Four months pregnant and fresh from reading Robert Kiyosaki’s ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad‘ in 1999, Fiona went on the hunt to find the ideal financial advisor, according to Rich Dad principles to help with the big, bold web idea that she and David were hatching. That advisor was found and is Phillip Grant from Nexia ASR, who still gives guidance, advice and insight to David and Fiona ten years down the track. Phillip explains to Fiona a bit about the art and science of getting rich, or at least making his clients rich, as well as what key things every start-up should know and have in place. Read More→

This is a transcript of the video post “No Better Time To Outsource“.

You can download the transcript as a PDF.

Hello, my name’s Fiona Boyd, and I’m going to talk to you today about when you know it’s the right time to outsource some of the functions of your business.

Outsourcing is something David and I have tried quite a lot since even the late 1990s, of which we had very little success until recent times, and I guess today I want to tell you some of the successful outsourcing projects we’ve had recently that gives me encouragement to actually advocate to those of you running a small business, particularly a small online content business or a blog that generates an income for you. I’d like to encourage you to get rid of some of the functions in your life that aren’t the best use of your time so that you can do what you do really well, which is create fantastic content and serve that content to your audience.

Just a bit of history – David and I certainly loved the idea of outsourcing, we loved the idea of giving work to people from other places and building beyond the employee/employer relationship. But unfortunately for us, some of the very early opportunities to give that a go just really were either price prohibitive, or if we were able to do something where the cost looked OK, the other side of the equation just didn’t deliver, and I’ll give you an example. First of all just something that was way too expensive. Back in 2003 with the business that David and I built from scratch and ended up selling in mid-2006, Arts Hub, we had a forum that we ran and it was called the Dole for the Arts Forum. There was a big argument in Australia at the time – basically most artists couldn’t afford to support themselves and they needed a base level of income in order to continue with their practice, and through time their practice and their product, their artwork or their performance or whatever would generate a living wage for them, but certainly in the early stages of a career that just wasn’t possible and there was an argument that we were advocating at Arts Hub that the government really should see the first few years out of Uni for someone who was an artist, as such, they should be eligible for the dole without having to get other, unrelated work.

The forum itself was a fantastic success, it was at the State Library of Victoria which had been newly refurbished, just a beautiful building. Over 60 people attended and there were some really well-known dignitaries in the arts community there, including many really hardcore arts workers who have been generating, working hard at what they do forever, and who had some really impassioned pleas as to why dole for the arts was a good idea. 60 minutes of talk time on a tape, I handed that to a secretarial service for a transcription, thinking, maybe it’ll cost $100 dollars. It took them two weeks to transcribe and it cost us $480, I seem to remember when I paid the bill back in 2003. This is just not affordable, to do things that way, so that was a bit of a trial. We ran a forum, the forum was successful, mainly things were sponsored but when it came to being able to use that content as news features, the transcript itself was just price prohibitive. That’s one example. There are other examples, we tried to outsource to a web developer partway through the Arts Hub experience, and found that they would do some bits of the work and then just lose interest. You could never really get the pay and the motivation equation quite right.

So that was past experience and I must say, every time I read an article in the newspaper saying, oh, well, the Commonwealth Bank has now outsourced X amount of call centre jobs to a call centre in India, I always wonder what really goes on and how do you manage those relationships to get the quality of service that you expect and that your customers expect and that the outsourcing relationship actually works and benefits both sides.

But in recent times, and certainly after reading a book by Tim Ferriss called 4-Hour Workweek which I read over Christmas, as did David, and I really liked him because he makes you question some of the fundamentals of how we live at this moment in time, and what are some of the paradigms we live under and whether our whole attitude to work is working for us or not, and one of the things that Tim is really big on is outsourcing all aspects, or virtually all aspects, of his life and his business. It certainly got us thinking – David had tried a couple of small web jobs last year with mixed success, but certainly this year we’ve made a much more concerted effort to – instead of just looking around us for talent to hire – to actually putting jobs out there into the global space and seeing what comes up. And just as an example for you, that things have changed and it’s so much easier now for a small business, an owner-operator, someone who is living, earning their income as a sole person generating content, that you actually now can get relationships with people who can provide for you at a rate that you can afford and you actually get what you want. An example of this recently is that we needed some web design for our Niche Content Millionaire book. We had spent six weeks writing non-stop, both of us, we equally shared the chapters and then another six weeks editing – in fact I thought the editing side was so much harder than the actual writing, which was a pleasure – and after doing all that we realised that we have the content, we have the words but what we don’t have is the look or the image and that was a cause of concern because neither David nor I consider ourselves design gurus – we love other people’s designs, we love what other people can create, but that’s not our strength, and we’ve spent way too much money on graphic designers and web designers in the past simply because it isn’t our gift, I think.

Anyway, this time round, David said, let’s give Elance a go – he had done a few small jobs with our past site that we had called calexing.com (?), in fact we still have. So he put up a job on Elance for someone to design the front cover of the Niche Content Millionaire book, and there were several submissions. The one that was – not the cheapest, by a long shot, but certainly showed a degree of understanding as to what we wanted was from a guy in China called Jay. We ended up – David ended up hiring Jay, and he came up with the cover that you see now, when you go to our blog or when you go to purchase the book, if you have purchased the book, of course, and we really liked it, we really liked that design, it said what we wanted to say, it’s not too artistic, it’s not too bland, and it really says what the book’s about, which is the story of how we started an online, membership-based community from scratch and we made seriously good money out of it on exit. Anyway, Jay’s work was sensational – so sensational that we’ve gone back to him several times now to do many more features as we build our Niche Content Millionaire website. But more than that, David consults widely as a web developer with lots of clients and he’s asked constantly for a graphic designer who “won’t rip me off”, and he has certainly passed Jay’s details on to many people now, within an eight-week timeframe. All I can say is that the time is now right for outsourcing – it’s not something to be scared of. If you know the job that you have really well, and you’ve defined it, you’ve defined the upper limits of what you’re prepared to pay for it, and you’ve defined what you expect, the level of quality, and what your expectations are, then you shouldn’t be scared to put your job out there and see who, wherever on the planet, is able to meet your needs.

So much in the past, certainly here in Australia, we’ve relied on the – what we called tried and true – but how good are they really? – things like Yellow Pages – to find whatever service or product that we need – or word of mouth, but you know the trap with word of mouth is that it’s only as good as, you know, people propping each other up, and it’s confined geographically to those who live around you – the thing is with something like Elance, and there’s another version, there’s 99designs, that is run by a friend of ours actually, Mark Harbottle, another sort of early days online entrepreneur. The thing about 99designs is that’s mainly focusing on graphic design across the whole spectrum, not just graphic design for web. But Elance you can put virtually any web job up there and someone is going to bid for it.

So, look, there’s a couple of examples of some really exciting news when it comes to outsourcing, you can do it if you’re small, you don’t have to be a big corporate conglomerate, with all the scale issues on your side, able to negotiate, you know, some poor guy in India back down to the smallest amount. You can negotiate a win-win rate, a rate that works for you, that is a fraction of the cost of hiring someone locally, who you don’t really know is going to do the job on time, and also in someone else’s currency it makes really good sense for them to do the job. Just as an example, everyone who walks into my life at the moment seems to need to have a web job done, including last week when a guy from RACV home monitoring came to hook up our security system in the new place we’ve moved to, and basically he was talking to David about a business idea, an online business idea, that sounded pretty sensational actually, that he’d hired a local person who was a web developer, who was a friend-of-a-friend referral, had spent $2,000 with him so far and in six months there was nothing to show for the $2,000, and this guy, this venture between him and his wife is meant to be the next stage in their life, and a big chunk of their savings had gone into the deposit for this web developer who has so far done nothing. I’m happy to say, that guy left here saying, oh, I’m about to post a job on Elance because, you know, we’ve got to get on with this and there’s got to be a better way.

So happy outsourcing! I’m with Tim Ferriss here – I think that the time is right, now – be confident, put your job up. Try Elance – there are a number of places, and – you know how to find those, but be prepared to get some of your time back and outsource some of the things that you don’t absolutely have to do.