
You Know You Can Do Anything
Outsourcing is today’s buzzword.
If your ability to pay your mortgage has flown to India, outsourcing is a bad word. If you have freed up a few hours a day to spend on growing your business instead of packaging your orders, outsourcing is a good word.
It’s all in the context.
Have you ever said something like, “I tried WordPress, but it was too complicated,” or maybe “I’m not a techie. I need something easy,” or even “I can’t learn that stuff.”
There is a world of difference between saying, “I know a little HTML, but my time is better spent mastering Photoshop than building a web site,” and saying, “I can’t… [blog, draw, do math... fill in the blank] because I’m not [smart enough, tech-savvy enough, good enough ... fill in the self-put-down].
Writers, artists, photographers and other product developers sometimes assume that technology is so far removed from creativity that they will never master it. But the truth is that you don’t have to know everything; you don’t have to master everything; you don’t even have to move beyond a glancing acquaintance with some things. You can certainly outsource the mundane, day-to-day tasks that keep you from your core purpose.
But…
There is always a but…
When you decide to let some stuff slide, be sure that decision is based on what is best for you and your business. What is best and what is easiest are not always the same thing.
Here’s a story I have, sadly, run across too many times. A busy entrepreneur needs a web site with a shopping cart, so they hire someone to create it. That’s reasonable. The business owner takes a quick look at the final product and then turns the day to day operation over to someone else, either the designer or a webmaster. The business owner believes she is “outsourcing” by not getting bogged down in technical details.
Skip ahead a few months or maybe even years, and the entrepreneur decides to change the cart’s payment method, or add a blog to the website, or update the template. The problem is, the entrepreneur was “too busy” to oversee the technical stuff. She may not know the log in ID or the FTP password. In fact, she may not even be the registered owner of the domain or the web site! The business owner, in short, may find herself locked out of her own store because she gave the only set of keys to an ex-employee who left town to join the circus.
That isn’t outsourcing. That’s giving away your power.
The web designer may have tried to get the business person to sign up for the hosting package, only to be told, “You do it, I hate that stuff.” The webmaster may have forwarded the email from the hosting company containing passwords and other account details, and the entrepreneur, faced with a stew of meaningless acronyms, deleted it from an already full-to-bursting inbox.
Eventually, the web designer probably shrugged and said, “It’s not my job to save you from yourself.” The designer is not a villain in this piece.
In the bricks and mortar world, you don’t have to be a locksmith to safeguard the keys to your door. In the online world, you don’t need to be an engineer to run a website.
Whether you are on the street or on the web, knowledge is power. Don’t throw yours away.
Photo by mishox Released under Creative Commons License