All small business owners have been in a position, at least once in their lives, whereby they need a particular task to be done but they do not have anyone on their team at this stage with the necessary skill set to do it for them.

Well thanks to the internet, we can now tap into and leverage a global knowledge base and world-class capabilities! In the past, businesses were restricted to the extent to which they could outsource. But now, businesses are no longer limited to their local workforce. We can get people anywhere in the world to work for us and do a job that we can’t afford to pay somebody locally for, but we can’t afford to do it ourselves either.

Azim Premji, an Indian Businessman once said, “The important thing about outsourcing or global sourcing is that it becomes a very powerful tool to leverage talent, improve productivity and reduce work cycles”.

Most small business owners put so much stress on themselves when they don’t have the skill set to be able to do a task themselves, and they can’t afford to keep someone with the required skillset on their team. And that’s okay. We can’t do everything in-house.

As Ryan Khan, Founder of The Hired Group once said, “Master your strengths, outsource your weaknesses”.

Hence, for tasks that come up every so often, in which you can’t afford to keep that level of expertise on hand locally, this is when you turn to outsource. As small business owners, we can access freelancers through websites like Freelancer, Fiverr, Upwork, etc. We do this on a contract basis whereby we tell them what we want to be done, we get their fee, then we oversee and make sure that the job they produce is to the standard which has been agreed upon.

Yes, it’s that simple. However, you need to be very clear on your instructions to freelancers. You must discuss with the freelancer what it is you want to be done, the process that you want to be followed, and what the outcome should look like. Only after the job has been completed to your satisfaction do you pay them. Occasionally, you can even build a relationship with a freelancer and keep using them for that particular type of job. But if you want a different sort of job done then you will have to form a relationship with a different freelancer.

Regardless, small business owners are always encouraged to take advantage of any opportunity to outsource where they can. As Alphonso Jackson, the Former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development once said, “The other part of outsourcing is this: it simply says where the work can be done outside better than it can be done inside, we should do it”.

Outsourcing also has many benefits, three of which are: