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Building Your Team with Outsourcers

Often the fastest way to accelerate your impact and growth in your business is to grow the team. In this blog post on team building with outsourcers I want to go through some of the key things you need to think about when you planning on building and growing your team.

Before you even think of hiring…

Don’t just go out there and start hiring people left right and center, often this kind of hiring leads to getting the wrong people with the wrong skill set as well as the wrong attitude. You need to plan out very clearly what your strategy will be for building your team and then work out what actions you need to take and who you need to hire, to build the best team possible.

Be clear about the skills you need the most. Do you need a writer? Do you need a SEO expert? Do you need a web programmer or a graphic artist? Don’t hire people just for the sake of it, be very clear about what they will be doing when you bring them on your team. One of the best ways to do this, is even before you’ve hired anyone, write out the first months taks that you expect them to do and the results that you expect to achieve with that person on your team.

What levels of skills do you need? Don’t hire people who are under skilled, this just leads to frustration and the inability to get things done that will really grow your business. At the same time also don’t go out there and spend a fortune hiring people who have skill sets that are beyond what you need. This is also a big mistake and it can be very costly and make the person cost beyond what they can return in business.

To produce the best results in your business look for the best people possible that will fit into your budget.

How to get them…

Think creatively about how you’re going to find your future team members. Don’t just go to the same old boring outsourcing sites. Sites change over time and one that may be really effective today can often have really low quality people on it tomorrow.

If you are going to use an outsourcing site I recommend that you put your ad on a number of them such as odesk.com, freelancer.com and vworker.com.

Often you can think more creatively and put ads on Craigslist or other sites that have classified ads. These are often free and you can actually end up finding really good people who didn’t know about the existence of normal outsourcing websites.

Make sure use a great ad…

People want to belong to a team and they also want to know that their effort is going to be appreciated. Your ads should certainly contain information about what it is that they will do and also if it’s an ongoing job you should sell them on the prospect of stability, which many outsourcing workers are understandably looking for.

For more in on writing good ads for hiring people online see this post.

A key factor in building your team and hiring is to put the people through a screening process. This can be done through a hiring questionnaire and a set of small test tasks, before you do an interview them. This is very effective in making sure that you hire the right person for the right job.

Paying them

Once you’ve got your team you need to make sure that you have consistent and reliable way of paying them. For many people a service such as PayPal is perfect, but in some countries PayPal is either very expensive or just not available. Nowadays with Internet banking it makes it far easier for us to use to direct deposits into people’s accounts and wire money into people’s accounts. Some other services that you can look at using for transferring money to people are payoneer.com and  moneybookers.com

Conclusion

The key thing to take away from this, is that at some stage you have to build a team if you want to build and grow your business. Nowadays with all of us living in a worldwide market, that team, doesn’t have to be in the same country as you. Make use of the great talent pools that you find in various places around the world like the Philippines, Eastern Europe and India.

photo credit: RambergMediaImages

In the past week I’ve had three separate occasions where  I was coaching or consulting for someone and the whole issue of making decisions via subjective opinions versus objective facts came up in the conversation.

I’m constantly amazed at the amount of a very smart and intelligent people who are making very big business decisions purely on subjective opinions which are not backed up by any facts.   One thing that most truly good entrepreneurs understand is that really at the end of the day, your own opinion doesn’t really matter at all. It’s the opinion of the customer that matters and the only true way to measure that opinion is via the numbers of whether they buy or not!

As entrepreneurs it can be very tempting for us to purely follow out gut feel and blindly invest all of our money and other people’s as well, but this is a mistake. A very big mistake. Any time that we make decisions based purely on our own subjective viewpoint we are leaving ourselves at the mercy of all the flaws in thinking that we have and also the lack of information that we have at our disposal.

Entrepreneurs are testers!!

As entrepreneurs we should think of ourselves as testers. We test assumptions of what works and what will not work. We test ideas for products and services and we test business models and concepts of how to improve something in the marketplace. Our goal as entrepreneurs is to find the shortest and quickest possible route to a profitable business. To do these things we can’t simply rely on our own subjective opinion or the subjective opinion of those around us. Everyone’s family and friends will tell them that their business idea is a great one and that it is something that can make a lot of money, yet far too often I see these people are the first to go out of business before they have even faced any real challenges.

Simply put, opinions are a dime a dozen. People’s opinions are the one thing that most people would happily give you for free, especially when they’re not qualified to give advice on the subject. It’s dangerous to follow these opinions, because they aren’t backed up by any facts or proof.

Most of our business ideas start simply with us thinking of a new product or service and having a gut feel that it’s something that other people would want as well. This nothing wrong with this, but once you’ve got this first idea, your entire goal should be to find the evidence that’s it a good idea or not to prove you are right or wrong. You should be trying to construct a proof of concept or a prototype which you can test in the real world to see if it is going to deliver the results that you thought it would. Often what seemed a great idea in your head fails miserably when brought into the the real world.

Don’t think like a big company

Last month I read a very good example of this in a blog post by Internet Marketer Dan Raine. He made the point about people and especially companies deciding on designs for websites purely by what they believed made up the good website, rather than testing what actually worked in the real world. Unfortunately my own experience in consulting and working with big companies has just reinforced this fact time and time again. They don’t rely on constructing cheap and effective testing methods, they usually just go with the opinion of the most senior person in the room, who is generally clueless about what really produces the results.

In the past two weeks I’ve seen this in everything from the way that HR people in a very large bank decide who should receive what training, through to a CEO who was about to approve an entire new product range for next year based purely on what he thought were good colors for the packaging. These kinds of decisions are extremely dangerous for big companies, but more importantly they can be fatal for entrepreneurs and young startup companies. Don’t fall into the trap. Test it before you commit.

Ask yourself: what’s the fastest way to test your idea for the cheapest amount of investment both financially and in effort? This is the thing you should be focused on for every new idea you have in your company or business. Many people are scared of a test that proves their idea was wrong, until they realize that it’s often exactly those kinds of tests that allow them to find the right product, or service, or market which will lead them to profitability as quickly as possible.

Don’t make the mistake, basing big business decisions purely on gut feel is simply stupid, the whole myth of “build it and they will come” is exactly that a myth. Don’t fall for it.

As I write this you may have seen the story of Ted Williams. He was a guy that over the past few days has gone from being homeless,  living on the street and sleeping in some shrubs to being inundated with offers of work. Why? Because he has a great voice. Actually let me rephrase that – he has an amazing voice that puts the slickest radio announcer to shame.

Don’t believe me? Take a listen for yourself

So is his voice the reason I’m writing this post? Well as much as it is a great voice, actually no. What I wanted to write about is the reaction to this story.

I first saw this story in the feel good news segment at the end of a cable news sh

ow. It did its job -  I felt good. But over the past two days the story has changed . Williams has gone from being discovered to being exploited and now being attacked.

At first everyone came out and the support for him was positive. He has gotten over 8million hits on that video above as I write and still the majority of people have felt endeared to this story of redemption. But for the news networks its not good enough for them to show the same story for a second day. So after having been flooded with offers, sites like the Smoking Gun have pointed out that surprise surprise Williams had a drug and alcohol problem which had also entailed problems with the police and going to jail. Does this really surprise anyone and more importantly does it really take anything away from the feel good story?

Howard Stern and some other commentators  have gone on to claim that the whole thing is a set up and the guy is a fake. It seems many people are trying to point out everything wrong with this story rather then appreciating that the guy got lucky and got a second chance. Good luck to him, he took action with his sign (see pic) and put himself out there. He dared to do it.

Ted Williams putting himself out there.

Some people want to destroy

There are two ways to gain people’s attention  -  either build something up or pull something down. Some people like to make it their mission to pull down others, point out flaws and dig for faults. In the online world they are known as trolls, but don’t be fooled  – they exist everywhere.

In my own seminars when we have an audience of around 500 people I often hear from my promoters about a few people who sit in the back and criticize what ever I’m talking about and claim that they know it all and could teach better than me. Very rarely will any of these trolls come up or challenge me in person, but they will try and infect as many people as they can at the back of the room and they take great offense when people there to learn tell them to shut up.

I’ve seen the exact same thing in other peoples seminars such as Tony Robbins, Harv Eker and Frank Kern. These trolls are more focused on pulling others down rather than trying to build something up.

You need to put some people out to attract others in.

See anytime you put yourself out there in public you are going to get people who come along and try to pull you down. Its part of the game and the fact is that if you aren’t getting some trolls then you probably aren’t pushing hard enough. I know out of every audience I speak to that roughly 2-5% of the people there will vigorously dislike me and what I have to say. Guess what?  I wouldn’t have it any other way. See if I tried to please that 2-5% of the people who don’t like it, I would end up losing the 35% of people who are my hard core raving fans.

There are always going to be people who don’t like you and want to criticize you just for the sake of it, whether you are a speaker, a blogger, someone trying to make a change at work or even a homeless guy looking for a second chance. What ever you do don’t let it stop you.

photo credit: futureatlas.com

Enough with the 2011 predictions – Evaluating Opportunities

For the past few days I have mostly stayed away from the internet, I gave my team time off for New Year and after finishing a beta version of cool new plugin we have been developing.

Yesterday when I logged in to social media for the first time in a few days I saw a plethora of people in many niches declaring their predictions of what will happen in 2011; what new sites are going to be big, what the best new way to do marketing this year, what’s the new social media thats going to take off and even what are the top arbitrage opportunities to make money this year.

Trends are important but….

Don’t get me wrong, you should always pay some attention to trends and I do believe things like Facebook advertising are a game changer, but this year isn’t that much different than last year, or the one before that. Good businesses with good products will find good ways to sell them and everyone who stands around and watches with out taking action, will likely make no money.

See, the thing with predictions is some people will get some right, most will get most wrong but the end of the day none of them will mean anything to your business if you aren’t focused on the fundamentals of getting new customers, giving them great products and delivering value.

Things will change throughout the year and new opportunities will come up and some that seemed were going to be big will fall by the wayside. Ask yourself, how many people this time last year predicted Groupon? See, things are going to come up and surprise you along the way, that’s what business and life is about. So how do you decide which opportunities to take ….

How to interpret these predictions as opportunities for your business

Ask yourself these questions and use your answers to guide you as to what actions you will take:

1. Is this opportunity really important enough that I need to change my current strategy and actions?

There is no use jumping from opportunity to opportunity unless you can clearly see how this is going to substantially improve your business in a clearly measurable way.

2. Are we doing something like this already? Can we create leverage?

Often you are doing something like this already and then just expand that to encompass this new opportunity. This is especially true of things like social media for your business. At the end of the day, its talking to your customers. If you can leverage to have you post one message and it goes out to 20 different places, it means a wider reach for you, without the added work.

3. How will this bring us customers?

Be really clear about how this opportunity will deliver customers. There is no point you spending 20 hours a day on something that is not instantly increasing your sales. Even if its important long term, at first you need to focus on what’s going to deliver customers today.

4. Is this a marketing, sales, product creation or customer support opportunity?

This question builds on the previous two. Be clear about where this new opportunity fits in with with what you are already doing. If its a fantastic customer support opportunity and that’s not a problem you currently have then put it on hold and focus on the real problems you have at the moment.

5. Who is going to be responsible for this? What resources are you going to allocate to this?

If you are just starting out by yourself or have a very small team you can’t expect to be on 25 social media sites (without serious leverage ) and be doing everything you need to be doing to grow your business like getting customers, creating a solid backend and building the processes to get these things on autopilot.

6. What processes can you create that will allow this to be outsourced or automated?

Now is the greatest time for creating the right processes in your business. Once you have these processes you then need to get them automated or done by other people so you can focus truly on growing your business.

7. How are we going measure the results?

Whether its fan interaction on your Facebook fan page or amount of visitors on your blog, you MUST be measuring the results. While here is not the place to go exactly in detail to what and how you should be measuring I will say start by measuring things that bring you or cost you money. Its your balance sheet most of all that will determine whether your business stays alive or dies. This is as true for a corner store as it is for a multi national company.

What you should be focusing on

As an entrepreneur and a business owner you need to be focused on your business, not what’s the coolest new thing on the internet or how to get more followers on twitter that won’t ever buy anything from you.

You need to focus on building the best and fastest systems for getting new customers, creating great products for them and providing great customer support.  You need to be measuring your results to be constantly improving these key fundamentals of your business.

Overall don’t be distracted by things that are shiny, bright and new. Just because some blogger online thinks that something will be the biggest thing in 2011, doesn’t mean at the end of the day that’s what’s going to be right for your business.

The Cost of Inaction

You’re right it ain’t easy!

Start Small.

Give yourself a time limit.

Measure

Set up the Environment to Win

Conclusion

photo credit: quinn.anya

I remember a time when I was talking to a small business owner in Asia and asking him some questions about his business. He told me that he bought a certain product from his supplier at about 80 cents and then he sold it for $1.60. I congratulated him and said it was very good that he was making a 100% mark up on what he was selling. Very quickly he turned and told me that, no he only had a 50% mark up. When I pointed out the he was actually doubling his money and had a 100% mark up, he kept pointing out that I was wrong and the mark up was only 50%. No matter what i tried to do to convince him otherwise, he disagreed. I began to make the mistake of thinking this guy is stupid and I could feel that I was getting annoyed at his lack of math skills.

As the conversation went on, one of his sons came along and listened and laughed at our conversation. His son had a very good education overseas and quickly agreed with me that it was a 100% mark up. Not matter what we did to convince his father, the father though we were both stupid. Eventually I had to laugh at the situation and let it go. As i did that, something occurred to me. He was the one making the money. He was the one taking action and even if he didn’t describe in the correct academic way, he was the one getting the results he wanted. From that day on I realized that being smart had a lot less to do with being successful than I had ever thought.

So if intelligence isn’t the answer, what is?

At school we are taught to value intelligence as if it is gold . I suspect that most of us were taught to value it too much. Time and time again when I meet people who have achieved much success in life (both financial and non financial), their success hasn’t come from a great deal of intelligence, its come from the consistent actions they have taken, not from any large source of intelligence.

Look at most self made millionaires and a common theme that you see in many of them is that left school at a young age. Its true that most of them kept learning in the real world after they left school, but I think you would be hard pressed to find one of them that claims they were one of the smartest people in their industry. Many of them would claim though, that they were the ones who took action when other people stood still out of fear or out knowing better. You often hear them say things such as “I was too dumb to know that it wouldn’t work, so I made it work.”

Action Beats Smart

Time and time again when I meet people who are getting results that they want in life, they aren’t the people who are the smartest in the room. They are the people who implement the fastest. It surprises me so often that its not the people who talk the big talk and ask in depth and complicated questions, its the quiet person who comes up after the seminar and says “these are the 10 things I am doing and these are the results I am getting, what can I do next?”. These are the people that I love to talk to, because I know if I show them one small thing that they can do to improve their business or life, they will implement it. They won’t argue whether it will work for them or not. They won’t argue that their situation or location is different, and that that means that what works for others won’t work for them. They Nike it!! They just do it and more often than not they get the results they wanted. I think we all do this when we are achieving in our life.

Even the smallest bit of action will beat immense knowledge with no follow through.

What action have you taken today?

My challenge to you now is what action have you taken today that will take you closer to your goals. What action is getting the most traction in your life. Don’t let the quest for more knowledge or the self perceived belief that you aren’t intelligent enough stop you from taking small actions that will lead to big results. People (often including myself) are looking for the magic strategy or information that we think we need. Nine times out of ten the strategies we need are out there and easy to find, they don’t require a great deal of knowledge but they do require action.

I continually aim to remind myself of this. Re-starting posting to my blog is an example of action that I have needed to take for a long time, yet not followed through on, because I thought I needed to learn more about writing and blogging (and wordpress and plugins) and getting smarter. I was wrong!!! I needed to be posting and getting it wrong and learning from doing, rather than from reading or listening to others. So here it is my first post. I am sure that they will get better the more that I write but at least now I have taken the action, posted this and even have 3 more posts coming along the pipeline.

photo credit: Eddie~S

I was recently in Zurich Switzerland and had the good fortune to be taken to The Blindekuh (Blind Cow) Restaurant.

The Blindekuh is a restaurant where everything inside the dinning room is totally pitch black. There is no light in there what so ever. Basically by walking into the dinning room you loose your sense of sight. You become blind. Totally.

At first myself and others at my table had the illusion that we could still see our own hands moving in front of our faces, even though we couldn’t see anything else. I put this to the test by getting a friend’s hand in front of my face (an inch away), only to find that I couldn’t see it at all. It had been a trick that my mind was playing on me by making me think I could see my hands.

The experience for me was amazing. After the few initial minutes of feeling wary and concern about where my hands were and if I was going to knock over my glass etc wore off, I began to relax in to the realization that I no longer had my sight to rely on.

Listening to people’s voices took on a whole new level of awareness. The tables are shared and seat 6-8 people, so our small group of three joined a table by another group of 3 Americans. During the whole lunch I never got to see these people at all, I only had the sense of sound and topics of our conversation from which to evaluate them.

The Obsession of Passion – What you gives you OCD, will often give you your success.

People often ask me at my seminars, about how they find can find their true passion and often my answer is something along the lines ‘you will know it when you find it, so keep trying new things till you find it’.

While this may often seem a short and succinct reply to a truly in depth question, the simple fact is that most people don’t try many new activities once they become an adult.

Adam Savage is known to many of you as one of the presenters from the Myth-Busters show on the discovery channel. I am a fan of the show and the fundamental ways they test assumptions to see what actually is myth and what is plausible.