If you're not outsourcing, you're either about to get crushed by someone who is, or wasting time on worthless tasks.
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I'd always considered myself smart... until I started blowing absurd amounts of time & money outsourcing.
Listen, this isn't a crazy sales letter. You're smart enough to know a good thing when you see it, so we're going to hit on some key points and shift right into looking at the book.
Let's get going. By the time we're done talking, it'll be 9am somewhere in the world, where people will be walking into work - ready to do yours.
Outsourcing is two things: a massive threat & a powerful weapon for lifestyle design. First, the threat...
Depending on your industry, consider the possibility that you're only making money right now because someone hasn't realized how simple it is to outsource or automate what you do. If I were a better person, I'd apologize here, because someone who's paying you right now might end up reading my book - which could create real problems for you if what they're paying for is anything but truly specialized.
If the demand for anything you do can be snuffed out by software a smart kid is about to release from his bedroom, you should pay attention.
Outsourcing doesn't just affect blue-collar assembly lines, call centers and hardcore programmers. Disregard towards outsourcing, whether you care or not, is impacting you right now. It governs what you're able to do when new projects or opportunities appear.
Outsourcing is the reason we could both decide right now to make the same product, and I can be finished & selling it before you're done designing the logo.
That might sound like a dick statement, but this isn't about feeling good. We need to start building our entire lives on foundations of work that is 80% unspecialized. If the majority of the work you do is performed to support or enable your specialized, core value - you're operating from a weak foundation that can collapse at any time.
This is exactly why we need to look at outsourcing as our single most valuable weapon in designing & enabling our lifestyles.
Simply put, it enables us to eliminate the weak supporting tasks and focus on what makes us indispensable. It allows us to free up time spent on worthless tasks. I'm not about to pump you up with a vision of your untapped potential or show you how to make your first million. Your first million is a failure if you hate your life and traded it away for cash.
Anyone can become wealthy in exchange for time. It's formulaic and unremarkable. The real measure of wealth isn't a sum total - it's the ratio of free time vs. working time. The more time it takes you to sustain your income, the poorer you are.
The New Net Worth is measured in Time & Autonomy. Let that sink in, deeply.
You get this. You know how important time is and I'm not going to insult your intelligence by hyping what you already know. If you don't realize what it means to have an endless reserve of human capital at your disposal, you won't have a clue what to do with what I'm offering anyway.
Everything I want to talk about now is what comes after you decide to respect your time and start outsourcing...
You are going to do one of three things to tap into it...
Continue doing everything yourself. This is an admission of defeat before the game begins, and a bulletproof way to maximize your time loss. Domestically sub-contract the things you shouldn't be doing. This is well-intentioned, but you're accepting a serious, and ongoing financial loss by paying domestic wages. Outsource the things you shouldn't be doing. This is exactly the right path. You'll also definitely lose time and money doing it. Don't take that personally, it has nearly nothing to do with you and everything to do with the fact that you'll be feeling your way around in the dark when working offshore, and there's certain mistakes you'll inevitably make.
Do you see how this works? The right strategy is also the one with the highest perceived cost-of-entry. Do you start to understand why everyone timidly accepts one of the other options? The average "entrepreneur" is consistently choosing predictable failures over a risky win. There's a seat for you at the real player's table, but you need to be ready to elevate your game.
If you're anything like me, you've definitely started thinking that you can just feel your way through this, and start outsourcing on your own. Well, you can - I did. You can also lose a tremendous amount of time and money screwing up the same things I did.
Here's a little taste of what you're getting into...
You'll put ads on sites like Elance and have no idea how to handle the response. Every proposal looks the same and every firm looks strangely similar, as if they're all working from one giant country-sized office. Lacking a meaningful basis for comparison, you'll be paralyzed with indecision. You'll hire someone and realize you completely overestimated your ability to keep them busy. This isn't because you don't have a mountain of work - you have loads of it. Your problem will be that you can't present that work in a way that enables them to do it for you. You'll get work back that isn't wrong enough to withhold payment, but not good enough to actually have been worth paying for. You'll spend equal time cleaning it up as you would have spent doing it yourself. This will happen with alarming frequency.
... and a whole lot more that I'm not going into right now. It's all just a long-winded to say: you are going to waste time & money learning how it all works.
Losing money when you start outsourcing is not a possibility - it is an absolute certainty.
The question is whether you're one of those people that - for some absurd reason - feels a need to experiences those losses for yourself.
If risk turns you off, don't start on this path. You'll stall out with hesitation or fear and you'll find some way to blame me for it. If you're looking for a risk-free "sure thing" that will create more time in your life or elevate your income, get your Visa card out, go to Google and type in something like "multi level marketing opportunity". Buy the first thing offering "income auto-pilot" or a "cash machine".
Outsourcing is a poker game. There's absolutely no loss involved - you're just paying for crucial insight into the next hand.
All in all, I've blown more hands than I've won. None of that matters, since it only takes one or two smart plays into big pots to make everything else an afterthought.
Get rid of the thought that outsourcing mishaps are losses. Every project, every experience, every blown budget... absolutely everything we do is feeding back into a system that ensures we never have to deal with it again, and are smarter the next time around.
You're being given a way to outsource your inevitable failures.
All we're doing by going overseas is leveraging the endless reserve of human capital waiting to be utilized. Sourcecontrol gives you access to my human capital - my experience, knowledge, failures and wins - in the same way I've been doing overseas.
I'm not talking about tricks or theoretical secrets. I'm simply offering you my my losses at a ridiculous discount so you don't have to take them yourself. The experiences are mandatory, but what isn't mandatory is your need to experience them directly.
Wait. If you're wondering... this is not about trivial "personal outsourcing"
Personal outsourcing is novelty and you aren't busy or important enough to need it yet. I'm not, you're not. If you disagree with me on that and truly feel you simply cannot post another online dating ad on your own time, go ahead and hire a VA for that. Outsourcing small, no-value tasks is the tail wagging the dog.
If you need an assistant to make your dinner reservations, it's because you're too buried in the menial work that assistant should be doing.
Personal life is random and unpredictable. That's half the fun and it's meant to be experienced. Outsourcing is built on systems and structures that ensure everything gets done in a predictably consistent way. To force-fit the beautiful chaos of our personal lives into these systems is an exercise in futility.
If you're looking for that, come back and keep reading after you've gotten it out of your system. We're focused on fundamentals.
So, what about serious outsourcing? Look around. There's nothing else out there.
Feel free to go scour Google for anything of value. Trust me, I did. I tried everything I would have used when I started out: personal outsourcing system, outsourcing system, outsourcing guide, virtual assistants guide, hiring virtual assistants and more. Wasteland.
Let me tell you what you'll find...
Hundreds of sketchy firms that sprung up following the success of The 4-Hour Workweek, attempting to capture the new market of wide-eyed Americans. These firms prey on people who don't realize outsourcing is more than hiring a VA and saying "make my life easier". Generic, non-actionable articles on the benefits of outsourcing or something equally unremarkable, seemingly written by people that simply toyed with it long enough to extract material for an article Heavy, big business Information Technology outsourcing and business process automation with zero relevance to our agile, entrepreneurial focus Entirely too many bloggers complaining about the same three companies, and how they just simply can't find someone capable of managing their kid's after-school soccer practice schedule.
...and so on. I'm telling you, it's a weak space and there's nothing for people like us. That's exactly why I wrote this. I would have paid anything for it if I knew what I was getting myself into.
Who should get this book...
Anyone that know that they're spending time on things that don't matter. You're doing work because you're able to, not because you actually need to. Anyone wanting to simplify your life by eliminating everything that isn't essential or fulfilling Anyone wanting to multiply your efforts and develop ventures more aggressively by shifting from an individual to an army Anyone considering creating information products. This is a critical component to developing killer information products.
Who shouldn't get this book...
Anyone not feeling frustration, aware of inefficiency or lost opportunities - you have no need for outsourcing. You can't outsource complacency and indifference, nor can you outsource contentment and happiness. Whichever you're feeling, you don't need a VA's help. Anyone that doesn't act on clear direction or sound advice. Please don't buy this if you leave everything as mere intention. This is only for the action-oriented. Anyone looking for US-based virtual assistants. There is absolutely zero mention of domestic VAs in here.
Well written, fierce, commanding of my attention & acutely designed.
Robert Granholm, The Life Design Project "Sourcecontrol is an absolute must-read for anyone who is looking to exorcise extraneous busywork from their lives, take their entrepreneurial endeavors to the next level or mobilize their work with as little wasted effort as possible. David has written a book that is informative enough to make you completely rethink your current business model and entertaining enough to keep you glued to your seat (I read the whole thing in one sitting due to its excellent readability). I highly recommend Sourcecontrol as the next logical step in any lifestyle designer/entrepreneur/ambitious person's progression!"
An aerial view of what you'll get from ourcecontrol...
Starting with the right mindset so you aren't sabotaging your push into outsourcing Save yourself massive headaches by screening candidates on your terms in a way you won't get on Elance or other sites Ensure you don't watch a firm a firm disappear with your money and not so much as an email Totally change how you look at the work you do and tasks you perform Establish new filtering process and decision-making rules for deciding what work benefits from you doing it Step-by-step explanation of breaking down any specialized process and turning it into a generic process anyone can do for you Capturing your process for your assistants, handling decision points ahead of time Key process for creating illustrations or supporting document to support your new process Separate your individual role in every task from the generic actions, and learn to turn a specialized task into a scalable process Decide between full-time assistants or part-time on-demand help.
