EXP-10 Outsourcing
About this guide
If you're a full time teacher, run a music school or feel like you're at your limit with your business, you may want to consider outsourcing as a way to free up your time. Outsourcing can be a great way to focus your time and effort on the activities that matter the most.
In this guide you will learn everything you need to know about when to consider outsourcing, what type of activities to outsource and what options you have available.
Why people outsource work
It's important to first understand the basic reasons why some businesses outsource work and why you might want to consider it. The main reason is it takes you away from low-value work and allows you to spend more time on high-value work.
A basic example is a guitar teacher who spends a couple hours every week working on administrative tasks (eg: sending out invoices to students). If that teacher can pay somebody else $20 per hour to handle all these tasks, he can then spend an extra couple of hours each week in guitar lessons and earn $40+ per hour. So this teacher can actually raise his income by outsourcing admin work. The teacher is better off financially and enjoys his work more as he can spend more time with students.
In the above example, 'low-value' work is the admin work the teacher needs to spend time on each week. 'High-value' work for a teacher is time in lessons. So if there is somebody the teacher can pay to outsource this low-value work, the teacher is better off outsourcing.
As an example of a different type of outsourcing, full time teachers sometimes hire another teacher to take on students on their behalf because demand is so high. That's outsourcing because the teacher is paying somebody else to complete work he is unable to take on. The teacher can grow the business further because he can pay others to take on more work on his behalf. In this example the teacher isn't trading low-value work for high-value work. Instead, he's finding somebody else to take on more high-value work for him. As long as the teacher can pay the person less than the less fees, it makes sense to consider this option.