Build Your Virtual Army and Delegate
I’m back from my trip to San Diego where I had the opportunity to attend FortuneBuilder’s 1st Online Marketing Summit and meet some awesome people like Than Merrill, Sean Malarkey, and Lewis Howes. I picked up some great tips about the online space at the event, I’m a strong advocate of continued learning once standard education is over (i’ll save that for a later post). In other news I have two weeks of my undergraduate career in countdown. It’s definitely exciting to be finishing up college and allowing a new chapter of my life to unfold.
Today I want to emphasize how important it is to delegate tasks and portions of projects out to people that can do them faster (and better) than you.
The number one mistake most entrepreneurs make is not delegating work to others. As someone that is starting my own projects I made the mistake of not delegating tasks to others that have better skills than myself. It took me about 2 months to build my first WordPress blog that I was satisfied with (including logo design, custom coding, etc.) In a way its alright that I built it on my own because now I know how to setup a WordPress blog in a couple hours. But imagine if I focused on building what I wanted to learn (at the time it was to setup a WordPress blog) and then found a designer to do my logo and an then a programmer to do work on my custom coding. I would have been done 10x faster and I would have still learned (and worked) on the portion that I wanted to do.
You need to focus on what interests you and what you’re ultimately good at. All the other work needs to be given to someone that can guarantee they can do the task better than you. Having a team of a people that can complete tasks that generally replace your weaknesses is powerful. So get over yourself and stop trying to do everything on your own (I know I had to).
I’m going to share a secret I’ve been using to gain funding to delegate work to others. I jump on United States freelancer broads and completed tasks I know I’m strong at doing and can complete in less than a couple hours. I get the task done and get a good amount of cash in return. I then use the money I earned and jump onto an overseas freelancer/outsourcing broads and find designers or programers that fit my needs. The reason I do quick jobs on the U.S. freelancer websites is because they are willing to pay more to get the task done. Overseas they charge much less so I have more outsourcing funds to play around with. If you want to start getting in the outsourcing game this a a great way to test it out.
I’m slowly building up my virtual team by outsourcing and the people that I work with are always happy to complete more tasks for me. The key is to build a relationship with the people you work with and create a virtual army.
Have you started delegating areas of work you are weak in? What results have you been getting?
Photo Credit: veo
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6 Responses to “Build Your Virtual Army and Delegate”
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Hello and welcome, I'm Tony Ruiz. My work revolves around learning and applying efficient processes, human psychology, Internet marketing, and user experience to web-based projects. You can learn more about me here.
Great post Tony. I understand the value of delegation and outsourcing but for me as a start up with limited revenue and more time do you thik it is wise spending the limited funds outsourcing work I can do myself? Once I have the revenue hiring a VA will be one of my first actions but for now i’m just trying to build up that revenue stream. At what point do you think one should start outsourcing?
Hey Vinay,
If your only option is to bootstrap everything yourself then thats the way it has to be for awhile right?
I just suggest to not make it a habit once revenue starts coming in. If you have an extra $25 you should outsource a task, it could be as simple as a logo design or some research.
This will get you in the habit of knowing outsourcing is a possibility even for smaller tasks that you don’t have to worry about. So to answer your question I don’t think its never a bad time to outsource even when your one a budget.
Set a limit you would like to use to outsource and see what you can get in return – you’ll be surprised.
Couldnt agree more with you, Tony.
Excellent piece of writing, and excellent info.
Thanks buddy. We all know you’re the one to go to when we need VAs ;)
“Get over yourself and stop trying to do everything on your own (I know I had to)”…. hahaha I admit I have not done this and I guess I should start doing this very soon. This is a great article Tony and it is definitely a wake up call. What are some good US freelancer sites that you do projects for? I’ve heard of elance and odesk. I hope to chat soon about your experience and what you learned at the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego.
I picked up some awesome tips Monique. I’ll be glad to share them with you and i’ll make sure to post some tips I learned on this blog. The U.S. website I use is OrangeSlyce (Its a student freelancer board based out of Phoenix).
I also use eLance and been exploring oDesk.