Last week, I talked about how I saved $5850 by outsourcing a lot of our work to low cost offshore, resources and our more highly skilled onshore resource. Way back when I realized that I needed to start outsourcing some of my work, the first problem I had was trying to determine what work to outsource. I either had:

• Small things that didn’t make sense to outsource since it would take me more time to explain that it would to do myself
• Big things I thought were so complicated that there was no way they could be outsourced

So What Did I Choose?

There wasn’t some eureka moment when I figured out exactly what made sense. The fact is that I’m still working on what activities I can outsource and I think of new stuff every day. But I was able to get through the initial roadblock that I described above, which seems to be what most people get into

• I could bundle the small tasks together and make it a regular task. It was a waste of my time to try and explain work that would be done just once. But some of these small tasks were repeated over and over again (usually weekly or monthly), so all I had to do was give them instructions and have them do it on a regular basis.
• Break down the complex tasks into more simple steps. Some of it could never really be outsourced because it needed my input, but once I provided some context, I realized that these complex tasks could be 90% executed by someone else.

Here are Some of the Tasks that I Outsourced Last Month

• Optimize Our Clients’ PPC Campaigns – I put together a form a while ago and I just have to do some basic research into what I want changed and because our clients are very similar. By doing some of the thinking work, I was able to give that information to my offshore people and they made all the updates. They did about 90% of the work
• Check Client Status – Because of how we do billing, we need to keep track of our clients’ accounts on a regular basis and if they reach a certain point, pause their accounts. This needs to be done on a daily basis so we have our offshore people check it every single day and pause accounts that have reached their threshold
• Set-Up Client Accounts – We used to get information on a form and set up client accounts ourselves. Now we get a fax to our inboxes and literally forward it on to them (soon to be implemented improvement – have those faxes go directly to their inbox)
• Close Support Issues – This was a bit more general so our onshore support helped us with this. They understood the issues and were able to work them independently and work with clients to close any open support issues. This only required an occasional e-mail to us to get information on steps to take
• Submit Job Postings Online – As you might recall, we found a great method to get a ton of good applications for open job positions. We had our offshore team submit our “Help Wanted” ads online