A common event with many business owners is when something either goes wrong or needs fixing and, instead of hiring out, they decide to take care of it themselves. Even if they can take care of the issue, one has to ask themselves if it’s always the wisest choice at the time.
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If income is a problem then there’s no question that if something needs to be taken care of and you can do the work that you should do it. However, even here, sometimes it might pay off to have someone else do at least a portion of it.
For instance, let’s say that part of your marketing campaign is to send out 50 letters a week for a month. You have a standard letter already set up and all you have to do is fill out the envelopes. The thing is, even if you’ve already printed out the letters, folding, sealing and putting stamps on those letters could take you 3 hours to do. If your hourly billable rate is $100 an hour, you just lost the opportunity to make $300.
In this case someone like a virtual assistant might have been the way to go. Many VA’s cost less than $20 an hour, and whether you supply them with the paper, envelopes and stamps beforehand, those are things you’d have had to purchase yourself. This means that not only would your costs have only been $60, which you could have written off, but you might have been earning money during that same time which means you’d have made $240 off the deal.
Let’s look at something much bigger. One of my clients recently realized that a few of his websites were losing traffic because he hadn’t upgraded them to the new Google standards of mobile speed capability. The cost for hiring this work out would have cost at least $2,000, which is a hefty sum.
Since he had the technical capability to do it himself, he decided to take that task on. The thing is, even though he knew a lot, things had changed over the years so he had to do a lot of research and testing. In the end, he put in at least 120 hours on those websites, and though he got things taken care of, since his billable hourly rate is $125, if he’d had a client or been working towards a client he could have possibly made $15,000. At the very least he could have been marketing his business and attained a new client.
It’s hard to decide when to let things go that you can do, but sometimes it’s worth taking another look at your projects and trying to figure out whether it’s cost effective to have someone else do it instead of doing it yourself. Always remember that you can write off all paid services that relate to your business and that might help you make a different decision if you need to.