You’re Not a Business Owner if…

• You work for an Multi-Level Marketing company.  You’re a commissioned sales person
• You do less than $30,000 a year.  It’s a hobby that pays. Caveat – if its your first year, I’ll give you a pass
• You have an idea and are ‘working on it’
• You have no plan on how you’re going to get paid.

SEO Infographic by SEO Book

We do some outsourcing on oDesk, mostly in an attempt to reduce our costs.  So far, the results have mostly been disappointing.  Here’s the major hurdles we have faced:

• issues with language – comprehension of the English language isn’t that great
• issues with following specific orders – even breaking down work point by point hasn’t worked all the time, so expect to go through one or two revisions to get it done right
• work not as advertised – let’s just say that sometimes the portfolio’s provided aren’t the same as the work you’ll get

In general, take the amount of time you’d expect a job to take if it was done properly the first time round and multiple that by 3. If you’re lucky.  Now, most of the time you’re paying 1/10th of the cost of doing it in-house or in the West, but it’s still a lot more hand-holding.

In addition, here’s a few tricks that the oDesk contractors have come up with:

• Applying with 1 contractor profile, then after you are ready to award the project asking you to push to profile 2.  If they do not meet your expectations, when you review them normally – their main profile isn’t affected by the lower than expected work
• Harassing you via Skype to give them a better review
• Overstating their qualifications then bumming around on work to run up hours
• Taking on more projects than they can handle, then providing constant excuses

Overall, there’s a few projects I’d outsource and a ton that I wouldn’t. Here’s what I’d do via oDesk:

• basic installations & theme designs. If you’re not interested in particularly high-quality themes and just need a basic website, it’s not a bad place to go
• basic graphic design.  Great for simple banners, posters, advertisements, etc.
• writing help.
• basic web-research.

Now, here’s some recommendations to working on oDesk or its equivalents:

• always use the main profile, never work with someone on another profile
• consider doing multiple small jobs to find a few good workers.  Then expand it into that job
• always break down your work into parts and give the work in parts out
• check immediately.  So if you need an excel sheet fixed, have them do 5% of it, then check. Or 50 lines, or whatever.  Then check.  Re-check during various stages
• pay more.  Don’t work with the lowest cost producers – you want to work with those with a higher price because they’re generally better and have more experience
• consider individuals from Eastern Europe.  They charge more, but the quality is often significantly better

Over the last few months, we’ve talked to quite a few business owners looking to sell online.  Some are just starting out, others have an existing business that aren’t supported by their existing shopping cart software.   There’s basically 3 ways to sell an item online:

• an online marketplace like eBay, etsy or Amazon
• using a SaaS shopping cart (e.g. Volusion, Magento Go, Shopify)
• using a self-hosted shopping cart (osCommerce, Zencart, Magento Community/Enterprise)

Deciding which of these three options works for you best depends on:

• the number of products / skus
• the  present revenue generated
• expected future revenue from the cart
• your personal HTML / CSS / Graphic Design ability
• and of course, your budget

It’s the balance of these three that I think pushes many smaller businesses towards the first two options, and truthfully isn’t such a bad idea.   The trick is of course reviewing your options with full knowledge of what the pro’s and con’s really are.

As an attempt to keep our costs down, we outsource much of our work. And yes, in the traditional sense such as sending work to countries like India, Pakistan and Indonesia.

Generally, the work and results are quite varied. Sometimes, you hit a gem of a worker, the majority of the time though you end up with people who have issues with the English language. And while I’m used to working with people whose English isn’t perfect, there’s a workable level that you require.

On the other hand, using a system like oDesk / elance; we get a lot more applicants a lot faster. In fact, we generally find that we get better response to our requests for work than if we use individuals here.

Our most recent banner request is a great example. Asked for a quote from a designer we have worked with in Vancouver – never got a reply after 4 days.

So we ended outsourcing it because we needed the job done. Fast. That’s what we got – within 24 hours, we had the banner done. Even if it did come with an extra hour of aggravation

Oooh my heard hurts when I start thinking about all the social media sites out there. There are just so many right now, it’s beginning to really get bad. Google+ just launched in an attempt to take away from Facebooks dominance.  It’s better designed certainly, doesn’t feel as clunky but…

Do we really want all this social media in our lives? Read a few good cyberpunk novels or sci-fi novels and sometimes, I worry.  It won’t take long before all the information we put out there (whether or not we want it to or not) will be available.

On the other hand, the good news is that with all this information, it’ll get harder and harder to find anything.  If you’re looking for a business idea, data mining and analysis will be a major thing for the futre.

We seem to be working slowly on our projects, slowly moving onwards on each.  I purchased a number of domains a while ago for potential new businesses and ended up not doing anything with them for a while.

With a new hire, we finally had time to get on those projects and started putting up some basic information including Analytics and Adsense.  Until we figure out a better option for those projects, I might as well look into making a couple of dollars via Adsense.

Had my first experience with crowd-sourcing recently, specifically creating a logo for a new project. It was certainly quite interesting, and we got a ton of great submissions.

One of the things that we found was that we didn’t get many submissions till the end, which was a bit of a shame since at least 1 of the submissions we received was so close. As usual, the early bird gets the worm in this case.

The other thing that we found was that due to the large number of submissions, we had some great ideas and concepts introduced to us. It certainly worked quite well.

Lastly, perhaps the thing we found the most difficult was the amount of time it required from us – commenting on all the logos, going through the multiple options and ranking them, etc.

I guess that’s the minus of crowd-sourcing compared to traditional sourcing via an ad agency or graphic designer. Time vs options.

So. Once an entrepreneur, always one. I have a rather bad tendency to get involved in multiple projects at once, which be detrimental to making sure any of them get the right kind of focus they need to be successful.

Currently, working on a site called Trails Today which is a hiking / trails website. Been working on it for a few years, problem is focusing and getting the code finally right and the developers focused on it. Ah well, here’s hoping it gets up within the next few months!

One of the hardest things about running your own business is learning to let go.  Once it becomes your work, your baby – learning to release parts of your work to other people – whether or not they are better, is very difficult.  In fact, for some people, it’s impossible.

We’re facing that problem now – we’ve grown to an extent that we have to actually hire someone soon, yet finding the right person and letting them handle the business process is difficult.

There’s a few things you can do though to make it easier on yourself:

- creates policies & procedures

Think ahead, create the policies and procedures necessary and write them down.  When you hand over the job to someone else, they can then just  follow the policies.  This means it’s easier to teach them, and just as importantly, they know exactly what they need to do to satisfy your standards.

- hire good people

Kind of obvious, but you have to make sure to hire the right people.  If you don’t you’re just leaving yourself open to more heartache.

- be patient

Provide time for your employees to get up to speed, remembering that they need time to learn what you’ve known for months or years now.

- create a list of your ‘new’ tasks

You’ve now given the job to someone else; so what are you doing? Make sure to have a list of new tasks that you now tackle in that free time.  Keeping yourself busy is one way to take your mind off the old work.

- check-in regularly; but not too often

Lastly, for your own peace of mind, set up a regular check-in schedule.  Just make sure that the schedule isn’t ‘every 5 minutes’ and you can provide both the oversight and hands-off approach needed.  Generally, 10-15 minutes quick summary at the beginning / end of a day and a weekly longer meeting should be fine for most jobs.