Let’s talk about the cost of outsourcing and how you manage these costs.
Whether you’re hiring at home or abroad you can often get workers for a much lower price by hiring them temporarily. Temporary help is less expensive because it is usually found overseas, and the pay expectations are a lot lower there, but you have to be very careful with the quality.
The good news is with outsourcing you can hire on a project basis, or a short term basis, for as little as a week or a few months. But to be as cost effective as possible you really have to be a good manager of yourself, and the contractors you hire.
Negotiate the fees
The price is always negotiable with outsourcing. Depending on the task, the contractor might drop the price for you, if you offer a longer term contract. So don’t be afraid to negotiate. They might normally charge $100 bucks a day for programming or something, but they might only charge you like $350 for a week, and less for longer contracts. The more long term the work, the better deal they will give you. A lot of the time money isn’t the only motivator for people. You could negotiate a lower price in exchange for a flexible schedule, the ability to travel or other perks that don’t cost you money. Just play around with this process and see what works and what doesn’t.
The Benefit of Crowd Sourcing
Crowd sourcing is when you outsource tasks to a large group of people. Think of it like a casting call, and only the best people get the job.
Here’s how it works.
You place a job on a site http://99designs.com and you run a contest for the design and you only pay the winner of the contest the “prize money”, which is usually less than if you outsource the job. You often get better work and it’s very, very competitive because you’re getting entries from all over the world for something. If you are needing a new logo for your business you could have people from all over the world competing for the job. You can literally have over 100 designs to choose from, and you only pay for the one you choose. There are a lot of things that are so much cheaper to outsource overseas, that can be done just as well as it can be done here.
Things that you can outsource are things like IT programming, transcription, graphic design, customer service, tele-markteing, and a bunch more. You just want to make sure to really intereview anyone that is going to be communicating with your customers, and make sure they have good communication skils. There is nothing more annoying than talking to someone on the phone that makes no sense.
Make sure you are keeping pace with the market, and always tracking the prices of services. You want to make sure that you are not over paying. You also want to make sure you are not under paying either, because you risk the chance of losing a really good contractor.
