As many will know I tend to try and outsource most of the business and many of the personal tasks I have to do each day. It allows you to build a system that will scale and in a time limited business like consultancy thats the path to real profit.

So I thought I would do a quick post of tips on how to get started in outsourcing your tasks.

The service I tend to prefer is oDesk (No aff link there surprisingly )

The reason I prefer them is that as you build your ‘team’ on the service they give you a team room where you can click to see the work diary of each team member.

The oDesk software also provides you with screenshots at intervals during their day so you can visually see the progress each of your team is making. They even have an iphone app to see that too.

1. Posting an opening
Post a clear and easy to understand description of the tasks involved. Bear in mind that many of these openings will remain open long term so try not to be specific on tasks. For example “PHP coder with experience of PHP, MySQL, xHTML, CSS, Jquery / Javascript, Wordpress and Api’s” is better than “Someone needed for development of a wordpress site”

2. When you get applicants filter down to a few possibles. I use the following criteria: -
English skills of 5 (Very very important)
Feedback score of 4.5-5 (I rely on the feedback quite a bit)

3. Choose providers affiliated with a bigger provider.
I have used independent providers but find them often more hit and miss and unless you can justify employing them full time from the off then they will get dragged off onto other peoples projects. Its also good to have a manager above them who can allocate work to others in their organisation if needed.

4. Don’t interview.
I tend to just narrow down to a few and then hire them explaining that I will give them a small paid task to test if they are what we need, the best result wins. The paid task is important as it measures the quality of their work and it gives you a chance to check communication is good – communication in outsourcing is the secret to success.

5. Set an hourly limit.
I need to make sure I know what my exposure to costs are, sure I can see the progress as we go but I need to be on top of what this is going to cost me (Watch out for anyone billing off odesk hours and ask them to stop)

6. Don’t employ people without a way of paying for their time.
I have 9 people on oDesk now and only one of them is doing work that I cant invoice out again to a client or is for a business I own equity ain and is paying for itself.

7. Use Basecamp to manage your team.
As soon as someone joins my team I set them up a login for our company Basecamp account and assign them tasks via that system rather than oDesks. Basically this means I keep on top of the total project and provides all we need to keep the tasks on time and all the files in one place.

8. Get a feel for what to expect and break things down for them
Its not surprising that people based thousands of miles away get the wrong end of the stick when you dont define what they need to do. Break each task into tiny little tasks and assign them, I like to do a project scope at the start so they get the context of what we are headed towards.

9. If you can try and get to a scale where you have someone managing your team whos communication skills and ability is excellent.
I have most of my team now reporting to one person who acts as a projects manager and understands the projects better even than me, I would like to get everyone reporting to them as soon as possible as there are always a stream of clarification questions to sort each day.

10. Get the iphone app
9am Monday morning…. roll over bleary eyed and reach for the phone…
Check email – NOPE
Check twitter – Maybe
Check the slideshow of work done overnight by the team – YUP

Its a great feeling to see that before you have woken up you already have an invoiceable days work or more done, suddenly the daily treadmill is an optional one!

Just wanted to let everyone know that I will be speaking at SES London this year. I am on a panel entitled ‘Automating Twitter’ with Fantomaster, Pierre, Tracy Falke and Moderated by Cindy Krum.

Looking forward to it!

As the bright light of a new decade streams through the bedroom window to suddenly focus what now appears to be an acute case of hangover I wanted to post this advice.

Normally at this time of year the net is suddenly filled with predictions posts and tweets (I even considered making a Twitter web app where you could add filter words to remove any tweet that contained “prediction”)

Rather than make any pointless predictions myself I would rather just share some commitments and plans for the coming year. This is a task that I would normally do at this time of year anyway.

2009 Goals

1. Move to entirely self employed (Done – March 09)
2. Diversify income as the first stage in long term plan (Done)
3. Start a new business with a friend (Done – Kerboo)

And my 2010 Goals are

1. Sell my Adsense flat to nearly clear my main mortgage (1st / 2nd Qtr)
2. Get Kerboo to 500 customers
3. Make 80% of my income location independent

And the sub projects for this year are all around the theme of

AUTOMATION

AUTOMATION

AUTOMATION

We have a 3 week trip to California planned in for August this year to look for somewhere we can relocate to (Planning for 2012 ish)

Heres the incentive for that…

Have a great 2010, make sure you have a plan and that you ACTION it

So if you are a reader of my blog or a follower on Twitter – first off, Why ?? I never understand but once in a while I suppose there is a good post or two and its always nice to keep up with what a friend is up to.

Twitter is great for that and I am as addicted as I have always been to it but sometimes you need to offer multiple ways for people to keep in touch. Posterous, Facebook, My own blog, Twitter – they all reach different people.

So from now on ill be posting in all these places with a mix of my day to day and occasionally something useful I hope.

Paul

Posted via web from seoidiot’s posterous

Well I thought id start a little meme, mainly to annoy people.

What I have done is created a playlist from Spotify of 6 songs that tell you all you need to know about who and what I am.

Heres whats in my playlist (SEOidiot – Defined)

The link to it on the excellent Sharemyplaylists site is here

Now id like to name the following people to do the same please: -

@kierondonoghue
@joannabutler
@alcarlton
@wendycwilliams