UWR 029 Help! I need to outsource but I’m not profitable yet

In today’s episode, I am answering a question that someone asked me on Facebook, so let’s dive in. Here is the question, for two weeks I’ve been ill and I’m pretty sure it’s related to taking on too much. I’m running my business and looking after my 16 month old who is in nursery part time. So I’m listening to my body and it is telling me to stop. I realised that I need to outsource parts of my business. The problem is that I am not yet profitable, so how do I start outsourcing when I have not made a profit? And how do you figure out what to outsource and to who? I just don’t know how else I’ll get to my business’ goals. I am working my ass off at the moment. And here is my answer to their question. First of all, before you even think about outsourcing to grow, you need to figure out how you can make your business profitable from today. What that means is that you need to identify the money leaks that are currently happening in your business because you cannot continue to operate business not making a profit. That is a hobby. A hobby is something that costs money and a business is something that makes you money, I.E., makes you profit. Check out my podcast episode on how to identify money leaks in your business. It is episode number six and you can do the exercise in that episode once you’ve listened to this one to find out more about eliminating money leaks in your business. The second thing that you should do after you’ve done that money leaks exercise is to work out of course what you want to outsource. What tasks can you handover? To do this, I recommend initially keeping a time diary. So how I do this is for an entire week, write down every single thing that you are doing in your business every minute of every day, every single tiny little thing. If you are posting on Instagram while you’re on the toilet, write it down and how long it took. I mean the post of course, not how long you were in the bathroom for. And at the end of the week go through the list. All the things that someone else could do, then mark beside those. And of course you’ll see how long it took you to do those things. Now any of those things marked are actually things that you could outsource. You can have a look and see what might be the simplest and easiest, what is the lowest hanging fruit, but the thing is that you also want to make sure that anything you are outsourcing, you can make sure that the person you’re outsourcing them to is able to pay for themselves. You don’t just want them to be a cost, you don’t just want to be chucking random bits of admin to them and not really getting any value for that. So you need to make sure that the things that you’re outsourcing are able to give you a return on your investment. I hope that this episode has been useful to you. I also want to invite you to step into the Uncover Wealth Community. This is my private community on Facebook. You can search Uncover Wealth Community or go to annetteandco.co.uk/fbgroup. I do a live teaching there every single Tuesday for Training Tuesday, and I would love to have you there. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, let’s find the clarity in your numbers, increase your wealth and get more money in your pockets.