What Should I Outsource First?

What should you outsource first?

Feel like you’ve got so much on your plate and you are about to hit the wall? Do you feel that if you could just get some support around you, you could warp speed everything your business?  

It’s time to get a team around you that can take things off your plate and keep you solidly in your zone of genius.

The question is “What should I outsource first?”

There are two things to think about when figuring out what you need to outsource first. Let’s walk through them:

In a previous blog post, we talked about Step One in this process:

Step One: Get really clear on your point of difference.

The things that set you apart are also the things that typically are connected to the revenue and growth drivers in your business.

When you get clear on what your point of difference is, you can see where you should invest more time as the CEO of your business.

Step Two: Once you know what your point of difference is and where your focus needs to be to drive growth, anything that lives outside of that zone is something you can likely delegate, either through outsourcing or hiring a full-time team member.

By outsourcing the things that live outside of your zone of genius, you can free up more time to focus on the things that drive growth in your business.

As entrepreneurs, there are a TON of things on our plate that don’t fall under the umbrella of “zone of genius”.

I’m going to walk you through a two-step exercise to help you figure out what you need to outsource first.

The first step to do is make a list of your weekly tasks and slot them into one of the three categories below:

1. Delegate

Are there things you could give away that are valuable tasks but they live outside of your zone of genius? These could be things you’re not passionate about doing or they’re not generating revenue in the business.

Here are some examples of tasks that you may want to delegate:

• Tech set up for your launches
• Responding to customer service emails  
• Designing PowerPoints for your webinars (or monthly calls)
• Overall launch creation
• Bookkeeping

2) Automate

There are valuable things that need to be happening in the business, but you’re doing them over and over again. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just do it once, get it systematized, and automated and not have to put it on your to-do list ever again?

Tasks that you may want to automate could be:

• Shifting from live webinars to automated webinars (with an automated funnel to support it)
• Pre-scheduling your content delivery for your emails, social media, etc.
• Setting up your onboarding experience for new customers (so you aren’t sending individual emails to your customers)

Make a list of these tasks. It’s helpful to keep a running list right on your computer that you can add to when you find yourself doing something repetitive.

3) Ditch

These are things that need to stop doing. “Ditch” tasks and projects are not driving growth or revenue in your business, and overall they are a huge time-sucker. They are tasks, action items or even entire projects that are not making an impact in growing the business.

After making this list, it might be immediately apparent where you need to start delegating. If not, the second step is to ask yourself “How long am I spending on these tasks every week?”

Noticing how much time you spend on these tasks is the key to figuring out what you should outsource first. Click To Tweet

The goal of this entire exercise it to figure out how you can free up as much time as possible. If you’re spending most of your time on two or three of tasks, you could lump those together. This grouping of tasks is what you need to outsource first.

When you outsource those tasks, it’s going to free up a chunk of time that’s going to allow you to spend more time working on high impact activities that drive growth, which is the whole reason that we want to outsource, right?

We hire to free up time to work on priorities that grow the business.

If you don’t think about it this way, it’s really easy to outsource something that you just don’t want to do but it doesn’t really create the impact in freeing up time for you to create more revenue and growth in your business.

What are you going to get off of your plate next?