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Back on the show today is Nathan Hirsch to continue our conversation about outsourcing Amazon tasks.
Hire Somebody to Create Their Own Job Description
Tim Ferris gives the advice to outsource the creation of the Standard Operating Procedures to the people who will have to follow it, and Nathan’s approach is similar. When you’re outsourcing Amazon tasks, provide them with a rough outline. Then outsource to them that one of their jobs is to create their job description. It is an extremely effective way to co-create the standard procedures in conjunction with you, the business owner.
A lot of business owners make the mistake of being top-down instruction-givers. In Nathan’s team, they’re all on the same side. If his team members come up with an idea then he wants to hear it. He does contribute and review things, but they’re responsible for their own team and creating those SOPs. As a business owner, taking this approach protects you because if or when they walk out the door, it’s still a hassle but less so than if you didn’t have any SOPs and they had the whole business in their head.
Jack of All Trades vs. Specialized People
Quite established businesses are incredibly vulnerable to somebody walking out the door with half the business in their head. Finding a good person and relying on them too much is a common mistake. Another mistake is hiring one person and teaching them to do everything, instead of hiring a variety of specialized people. Everyone should have their role. If someone quits you replace one person in that team, instead of spending 6 months training one new person to do everything.
What to Outsource First
Where to start outsourcing Amazon tasks depends on the business, where you are, and how fast you’re growing. Nathan’s approach is to hire a number of part time people and have them prove themselves and their skills over time as their hours get increased. In some ways, there’s less risk in this approach compared to hiring somebody full time straight away. However, you do run the risk that if they are part time at first and turn out well, then you want to increase their hours but they might have another job and won’t be able to do both.
Bookkeeping and accounts are very important to outsource as soon as you can afford it. A lot of entrepreneurs are great at creating things but they aren’t good at being meticulous book keeping. So, outsourcing Amazon bookkeeping show be done as soon as possible. It helps to advance your business beyond what you can imagine.
Calculating Risk When Outsourcing Amazon Money Tasks
There’s nothing you can do to make the risk zero when you are outsourcing the tasks related to your accounts. However, do be smart and make sure you do the research on the potential workers. FreeeUp’s approach is that it’s really hard to get into the FreeeUp team. So by the time somebody has made it through the vetting process, they’re trustworthy because they are much more concerned with staying in the FreeeUp community than they are with stealing your money.
In Nathan’s experience, 99% of the time people are more interested in working for you and helping you, than they are hurting you.
The fundamental issue is that you can’t grow or start a business without a certain degree of risk. So know what you should be looking for, do your due diligence and use common sense to insure yourself against the obvious risk. Then, you have to have a degree of trust which then enables you to expand beyond anything you could possibly achieve on your own.
The Importance of Trust
Nathan’s advice is that you can’t go in with the attitude of not trusting anyone. Business doesn’t work that way. He takes the approach that working for him is a great opportunity and the people he hires appreciate the work because it’s so hard to find a job nowadays so the majority of the time is it’s not worth it for them to fraud you.
They’re going to make way more money by having an honest business relationship with you over time than they would by a fraudulent way of doing things that will only work for them in the short term. That old saying is true: crime doesn’t pay. Compared to good business this is even more true.
Nathan has had people try to be sneaky and fraudulent on FreeeUp but they caught them. They might have lost a little bit of money but they learned from it and he sees it as a learning experience. His view is as a business owner you will get a lot of opportunities and it’s your job to minimize risk to the best of your ability.
More Information
You can find out more about FreeeUp here: https://freeeup.com/how-it-works/
Or check out Nathan’s book here: https://freeeup.com/free-up-your-business/
Get $1/hour off your first life, on your first hire by going to amazingfba.com/freeeup
Watch How to outsource Amazon Tasks Part 2 of 4
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