The Outsourcing Engine: What Powers It?
Discussing what powers outsourcing engines.
If you think of outsourcing as the magical business tool of the new age, you must have an idea of how it’s working. It actually stands for letting some other party do a task for you against a fee. Wait a minute! They will be charging you for a work that you can do yourself for free.
If you’re just starting out, you probably loath unnecessary expenses; Especially when made just to save you some hard work. You are right; undue expenses should always to be avoided.
Just that there is one more factor that you are overlooking.
Look around you for a job that you can fit in. How much can you make working elsewhere each hour? For example, if you are getting an easy offer of $12 an hour from a store nearby, take it as the value of your time per hour. So every time you spend an hour on a project, you are actually throwing $12 at it. That is the cost of your time; you may consider this the opportunity cost.
Behind The Myth:
As mentioned, you probably think that outsourcing costs you money.
Most likely you aren’t a pro who knows everything about the project that you have to do. Far from it, you are stuck doing things that you have to learn from the basics. The freelancer that you talked to however, has done such projects before and knows about it. He/she can therefore do it twice as fast as you can, and will charge you
$10 per hour.
So let’s analyze how much will it cost you to do the project yourself. You will have to spend 8 hours to complete it, and since 8 hours at the store means about a $100 of salary, it cost you nearly hundred bucks –far from being free that you thought of it as. Compare this to what you will pay the freelancer: he/she will do the project in 4 hours, and at the rate of $10 an hour that she charges, it sums up to under $50. Cost goes down by half, and you steer clear of doing messy stuff you have no idea how to go about. Essentially, that is how outsourcing does it for you. Instead of draining your own time and energy into doing this, you free up the time to put your efforts into more productive areas of your business.
So what does it has in store for the freelancers? Most of them are living in different geographic locations, where due to lower wage structures and less inflation, they make significantly more money than they can by working like you in a store. Also, some of them pursue it as a part time job when they have nothing better to do. Over time they become so good at it that they are able to pump up more work with less time and effort.
