Time Is Money: Outsourcing as a Profit Centre

How many times during a typical day do you say to yourself: "If only I could delegate this to someone." Chances are that it's at least once a day.

Most of us are dealing with the current economic downturn by trying to do more with less. The lucky ones are working with the same budget as last year but with increased productivity targets. The not so lucky amongst us are asked to increase productivity with a reduced budget. How can you make every dollar work like two? Two words: strategic outsourcing.

Start by taking stock of all of your duties and tasks. You might be surprised how long the list is. Once you have this list assembled, rank your tasks in two separate ways; the importance of the task and the time it typically takes to complete each task. Now, take your own salary and divide it by 2000 (this is the average amount of work hours in a year). This will give you an idea of your functional hourly cost. Multiply the hours per task by you hourly rate. Now you have an approximate task cost.

So we've got task listed by importance and cost in two separate columns. Compare the two lists. Are your high importance tasks the most expensive? If not, take a look at where the highest cost tasks fall on your importance list. Tasks that fall within the top ten on the cost side and the bottom ten on the importance side are great candidates for strategic outsourcing.

Maybe you can offload some paperwork tasks; maybe resume screening is taking up too much of your time, etc. Find out the cost of offloading these tasks to an outsourcing firm. If the cost of outsourcing is lower than your time cost plus the added productivity to your more important tasks, then you have a positive return on your investment, otherwise known as a profit.

With this tangible data, you can now make the business case for outsourcing pieces of your daily work, allowing you to add more value where it is most important. Not only will you be able to focus on the most important aspects of your role, you’ll also become more productive due to your lower levels of stress.

Interesting recruiting ad

Just came across this from boingboing:

http://www.denkiornot.com/

An interesting pre-screen where your are asked to pick which of a series of images you prefer, side-by-side. This will presumably allow Denki, a game production shop, to evaluate your design palate.

Thoughts?

D.