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systematic outsourcing for the dangerously ambitious
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david walsh

Start Here Core Concepts

Mindset Reason Why Expectations Necessity over novelty Ethics, quality & a dash of ignorance. Systems > Skill An Ideal System

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Starting Out
Anchoring Horse rst, then cart. Outshoring, Conlancers, O sourcing & Freetractors Commitment

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Recruiting your workforce Money Geography 101 To source, or not to source? Cubicle Ops: Outsourcing your 9 to 5

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Operations & Arsenal

Workow Communication Taskmastery Arsenal

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Wrapping Up Resource Reference

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Start Here

OUTSOURCING SCARES PEOPLE.

If you havent already, you need to experience this rsthand. Next time youre in an eclectic bar or social setting, casually seed the discussion with the O word. Youve just pulled the pin from a conversational livegrenade - its explosion creating the most magnicent show of biased half-truths and uninformed, misdirected fear youve likely seen since the last election. Youll get rumblings of a crippling recession, tirades of patriotic rhetoric and the obligatory bigoted remark toward a foreign country by someone who doesnt even have a passport. Theres also usually someone like me, listening intently with rmly held tongue, knowing theres just certain people that dont respond well to economics and logic. If you and I are ever in the same place when that bomb drops, I want to be absolutely certain its your eyes that catch mine with an understanding wink - not your ears that ring with sympathetic silence.

Consider this your invitation into the international players club. With it comes access to a endless reserve of human capital, a quasi-supernatural ability to work while sleeping, and an awe-inspiring means to progress at a pace wildly disproportionate to your capabilities.
What we have at our ngertips gives us a means to realize absolutely any ambition bigger than ourselves. No skill unknown, no problem unsolvable - there is nothing we cannot make happen if we just know how.

If you call yourself an entrepreneur & that doesnt excite you, you arent one.

Outsourcing, simplied.
There is something you love, something you would choose over all else. Each day o ers us 24 hours to do with as we please. Sleep demands some of it, but time sleeping need not be time lost. To live extraordinary lives, we need to own our hours. The fewer hours we control, the less fullled well be. If we want to own our time fully, we need to stop doing worthless things. The act of doing doesnt make it important. Being the person that does it doesnt make it important. To stop doing something ourselves, we need to eliminate it or enable someone else to do it. Always seek to eliminate rst. If its not possible, we remove ourselves from the process. To enable someone else, we need to unpack the strategies we use to perform. Its often rather unconscious. Once we know what we do and how we do it, we need to nd others to do it for us. To nd the right person, we have to look in the right places and ask the right questions. After we have someone, we simply communicate our needs and oversee the process. All of this must be done systematically and without consuming more time than it reclaims. Its time to do this, and do it right. Your eeting time hangs in the balance ... and thats a loss you can never recoup.

Read Before Reading

CAVEATS & BLANKET STATEMENTS GIVING ME PERMISSION TO SAY WHATEVER I WANT GOING FORWARD
Its entirely possible that by the end of this youll think Im just another arrogant capitalist who doesnt want to work hard. Its also possible youll think I actually know what Im talking about. Im not going to ease the blow of any hard facts. If you want to feel good, go watch Oprah. Its time to get real and were summoning Dr. Phil. I nd it insulting when statements are wrapped in that warm blanket of delicate diplomacy so well keep this very simple and direct. Im not a man of few words so this isnt a short read - but its only as long as needed to push my knowledge into your head. I guarantee you there are points and perspectives ahead that stand to save you not only money, but countless hours lost to experimentation and trial-by-re.

A NOTE ABOUT ASSISTANTS

Everything pertaining to virtual assistants (VAs) is specically referring to assistants outside of the United States. The domestic VA industry is thriving and I have zero experience working with anyone in it. It should go without saying that experiences, rates, terms and any number of factors will di er by eliminating the jump to another continent. In other words, dont call a rm in Virginia and ip out when they arent quick to compete with the $2/hr o er you saw on Elance.

What this is...

A way of thinking about your capabilities An approach to intelligent, systems-driven outsourcing An adaptable set of resources and tools which you can shape and extend to suit your situation Absolutely enough to do serious damage, greatly multiply your force and e ciency, and make money from it.

What this isnt...

A directory of virtual assistants Rigid, nely-tuned, all-encompassing software that accommodates all scenarios An excuse to suspend judgement and critical thinking as you start hiring Focused on novelty, no/low-value, outsourcing tasks A way to multiply e ciency in doing more of something worthless to begin with

Core Concepts

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Mindset

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GETTING OUR HEAD RIGHT

No system or software can compensate for the wrong mindset. Without the right mindset, you wont experience the power you have in your hands with your ability to outsource e ectively. Ill mention two ways of thinking that will not jive with what were doing: the employee and the prima donna.

shoulders. With so much going on, its always shocking how much time they have to remind you of just how necessary they are.

We arent making ourselves unimportant or obsolete. Were simply maximizing the time we have to focus on what actually individuates us.

The Employee Mindset

Employees expect to be managed by someone else. Outsourcing demands managing employees of your own. Being an employee is ne, as long as you dont actually think of yourself as one.

We each get the same 24 hours in a day and the average person uses them very predictably. Your ambitions and passions are anything but average, which is why were adopting an equally ambitious system for ensuring theres time for both. Since we can never technically increase the total time available to us in a day, it is absolutely critical that we use the time we have intelligently. What could be more intelligent than distributing its consumption to others, leaving you clear to explore passions?

The Prima Donna Mindset

Theres a di erence between being the only person that can do something and simply being a person that does it. We all know one of these self-important diva types that walk around with the world squarely on his or her

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Reason Why

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REASON WHY
Outsourcing for the sheer sake of doing it can feel like taking up an instrument you dont enjoy the sound of. At every moment, youll be asking yourself why youre bothering with it. Eventually youll give up chasing an end that wasnt even compelling from the beginning. Having a driving force, an underlying pursuit, as a reason why is not an ideal - its a requirement. You need something that relentlessly demands more of your time and attention. Everything else needs to enrage you for daring encroach on your time. Menial, low-value tasks entering your reality need to feel like your accountant walking in on you during sex - and standing there stubbornly until you sign-o on some paperwork.

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Expectations

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EXPECTATIONS
Outsourcing is an extension of yourself and your core capabilities. If you are disorganized, outsourcing wont change that. If your outcomes are undened or unfocused, outsourcing wont change that. If youre an anal-retentive taskmaster that tracks every cent with ten years of alphabetized receipts - outsourcing wont change that (though youll know precisely how much money you wasted nding out). We each have glaring weaknesses and are less-thancapable in some area. The di erence between mediocrity and excellence is not self-improvement - its brutal selfawareness. In the same way that the rst step in addiction recovery is admission of a problem, the rst step to absolutely crushing it on a daily basis is knowing what we shouldnt be doing ourselves. Once we work that out, its time to create a system that compensates for any weaknesses and ensure certain activities are never demanded of you.

Learning how to manage people is a life skill. Without it, you will never realize your potential simply because you cant take on as much and will take on tasks that are outside of your core competency. If outsourcing is something youve played with and it hasnt worked for you, youve done something wrong. Yes, maybe your team/assistant disappointed you - but its your responsibility to manage the situation and replace them with someone competent. You run the show - you are in charge now.

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Necessity over novelty

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Once the media got a hold of it, personal outsourcing became a novelty. It turned from eliminating low-value business tasks to getting someone to stand in line for you at the post o ce so you can use the regained time to send a Tweet about how someone is standing in line for you at the post o ce.

DONT HIRE A VA TO... Aggregate more blog posts for you to read Clean up a 10,000 entry contact list for 9,950

We are not trying to free up time to sit around and read more blogs. We cant get excited that an assistant can dig up album artwork for even the most obscure albums in our iTunes library. Assigning low-value novelty tasks to an assistant doesnt change the fact that its low-value.

people you never talk to Manage your fantasy football league

The only thing worse than ine ciency and misusing time is paying an assistant to maximize that ine ciency.
If you're focused on making money or supporting your lifestyle, forget about organizing your bookmarks, schedule your own dentist appointment, and focus your assistants on the highest-value, income-producing tasks. Once you've e ectively automated or systematized those, you can start paying your VA to start ironically sending out 1,000 greeting cards on Arbor Day.

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Ethics, quality & a dash of ignorance.

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Were not here to argue ethics. If youre reading this, youve almost assuredly moved beyond misconceptions and are ready to act. Im unfortunately unable to resist using this as a selfconstructed soapbox on which to share some thoughts. Arguing the ethics of outsourcing is an exercise in futility on-par with debating intelligent design with a hardened atheist, or getting the Bloods and Crips to settle it all on Family Feud. Yes, you can try but making money is much more fun. Everyone youll meet knows someone who has been a ected by globalization, for better or worse. Someone watched their job move to Beijing. Someone else had a nightmarish customer service call with a man whos real name was denitely not John. People tend to form rigid opinions from limited experience or information. These people shouldnt make you angry - they should make you sad. Pay them no mind. The best revenge is outsourcing well.

LESSER KNOWN FACTS ABOUT OUTSOURCING

Outsourcing funds terrorism I came to know this from someone that was shocked to learn India is not in the Middle East, nor are they a major supplier of the worlds oil resources. Outsourcing is directly responsible for the current recession faced by the United States. Further discussion revealed this person also was not familiar with Bernie Mado and still thought they banked with Wachovia. Outsourcing directly violates the laws of [unnamed major world religion]. Ironically, this person was visibly intoxicated. You could likely add more unsolicited, wellresearched facts youve heard from coworkers or relatives.

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QUALITY IS UNIVERSAL
The mere suggestion of non-American labor has a funny way of grabbing the attention of any person in a room that blindly assumes nothing of quality or excellence can come from outside our borders. These are also the people that wont acknowledge a Toyotas existence because it wasnt assembled in Detroit. Quality, craftsmanship, e ciency, pride in your work none of these things respect arbitrary national boundaries. Italian wines, German automobiles, Swiss watches - all of these things are what they are because people take pride in their craft. Excellent work - wherever it comes from - depends on your ability to create the proper incentives to inspire it.

WHY GO ABROAD? THINK OF ALL THE BROKE COLLEGE STUDENTS.

This is not complicated. At the end of the day, it costs our friends in India or the Philippines less to go enjoy an afterwork beer than it does for their American equivalent. Dollar-for-dollar, we can derive more value by going abroad for certain tasks than we can by hiring here. Certain decisions are simply nancial. National pride wont pay your rent, and new American jobs arent created by entrepreneurs going broke on menial tasks. We are a nation of hustlers, entrepreneurs and freemarket capitalists. The American Dream, for lack of a better phrase, moves us all to action, instills aspiration and creates a strong undertone of discontent. Sometimes youll nd more consistency working with people in countries that have a healthier respect for the status quo, and can draw a tremendous personal pride from being in a position of service.

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Systems

Systems are as reliable & predictable as human beings are not.

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Skill

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In the spirit of giving due credit, I want to be clear that Im heavily channeling principles from Michael Gerbers book The EMyth in the pages ahead. To not cite E-Myth for the sake of claiming never-before-heard concepts would equate to a preacher omitting God from his sermons to ensure he isnt pulling from the Bible. Orchestrating a system allows us to reduce our involvement by turning what we do into processes and anticipating decisions so we can empower others to make them.

Orchestration is the elimination of choice at the operating level of your business. If you havent orchestrated it, you do not own it. - Gerber
Our system is the set of rules, tool and processes that make outsourcing worth the e ort. Without a smart system around it, outsourcing can steal more time than it saves. If every single situation is handled di erently, or as if its the rst time, we havent improved anything - weve simply added more complexity and introduced new costs. For the system to work, it cannot depend on any one persons expertise or talent. Rather, it depends on process to create results. To replace people (the rst one being you) with process, we need to actually know what it is we do on a regular basis. Once we break down the things consuming our time, we can realistically decide if our involvement matters.

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SYSTEMS OVER SKILLS

Sometimes the simplest way to dene something new or unknown is by drawing comparison to something known. When were dealing with systems - and the notion of relying on them - its tting to pit them in opposition to skilled people. Imagine for a moment that youre starting a business. Youve seen successes and demand for growth is undeniable. You hire aggressively and do so based solely on talent. Youre wagering your entire companys future on nding and keeping the highest level talent possible. You run the a company for a few years. Things are alright until your 3 top talents decide to go start their own thing. Your 3 most loyal, protable accounts then become their 3 most protable clients. Without your team, you suddenly cant o er the results that built your reputation. This is where systems and people start to behave predictably di erent.
Systems dont leave you for a better paying system Systems dont act in their own best interest Systems dont fear change Systems produce predictable results, untouched by mood or state of mind Systems dont care where in the world they operate from Systems dont get pregnant and take a year o Systems dont question their purpose, quit and go travel the world Systems dont only operate for 8 of every 24 hours each day Systems dont spend 2 hours every week talking about the next episode of LOST Systems dont spend another 2 hours every week talking about the last episode of LOST Systems would laugh at the idea of sleep... if systems could laugh.

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OUTSOURCING GIVES OUR SYSTEM A PROPER HAZING

Im not here to bag on exceptional people. In my life, Ive worked alongside and gained unshakeable respect for a lot of people. Its a deep respect for such people that I emphasize that there is no reason you should not pair those people with intelligent systems & processes. The better your systems are, the less risk they face of being pulled away from the work that gives them the highest level of fulllment or utilizes their purest skill. The rst (and if self-employed, only) person you should start dening systems around is yourself.

Proactively replace yourself with smart systems now, or wait until someone does it for you. Either way you look at it, a system is in your future.
Specialized ability can always compensate for absent or weak systems, but each time you work harder to make up for a missing system, your foundation weakens. You create greater dependence on your ability to perform and maintain. This is functional but not sustainable. It assumes you want to continue doing exactly what it is that youre doing - indenitely. Its time to design systems aimed at enabling the most unskilled of individuals to create acceptable results. Systems eliminate the fragile dependence on specialized skill or knowledge. In other words - systems can remove you as a bottleneck in your own processes.

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An Ideal System

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Goal: Dene a scalable, process-driven workow producing consistent outcomes with minimal intervention.

Think of the following as the Match.com prole of your outsourcing system soulmate. Not your ideal assistant, but rather the system that will allow you to keep your assistants on-task and on-schedule. As you read ahead, feel free to start scouring your hard drive for a hot self-portrait and begin mentally composing a creepy, over-eager rst email.

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NEWBIE-FRIENDLY
Your system loves the new guy.
Imagine if every new recruit to enter the United States armed forces was trained di erently. If it were entirely up to the discretion and style of whoever found themselves in charge, we would not have a world-class national defense - we would have a poorly run fraternity. Thankfully Im not more of a military bu - as this is likely where I would insult an entire nation by using them as an example. Your system clearly communicates guidelines, expectations and terms to each new assistant. Your system minimizes dependence on you to repeatedly explain your operations. Your system gets someone up and running immediately, and ensures the results will be as close to the previous person as possible.

USER-AGNOSTIC
Your system doesnt care whos using it.
Bad systems refuse to cooperate with anyone but specialists. Smart systems are indi erent to you and simply expect you do whats expected. Imagine if mirrors only reected images of people they felt were attractive. Wed have more broken mirrors and more demand for plastic surgeons. You system is unaware of and indi erent to your VAs personality, moods, location, language and level of skill.

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MODULAR
Your system keeps everyone on a need-toknow basis.
Not every assistant or new hire will need to handle every aspect of your life or type of task. When hiring a researcher, the requirements and expectations are di erent than hiring a programmer, writer or freelance designer. Your programmer doesnt need your Amazon credentials and your graphic designer doesnt need your web server login credentials. Your system must be modular and support only the necessary tasks of its operator.

ORGANIZED
Your system has obsessive-compulsive disorder.
No more digging up old les. No more emailing attachments back and forth. No more chaos. Your system expects everything to live in its proper place and sets rules to ensure they stay there. It also needs to go make sure the oven is o . Three times. Your system must keep any les, documents, credentials and information in a well-organized, shared, central location.

EVOLVING
Your system learns from its mistakes.
Elements of your system should track whats been accomplished, whats changed, and who changed it. As new scenarios emerge, your system has a place to hold new rules to simplify for the future.

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David Walsh
David is behind Muselife, a community blog focused on fueling the ultramobile entrepreneurial lifestyle through systematic product creation. He is the founder of Arsenal, an agile outsourcing process consultancy. Presently, hes immersed in the development of M6 System, pairing a methodical six-part approach to muse/product creation with purpose-built tools to bring it to all life. If youre intrigued to dig deeper, youll nd what youre looking for at www.muselife.com/about/.

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