0:00:00 Ben Wright: I’ve been trying and you know, I’ve been tested.
0:00:06 B: Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast with your hosts, Ben Wright and Jemimah Ashleigh. Ben, known as the sales strategist, and Jemimah, our resident visibility expert, are here to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with a little fun along the way. Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or aspiring business owner, this is the podcast where we share everything we know about business to help you succeed.
0:00:31 B: Let’s get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast.
0:00:44 Ben Wright: Welcome back, everyone, to Friends in Business, where you are about to witness the first ever murder live murder on a podcast. I’m not going to tell you who’s going to murder who, but you can work it out.
0:00:56 Jemimah Ashleigh: I’m in trouble.
0:00:57 Ben Wright: You know what? This all comes after we had a great morning where Jemimah has actually bought me up some for my daughter. I think more importantly, up some honey. And it’s quite cool. Right. Tell me about this. A very different technique around harvesting honey.
0:01:11 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. I’ve just started working with a company. I’m sitting in there one day a week helping out a company at the moment called Hivekeepers, really doing honey harvesting. So instead of it being this very ancient traditional way of doing it with smoking things and having to do massive amount of honey, it’s just become a very small, little compact device that sits on your kitchen bench and you can get farm to table honey in under a minute. It’s pretty incredible little invention.
0:01:37 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:01:37 Jemimah Ashleigh: And I walked in really proud. I was like, I actually spun this honey for you and you went, are you a beekeeper now? No, actually, I’m not.
0:01:45 Ben Wright: I think I might have also said to you, the container’s a bit smaller. Thank you. And I like about you talking about you actually, actually have the hives on site. Yeah. Really cool. This is coming from me, who’s allergic to bees, but I’m looking forward to tasting it. And no doubt my little one will come roaring through the door at some point and she wants some Auntie Jemimah’s special honey on toast.
0:02:04 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s fair.
0:02:04 Ben Wright: The bit, though, that got us thinking out of that was that you’re an outsourced resource to this business.
0:02:11 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes, I am. I’m sitting in as a chief marketing officer one day a week.
0:02:16 Ben Wright: Excellent.
0:02:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: Okay.
0:02:18 Ben Wright: Outsourcing is something that many businesses look at but can be a little bit hard to demystify.
0:02:25 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:02:25 Ben Wright: Right. When to outsource versus having? Well, in fact, the first question is, when do you actually need support? Right. And then what does that support look like? Is it outsourcing versus part time roles versus casual roles versus full time roles. I’d argue subcontracting is a form of outsourcing but a little bit different to some of the traditional outsourcing. Right. Outsource a role one day a week versus you generally will subcontract a job, you know a specific job. Subcontracting often actually falls into mostly around your blue collar trades. And so yeah, really hard one to demystify. So I think today we’re going to have a go at exploring the wonderful world of outsourcing.
0:03:04 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, this came up when we were talking about the honey and I just said, you know, I’m sort of sitting as a contractor a little bit and how incredible it was to have the opportunity to be really embedded in the business and not actually have to be making any decisions which was. It’s quite a nice little change. So be love to ask you, have you ever outsourced to start with?
0:03:23 Ben Wright: Look, absolutely, I have outsourced almost every function. I’m just thinking through this. Almost every function I’ve ever had in a business, even look at sales, have probably worked through commission agents. I’d say that’s probably the area I’ve outsourced the least because I’ve always had reasonably strong competency around that. But yes, have outsourced the majority of positions in a business. We grew. Our largest business grew from pure startup to about $40 million revenue. This is outside of the corporate work I’ve done. Obviously work for corporate business is far bigger. But at a private level we went from 0 to 40 million in about annual run rate in about seven years. Right. So we had some serious hiring to do over that period. I think we ended up with 80 staff and 200 subcontractors. So over that journey there’s lots of different permutations and combinations that you run.
0:04:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, One of the hardest times in that situation is to know when do you go from having Susan come in to do one a day, a week versus do we need to get a full time person, do we need an intern? Can we get a virtual assistant to do that? And really want to go through today what that looks like for different businesses at different levels. So one of the things I tend to work with businesses that are sort of sitting in that pre million dollars so they’re usually sitting in around 250 to 500,000 heading to a mill. And one of the first conversations we have to have is what can we get rid of immediately? Because often the thing that’s stopping people hitting that next Level financially is too much actual practical work in the business rather than on the business for them.
Ben Wright:
For them. And they are doing too much themselves
Jemimah Ashleigh:
For themselves. So. And it can be as simple as social media posts. It can be as simple as an award application that they’re writing themselves and taking a day out of their life to go and do. It can be as minute as still doing their own bas or still doing their own zero matching up. It’s a tiny task. It might take five minutes, but the sum of those tasks, eating days out of your week.
0:05:18 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah. Fundamentally green look. I mean, obviously work with businesses from the startup scale through to my largest is just north of $5 billion. In fact, they’re closing in on $6 billion in revenue. And I’d have to say the principles often are pretty consistent around how you approach outsourcing. Or not, albeit right, with different depths of cash in the pocket. So, yeah, let’s talk about it. Perhaps let’s go through first your approach to outsourcing.
0:05:45 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, great. So I initially started doing outsourcing with having virtual assistants. That was sort of my first thing that I ever did. And that was my first little toe dip into like getting rid of work off my desk. And I did this in a couple of ways. One, I looked at international outsourcing. I looked at using particularly around the Philippines was a big place for me. I engaged with a couple of places sent workout. Now, I’m not saying all places are bad. I’m not saying all are good. I didn’t have a terrific experience. There was definitely the things I needed, needed to have language skills that my bas definitely didn’t have the capacity for. The responses that I was getting and that they, you know, they were doing inbox dms and having conversations were definitely in not English as a first language. We definitely saw some breakdowns there.
So that became very clear very early on. I needed to step away from that. That wasn’t for me. Definite time and place. If you have things that photo editing is a good one, website tiny tweaks like these little ad hoc tasks are amazing to get rid of. I then went onshore and got a VA to come on board there. Now a VA and assistant, there’s really no difference. Only usually one’s virtual and one is not. So one might not be in the same room as you. I still have a VA Now, I don’t call her a va. I would call her my assistant. Now, that was how that started for me and that made the world of difference. Being able to delegate tasks that were Repeatable. Getting rid of the repeatable things that were never going to change. Getting a bookkeeper on board who just dealt with, yeah, I don’t want to know how the bus is done. I just need to know when I need to pay it. Yeah, you tell me. Send me that email and I’ll deal with it. That was it for me.
Next comes the decision to bring a team member on board for the first time. That when that happened for the first time and I was now responsible for paying someone else’s salary as well as my own salary. That was probably one of the more daunting days of my career. When I started entrepreneurship. Just that moment of, I have to now pay two people. I can’t mess this up. I felt more pressure on that day than I think I’d felt for a very, very long time. We now have a team of four, so. And they’re killing it and they’re amazing. And that was a really good move for on our behalf. And we gradually added time. So it was 0.5 for all of them to start with. They’re now sitting at all ones. Okay, that’s full time. But it was a really daunting process to go through that process.
0:08:17 Ben Wright: Great. Okay. So we’ve got this little bit of personal experience there. I like to try and wrap frameworks around how we approaching
0:08:22 Jemimah Ashleigh: shocking.
0:08:24 Ben Wright: So I’ve been outsourcing internationally for what are we now, probably 12 or 13 years. I’ve experienced outsourcing throughout most of my career, whether it be local or overseas. And there’s an approach that I take and tend to work with my customers around that really, I think works for the greater good.
So the first thing is as we are starting to reach capacity in our business, right. If we’re a small business in our team, we’re part of a larger business or even personally at a professional level is I start to look at the tasks that either aren’t adding value or aren’t filling my cup, I. E. Right. They’re not going to add any value to what I’m doing or I don’t enjoy doing it. Yeah, they’re the ones I look at to say right within a business, a team, a person, you know, an individual, how can we start to outsource those? Right. And then for me, the other lens you can layer over that. And I learned this from a friend of mine, Grant Buttress. He absolutely used this saying it was fantastic. I learned it from about eight years ago and it’s reversible versus non reversible decision making. So where we have a decision that’s reversible, that is you can make that decision and quickly unwind it.
0:09:27 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:09:28 Ben Wright: With limited impact to your business. They’re the type of tasks I work with teams on to say, hey, these can also be outsourced.
0:09:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: Love that.
0:09:35 Ben Wright: Where they’re not reversible. So where they can have a significant downside on your business. They’re the ones I like to keep with my teams in house. Right. So you keep them in your control or you’re signing off those through your team members.
So first thing I like to do is pick out the pool of decisions or the pool of tasks that we want to outsource. The lowest value first, those that then aren’t filling your cup and then also the reversible versus non reversible. Right. There’s kind of three layers there you can roll in. The next question then comes down to, okay, so are we going to outsource that? Right. Are we going to bring someone in at a casual level?
0:10:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:10:10 Ben Wright: Right. Or a part time level or are we going to put the full-time role in? For me, the first place I start here is the more IP you have to protect, the more likely you are to bring in house into your team because then you’ve got control of the data.
0:10:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:10:24 Ben Wright: Right. The less IP there is to protect, or in fact, let me come to that for a minute. Right. The less IP there is to protect, the more likely you are to roll that to outsourcing. So Bass, social media work, editing of documents. Right. Within reason, administration work. Right. That’s all the stuff you can start to look to outsource and absolutely. It comes down to finding the quality of talent that you need. Generally, the higher the spec, the work you need to get done, the more likely you are to need to work locally so that you can guide those persons a little bit more effectively. Right. In a more localised environment. The second choice I then start to look at around whether we’re outsourcing or in housing.
Right. So whether it’s casual work. Right. Whether it’s part time work or whether it’s full time work. Right. Is the level of strategic advantage you can add when you get it. Right. So the areas that you know, if it can add a lot of strategic advantage to you to get it right, tend to build that competency in house because then you have other people. Right. When you’re teaching something very special about your business, let’s say your business is in the game of building custom furniture. Right. Business to business or business consumer. Right. When there’s certain design fundamentals that you’ve developed or ways of manufacturing that are a little bit unique to you. Right. And instead of outsourcing that. Right. Where you hold that in house and can start to build competency within your team, you then have a scalable business. Because it’s not just you that knows that manufacturing process or that design process. You start to train others within your business.
0:11:51 Jemimah Ashleigh: And I think it’s really important. You’re absolutely right. With the IP, once you start doing things offshore, you are extremely likely that while you have Megan working on your day to day activities, Megan may not always be there and someone else might be sitting in that. There will be absolute pool and hundreds and hundreds of people will have access to everything that you provide. As a general rule for these sort of outsourcing places internationally.
0:12:17 Ben Wright: I mean, I’d probably on that one say if we are outsourcing, can’t guarantee that they are firewalling data. Right. And they’re putting an island around your data so that only a certain number of people are seeing it. I wouldn’t be dealing with it. I think outsourcing’s changing, particularly at a virtual level. Right. Where you can guarantee security of data a little bit more. However, it’s very hard to stop an individual going rogue.
0:12:39 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:12:40 Ben Wright: And I certainly think that virtual assistants that you use will often work in multiple businesses.
0:12:45 Jemimah Ashleigh: Of course.
0:12:45 Ben Wright: Because you’re using them for a small period of time each week. Right. And often those businesses are quite similar.
0:12:50 Jemimah Ashleigh: Is that to say they’re working with your competitor for the most part anyway. Or at least talk to someone that could be a competitor.
0:12:55 Ben Wright: Yeah. And you’d have no idea. So generally for me, outsourcing at an overseas level, very simple medial tasks that are repetitive and you can train someone up. I’d be localizing that outsourcing where you have a little bit more control. Right. As soon as you start to add some strategic value with non reversible decisions or where you’re wanting to grow competency, but you’re certainly bringing in house. When you know that any skill development will lead to scaling your business down the track. Now there is of course there’s a bit of an asterisk around here. It depends how much time or how much support you need. Right. If you’re going through a phase where you need to outsource a one-off project, that is you’re launching a new product line and you know it’s your only major launch for the next 18 months, it makes no sense to do it in house.
0:13:42 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, right.
0:13:42 Ben Wright: Sometimes you actually want to go and find experts who have greater skill than a virtual team could have or that you have within your team. And the outsourcing support actually comes in terms of competency and that can roll through to not just one-off projects, but things you need to get done in your business. That is for me, as my businesses are growing, my marketing skills are reasonable. But when I want real on point branding and messaging, I need to get external support. I will always outsource that because I’m able to hit a higher high than I can by training someone or having someone in house.
0:14:19 Jemimah Ashleigh: I think I look at this at anything that looks like event management as an example. I’ve certainly organized my fair share of events. That being said, I. If I’m doing, if we’re doing a product launch, we have a big thing on. It’s not where my time or my staff need to be. I’m getting event managers to come in to do that project. You better believe that they’re coming in to manage that. They’re the experts here. They know what they’re doing and I’m getting out of their way.
0:14:42 Ben Wright: Yeah. Awesome. Okay, so if we were looking to have any rules around outsourcing, any friends in business, golden rules, Is there anything you’d like to share?
0:14:52 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. Can I give you my number one hack? We haven’t spoken about this. You’re going to love this. If I’m ever bringing someone on board, ever, I always get them to do a work task and I realize my team might listen to this and they’re going to realize I tricked them. But it’s the golden rule. If I’m bringing someone on, I ask them to do a piece of work for me. I ask two things. The first thing I’m going to get them to do, number one, I’m going to ask them to make an appointment. If I meet you, I’ll be like, hey, Ben, lovely to meet you. Can you do me a favor? I’d love to chat to you. I will put my phone number down. Can we meet next Tuesday at 10am? Can you please send me a calendar invite and a Zoom link? Thanks. And then I will hang the phone up. Now. You would only think that one thing would happen in that situation, that I would get an invite to go to this meeting. You would be surprised how many people don’t either hear that and don’t understand the instructions. That’s the first thing I’m going to do. I’m going to get into a really menial, repetitive task.
0:15:50 Ben Wright: And is this is for outsourcing internationally or is this for any.
0:15:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: Any outsourcing? I’m like, hey, I’m just out and about. I always put my mobile number. Let’s have a chat about it. Can you do me a favor? I’m just away from my computer. Can you please give me a hand by doing. Can you just send me a link? I want to understand if you can understand what I’m asking for. I want you to hear, I need a calendar invite and a zoom link. Have you got a Zoom room? Yes, I do. No, I don’t. That’s fine. The zoom link just chuck that in the invite. I always problem solve with them, but I want to see if they can follow a verbal direction and not be really held down for me having to be at my email should I need that. So that’s the first thing I want to understand if we can if where we are on that and some people will send through just a zoom link in an email. See, it’s 3 o’ clock on Tuesday. It’s not in my diary, it’s not getting done. You once sent me an invite to my wrong inbox. I didn’t turn up. I live by my calendar.
The second thing I’m going to do is I’m going to ask them to do a piece of work, whatever the work is. Let’s use social media as the example. I need you to make a social media post. Here is the template, here are the colors, here’s what I need it to say. But I’m always going to make a very intentional mistake. It might be the wrong color, it might be the wrong palette, I’ve uploaded the wrong document, a really obvious typo. I will make a mistake and I’ll hand it to them and say, can you please send me this back when you’re ready? I’ll pay you for it. Thanks very much. I make a very intentional mistake. There are three possibilities.
Number one, they’re not going to see the mistake at all. They’re going to do what they’re asked to do and not notice the mistake. Two, they’re going to see the mistake, ask me what they should do and get some advice on how to fix it and go and change it. And three, identify the mistake, not contact me, fix it on my behalf and not mention a word.
0:17:46 Ben Wright: All right? And is there anything there?
0:17:49 Jemimah Ashleigh: I want Number three, every time I’m going to make mistakes, I’m going to ask you things, I’m going to send you the wrong document. I need you to think about me. For me, it shows initiative, it shows that they are thinking outside the box. It shows to me that they understand the assignment even when I’ve made an error.
0:18:08 Ben Wright: Yeah. Okay. So you’re essentially assessing competency before you even get to any of those stages.
0:18:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:18:15 Ben Wright: Okay. I like those as golden rules. Competency assessment. For me, the golden rules actually work out the tasks that are, you know, the lowest value or that aren’t filling up your cup. Get that sorted first. Right. And then move on to the next stages around how you’re going to outsource it. Right. Are they reversible, non reversible decisions and then, you know, all the way through to are they tasks that are actually developing competency in your business? Right. So you’ve got that whole paradigm of decision making. But the golden rule for me is start with the tasks that you want to be getting some support with first before you decide to go and hire someone. Right. Because that will then determine who you’re hiring. The second rule for me is to not be afraid to hire expertise. Right. We often think expertise need to come in at an employee level. Sometimes it just makes more sense to outsource expertise. Right. As long as it’s not building that competency developing in your business. And the classic example here is when you have expertise needed on a very limited scale. Right. That you simply aren’t going to be able to have in the business and build broad expertise around because it doesn’t make sense. Right. Don’t be afraid to look at all the different options for outsourcing locally, overseas and then a very high based skill level. Because I think having a one size fits all approach to outsourcing doesn’t give you the flexibility you need, whether you’re a smaller business or a larger business.
0:19:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: Agree.
0:19:33 Ben Wright: Okay, great. So we got some first principles from us around outsourcing. I think the message for me as I’m leaving today is that getting to this stage, it’s a fantastic point in your business. Right. See it as that. See it as that opportunity. If you need to get some guidance around what you do, you know, you’ve got us to get in contact with and of course, you know, you should have. Well, for me, lots of businesses, there’s plenty of support around how to outsource out there.
0:19:56 Ben Wright: So anything else from you today, Jemimah?
0:19:58 Jemimah Ashleigh: Just the number one thing I’ll say is get as much off your plate as quickly as possible. If you want to scale and grow and you want to have a thriving business, outsourcing is a great way to do that, no matter how you do it. It’s a great way of getting stop working in your business. You have to start working on your business.
0:20:15 Ben Wright: Great. Okay. Fantastic. Thank you. That’s a few kind of complex topics we’ve gone through today. If everything hasn’t landed, please, I’d encourage you to go back and listen through it again or jump into the show notes, but there’s lots of options out there for us when we’re outsourcing. Get some support if you need. But until next week, look forward to another episode of Friends in Business.
0:20:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: See you guys.
0:20:35 Ben Wright: Bye for now.
