In order to run your little business as a freelance translator you have to embody many roles at the same time: CEO/director, marketing specialist, administrative officer, web designer, call center, cleaner, personal assistant (to yourself, not the easiest person to deal with…), etc.
But how much time are you really devoting to your core activity , i.e. translation?
Recently, I decided to try outsourcing some of my paperwork (invoices and offers, and even some e-mails) to another freelancer. To this purpose, I used Elance, a website on which you can post a project to which freelancers from all over the world can react (a bit like Proz for translators). I was looking for a Dutch speaking person, as I mainly do business with Dutch companies, and I found a Dutch lady living in Senegal who was ready to help me!
I now have more free time (the paperwork had been taking me anything up to 30 min/day) and don’t have to worry any more about the paperwork accumulating in my office!
Here are the 5 good reasons:
- Paperwork is boring
After a hard day’s work, there’s nothing more boring than sending invoices to clients or having to take care of your accounting. Having a person whom you trust to do it for you is such a relief! - Paperwork takes time
- Paperwork costs money
You time is money! Try calculating the amount of money you make per hour when translating. This will show you how much you lose when you take care of the paperwork yourself. This time=money equation can also be converted into the currency of free time, time for your family or for doing things you enjoy more. - Outsourcing is not so difficult
Outsourcing your administrative tasks is not as difficult as you might think. There are many websites where you can find freelancers who specialise in this kind of tasks, or you could consider hiring a student who needs some money to finance his/her studies. You can also take advantage of what Tim Ferriss calls geoarbitrage: thanks to new technologies, you can work with people all over the world. This means that you could employ someone in a lower income country and, at the same time, you can actually help this person. It’s a win-win situation: you will be paying much less than for the same services in, for example Europe or the US, while the person with whom you are working will earn more money than she may by doing a similar job in a local company. There is nothing unethical about geoarbitrage!
On a website like Elance you can find serious freelancers, specialised in many fields, in administrative tasks, working as virtual assistants, webdesign, DTP, SEO… - Outsourcing allows you to focus on your priorities
After all, what you enjoy the most is translating, isn’t it? Outsourcing allows you to focus on your core activity, and to improve not only the quality of your work, but also and your relationships with your customers!
Do you outsource? Please share your experience!
Filed under: Time management | Tagged: Outsourcing, Time management
Outsourcing is best bet for four reasons:
One: Outsourcing is cost effective and saves you money
Two: Outsourcing can help you share risk
Three: Outsourcing can help accommodate peak loads
Four: Outsourcing can help develop your internal staff
These are additional reasons why Outsourcing is good for your business/organization:
1. Achieve more with less. Everyone in business is under constant pressure to produce ever-increasing volumes of work to generate more revenue using existing staff. With outsourcing, you can utilize your existing staff to manage outsourced projects. Your staff manages the outsourced team, thus improving the output of each staff member.
2. Real-time access to skilled people. Business is not a steady, constant stream. You can never fully predict what situation the next day, week or month will force upon you. Outsourcing provides a certain level of scalability to help solve the enviable situation of significant growth.
3. Focus on your core competencies. When your business grows, it does so because you successfully deliver a product the market demands.
4. Flexibility when negotiating contracts. Pricing flexibility allows you to be much more creative in managing your budget when you can’t afford higher-priced staff. In addition to each staff member’s salary, there is the cost of taxes, health insurance, liability insurance, computers, cubicles and much more, depending on the perks you offer.
5. Higher value per person. Maintaining the proper staff levels to meet the needs of your business is a difficult art to master. Outsourcing gives you flexibility when determining appropriate staff levels. You can hire a core team capable of meeting the demands of your business 80 percent of the time.
6. Educated people with deep skill sets. Clearly language and cultural barriers exist. Just resist the urge to speak with increasing volume, and relax.
7. Getting started is easy. If outsourcing sounds even remotely interesting to you, I suggest you take appropriate action. Notice I didn’t simply say “take action.” Getting started with outsourcing is as easy as finding a vendor and signing a contract.
This i think is great and it truly can help businessmen our there and investors who are thinking of getting into the outsourcing business