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Resources: Terranove More Links: Estatescape Building a Home-Based Business Team by Rob Spiegel When you first launch a home-based business, you get to wear all the hats: accountant, marketing director, ad agency, administrative assistant and office custodian. But as your business succeeds and you grow, you will start to divvy up tasks, hiring employees or outsourcing jobs to service companies. Most home-based entrepreneurs keep some of the fun jobs – speaking at meetings about marketing tactics for the under-funded – as well as some of the drearier work – face it, you’re stuck as chief floor polisher. Most home-based business owners dread the concept of sending critical work to outside firms. For one, the all-hats entrepreneur usually has control issues. For another, the successful home-business tycoon is cheap. That’s a good quality when you’re running a start-up, but that aspect of your personality will give you stick-in-the-craw jitters when you realize how much a decent bookkeeper charges per hour, and inevitably, you say to yourself – “Heck, if I just stay up a couple more hours each night, and I’ll get to keep all that money.” Even more frightening to the home-based entrepreneur is the idea of an employee reporting to your home to work. Face it, part of the reason you chose home as your start-up platform is because you like having the place to yourself. Even more disturbing than the intrusion into your living-room office is the idea of watching a fifteen-dollar-hour employee talk to mom on your phone. Nope, employees are rarely a satisfying solution for home entrepreneurs. You will likely prefer using fellow home-based service companies to fill out the tasks that you can no longer do no matter how late you work. If you’re business succeeds, you will need some form of support. Likely it’s the sales work you’ll get to keep – it’s almost impossible to outsource this critical task effectively. Here are a few guidelines for outsourcing the tasks that keep you from the sales calls that are the key to really building your business. Outsource your weakness. Sales probably comes to mind as your weak suit, but sales isn’t your weakness or you wouldn’t still be in business. Sales may be the most unpleasant work, but bookkeeping is probably your true weakness. Outsource it. Keep the proprietary tasks. Be careful not to outsource the key to your business – you may find your service company will develop a dangerously close relationship to your client. I know a marketing consultant who handed off his largest client to a freelancer so he could develop new business. The client just loved his freelancer, and next year the client decided to work directly with her. Send off the cheap work. Part of the success of the home-based enterprise is the low overhead. Be careful not to undermine your low-cost advantage by hiring expensive service help. Keep the expensive tasks at home. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |