable enough to pay someone else to do the tasks? That’s number one. There also comes a point where it makes more sense to pay someone else to do a task because their going rate is less than what you would make if you just took on another client.

Because guys, This podcast was brand new to me this year. I hired someone for a VIP day to help me with the strategy and I fully intended to hire someone to edit this podcast for me. 100%. I didn’t need to add anything else onto my plate. I figured I would find someone and that would be the end of it. And here I am three months in, episode 10, with three additional episodes that are already edited in my queue. And I still have not paid someone to edit this podcast. I actually enjoy doing it.

I enjoy re-listening to the episodes so that I can write the show notes, so that I can create the social media content. I do think that doing this now is going to help me improve the podcast in the future. Maybe at the end of Q3, I am going to be ready to hire someone because at that time, once I’ve got my bearings, and once I have pretty much learned everything that I can learn from the edit, I do need to hire someone because it makes more sense for me to spend, you know, six hours in a week working on a VIP day client than it does to spend six hours editing podcast episodes and creating content. Like my time is worth more money to work directly with clients, than it is to do, you know, these background tasks.

And let’s be honest. I mean, this, this podcast isn’t currently making me money. It is not a profit-seeking activity for me. And so it just doesn’t make sense for me to think about spending the time that it takes to get the podcast episodes ready every week, you know, for the foreseeable future.

Your homework today is just to think about whether you are still in the DIY phase of your business or if you have gotten past that. All right, guys, that’s it for this week. See you next time.