However, when she got a quote for the work which was nearly ten times what it would cost to outsource the work she soon changed her mind. Since then we have outsourced work on a regular basis, increasingly via freelance sites like freelancer.

So, here’s six reasons why we use freelance sites – and why, if you are a small business like ourselves, you should too.

1. Huge Cost Savings

The costs savings of using a freelancer can be huge. First, you exploit the wage differential between the West and the East to achieve things which small businesses could otherwise not afford.

Secondly, by outsourcing work you are also saving on the additional, government imposed costs of hiring staff in the West. For example, my partner pays herself £1500 a month from our business, but it costs the business more than £2000 to do so. By outsourcing work to companies abroad you can spend this money on getting work done instead of seeing it grabbed by the government.

2. Getting the Best Price

The bidding system on freelance sites like Freelancer.com assures that you get absolute best value for money. Of course, you should never go for the cheapest price – we always value experience and quality over price.

Quite often, when we go back to companies we found using Freelancer.com, we are quoted prices far in excess of what we would have been quoted on a freelance website. Remove the competition, and you remove the incentive to provide a competitive quote.

3. Choosing the best person for the job

The feedback on freelance is an impressive way of differentiating the ability of freelancers. Of course, it is not always straightforward.

Freelancers are desperate to get good feedback and will beg and cajole feedback from users. I am sure that some feedback is fake. Nevertheless, although not perfect, the feedback system allows you to assess the reliability and ability of users before you hire them. The desire to get good feedback also motivates freelancers to do their best work for your company.

4. Safe payment system

Most sites have an escrow payment system built in, with an adjudication system should there be an issue over the work. This gives both you and the person working for you peace of mind. Should the work not be satisfactory, you can withhold payment until the work has been improved, the project goes to adjudication or the freelancer accepts cancellation of the project and the work is reassigned to another freelancer.

5. Avoiding commitment

Some freelancers are good, some not so good. However, you only ever enter a commitment with a freelancer for one job – if their work is poor, you can move on without having to dismiss an employee.

6. Relationships

While you can leave poor workers behind, the advantage of working with lots of different people is that you will come across some people who are really good at their job. This gives you the chance to build relationships with talented people who you can continue to work with on as-needed basis.

These freelance websites are not perfect, and sometimes you will get frustrated. But bear with them, and you’ll be able to achieve things you could never have afforded before.

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This is a special post. It is part of a promotional tour of blogs put together by Katie Elzer-Peters to promote her friend Christine Johnson’s new book, Claire de Lune, which a novel about a 16 year old girl who happens to be a werewolf. A bunch of different bloggers who write about all sorts of different things (except werewolves) are participating. You can find other blogs that are participating in this unique promotional tour at Katie’s blog, The Garden of Words. The reason All Business Answers is participating is because I love unique marketing concepts, and because Katie asked.

In the current economy, there are so many applicants for most available positions that, as a business owner, it can be difficult to sort through the resumes and find the perfect candidate for your organization. Perhaps, in that mass of possible new hires, you’ve encountered a werewolf. What should you know before the interview? Is this sort of inter-species hire the right move for your business?

The ins and outs of employing a werewolf can be confusing at first. It’s important to note that werewolves will not eat your clients! Lawyers are much more dangerous, especially in a group. And since all werewolves are female, hiring one is a great way to make your employee pool more diverse.

But what about the full moon, you ask? It’s true that most werewolves will have responsibilities to a pack, as well as certain ceremonies that they must attend. However, with the right flex-time clauses and good communication on both sides, everyone’s needs can be met in regards to work/wolf-life balance.

Werewolves need little sleep, which informal studies have indicated results in excellent productivity rates. Their special insight into the lives of non-human species brings a wealth of new marketing opportunities. Increased speed and hyper-acute senses make them especially observant. They can literally smell a quality-control issue a mile away.

Often, werewolves possess special skills, such as the capability to hear people from far away, or the ability to open locks without a key. You’ll want to ask about these during the interview process, both to determine how they might help you and your business, as well as to determine if there are any special precautions you might want to take.

Other questions you might want to consider – or consult your HR department about – prior to interviewing a werewolf:

• Dietary restrictions – werewolves are notorious carnivores, and need to have access to appropriate food.
• Dress code – werewolves often dress to accommodate quick transformations. Make sure you’re both on the same page about what’s appropriate for the office.
• Confidentiality – some werewolves are more sensitive about keeping their identities a secret. You’ll want to consult with HR or the legal department if the candidate demands a confidentiality clause.
• Benefits – some health plans won’t cover lycanthropy-related diseases or injuries, and dental plans are almost always restricted to human teeth. Check with your company’s benefits providers to ensure that you’re offering acceptable coverage.

Should you have any other questions about werewolves as employees, check out www.christinejohnsonbooks.com and CLAIRE DE LUNE.

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photo credit: Kevin Lawver

This is a special post. It is part of a promotional tour of blogs put together by Katie Elzer-Peters to promote her friend Christine Johnson’s new book, Claire de Lune, which a novel about a 16 year old girl who happens to be a werewolf. A bunch of different bloggers who write about all sorts of different things (except werewolves) are participating. You can find other blogs that are participating in this unique promotional tour at Katie’s blog, The Garden of Words. The reason All Business Answers is participating is because I love unique marketing concepts, and because Katie asked.

The thing about werewolves is that they are normal people, most of the time. They may be a nice neighbor, a valued friend, a respected community member. You would never think of them as monsters. But then a full moon occurs, and they become completely different. They can’t help it. A natural event triggers something deep inside of them, and the next thing you know these normal people are hairy monsters howling at the moon and wreaking havoc on their home town.

Okay, so maybe werewolves aren’t real, but this very same scenario happens more often than we would like to admit in the world of business. You have a great little business, you treat customers fairly and kindly, and you do your best every day. You think great things about your business and you hope other people do as well. But then there is the incident. It is with one customer, who may be a little pickier than your other customers. Something goes wrong. They don’t see your good side. Instead, they are confronted with a monster of bad customer service. Your inner werewolf makes his appearance.

Watch for Signs of a Werewolf

There are all kinds of ways this happens. Maybe your customer service person is having a bad day, and responds to a complaining customer rudely. Perhaps a sales person forgets to note a very specific and particular need of a customer, and you end up not delivering up to expectations. Heck, maybe one of your packages of otherwise great gourmet coffee beans has a hair in it. Things happen.

When mistakes occur, the biggest thing that is affected is your customer’s perception of you as a business. The right thing to do would be to respond to the problem quickly and honestly, to show that you really are a great business and not a werewolf.

Unfortunately, the right thing doesn’t always happen. Sometimes you react instead of respond. Sometimes your employees bare their teeth at customers. Sometimes the stars and the moon and the seas all line up and you turn into a werewolf, if only for a few moments.

How to Deal with a Werewolf

If this happens once, be humble. Apologize to the customer. Then take steps to make sure it never happens again. But if you have a recurring werewolf problem in your business, with maybe 1% of customers seeing your bad side, you need to take drastic measures.

The thing is, you may be systematically enhancing your inner werewolf. Maybe you’ve added on a service charge to help cover some costs. Perhaps you have instituted a customer-facing policy to get them to act in a certain way so that you will have an easier time dealing with them. This is your werewolf. Whenever you put your own well-being in front of your customer’s well-being, you are in danger of your monster coming out.

The saying “the customer is always right” exists for a reason. Of course the customer is not always right, but you aren’t supposed to tell them that. Your job as a business owner is to serve your customer, not to annoy them or terrorize them. Small things, like extra fees, fine print, and rules can drive customers wild. Big things, like major mistakes or having an employee yell at a customer can also ruin your reputation.

Keep the Beast at Bay

The best thing you can do to make sure your business is not a werewolf is to get zealous about customer satisfaction. You need procedures and rules to run your business, but they should not be customer-facing. Build your business around customer needs, not yours. Make sure your employees know how to deal with every type of customer, especially complainers. Build systems so that important customer information doesn’t fall through cracks.

You can’t avoid every major mistake, but you can have a plan for how to handle it. It is like a fire drill. Have a way out of the doghouse if you ever get in it with a customer. Be honest, transparent, and caring. Remember, the customer is not mad that you made a mistake, they are mad because your mistake made things difficult for them. When fixing the mistake, be sure to see if you can solve their difficulty.

The little things, those annoyances like fees and silly policies, should be done away with. They are just opportunities for you to howl at the moon. Instead of trying to get customers to behave a certain way with rules, communicate with them about how your process works. Instead of charging fees to make up for small costs, like fuel or credit card charges, raise your prices and your quality overall.

And if you ever see a full moon (in the form of a difficult customer, for instance), keep a special watch out for werewolf opportunities.

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photo credit: elbragon

I spoke with Matt Cullina of Identity Theft 911 for an upcoming podcast. We covered a wide range of things concerning identity theft, but one thing in particular stood out to me concerning this growing problem and small businesses.

We all need to do better at protecting our own identities. Matt suggests that we start thinking of identity as a currency or asset that we are protective of. But if you are a small business owner, it is not just your identity that you need to watch out for. It is also very important that you take steps to protect the identity of your employees and of your customers.

Being More Careful

Sometimes protecting your identity just means you need to be more careful about it. Matt Cullina says that you should be slow to share sensitive information. Even things as innocuous as a birth date could be put together with other information to build an identity profile. It is a good idea to question why you need to share your information, and to share it sparingly.

When you own a business you are in a position where you need to ask for identity information from other people. Often, when you hire someone, you need to get their driver’s license and social security information. That is a gold mine of information for identity thieves. With customers, you may be collecting credit card information or other sensitive data.

The first thing you need to do is to make sure you collect only information that you absolutely need. Secondly, don’t hang on to sensitive information if you don’t need to. A shredder comes in handy here. Using an automated system to collect and process credit card data, rather than collecting the information manually, is usually best.

Keep Information Safe

If you need to hang on to certain sensitive information, make sure it is well protected. You should have a safe for your most sensitive documents. You should also be careful who you trust. Leaving identity information around where employees can access it is just asking for trouble. Even once trusted partners have been known to steal identities. While much identity theft is conducted by professional criminals, a large portion is perpetrated by regular folks. People get desperate when it comes to money and then they get stupid. So be sure to keep sensitive information about employees and customers safe.

You Are Trusted

Remember, when it comes to private information on employees and customers, you are trusted. In order to maintain that trust, you should treat any sensitive data as if it were gold. Be sure to take care of other people’s identities as well as you take care of your own. Don’t ever share information that you have been entrusted with. Become more guarded in how you keep and transport information. Trust is hard to build, so don’t lose it by making other people’s identities easy to steal.

And so I outsourced, made some mistakes, and learned how to make it work. Here are just a few of the things I picked up.

Outsource Processes, not Problems

Realizing the potential to leverage outsourced labor through sites like oDesk.com, my brain tended to think of outsourcing anytime I had a problem in the early days of my business.

One time, I had a problem that required a little bit of research and some critical thinking to solve, and I decided to try an outsourced provider. After typing up a brief description of the problem, and sifting through a ton of form letter proposals, I found a researcher that seemed to understand what was needed, and I hired him at something like $5 an hour.

It turned out that while this provider was good at collecting information, he wasn’t so good at analyzing it and making decisions. The project I needed required both skills, and the whole endeavor backfired. I ended up paying the provider and having to go back and redo all the research myself.

I learned my lesson, and the next time I had a project, I wrote out a clearly defined research objective and set of instructions to follow. I hired the same provider, and he performed wonderfully.

Any outsourced worker you hire will most likely not be knowledgeable off the bat about your product or industry, so make sure you give him or her a task that doesn’t require that knowledge to complete it. Short, well-defined processes will give you the best results from outsourcing.

You Still Have To Do Your Homework

Of course the allure of outsourcing is the cost savings. I’ve hired amazing writers, researchers, coders, and editors for under $10 an hour. But I’ve learned that even these providers need to prove their abilities before I hire them.

As an example, I recently hired someone to do some web work for me at $18 an hour. There were other providers offering to do the same work at $5 an hour. I indulged in my natural reactions and hired the $18 provider, justifying by saying to myself “she wouldn’t charge that much if she wasn’t worth it.”

However, it turned out she wasn’t worth it. Tasks went uncompleted, and the work that was completed wasn’t up to standards. I returned to interview one of the $5 providers, and found that he had much more experience, and understood what I needed much better. He turned out to be an excellent hire.

If I had done my homework, I would’ve seen that I was getting a great deal by hiring the $5 an hour provider, and that hiring the $18 an hour provider would turn out to be a mistake.

Pay On Time

This should go without saying, and I’m happy to say it’s not a mistake I’ve made, but you should always pay your providers on time. Just because they are in another country where the law may not reach does not put you off the hook for payment.

Morally of course it’s just wrong not to pay someone you’ve agreed to pay. But practically it’s not a great idea either. The organizations that run the sites and infrastructure largely responsible for making outsourcing so accessible don’t take kindly to delinquent employers. At the very least your company will build a bad reputation in the small world that is business. At most, you could be banned from using the outsourcing tools that could help you. You can even get sued for not paying a foreign provider.

Outsourced labor isn’t free labor. The benefits go both ways. You receive quality work at a fraction of the price you would have to pay otherwise, and the provider receives income otherwise unavailable. Make sure you pay promptly.

These represent a small percentage of the keys to effective outsourcing. What experiences have you had with outsourcing? Would you recommend it?

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photo credit: Shaury

How Many Hats?

How many different duties should you heap on an employee? The answer is different for every employee and every situation. But in general, an employee should have fewer hats to wear than you do. This goes to the adage of “never ask anyone to do something that you wouldn’t do.”

It is easy to pile on responsibility after responsibility. If you are not careful, you will drown a good team member in work. The funny thing is that you may have a tendency to give them all that work because they are so good. You think they can handle it, but do you know? You need to be able to take measure of how well your employee is handling their work. Here are some warning signs to watch out for:

• Insists on staying late (you can chalk this up to work ethic, but I chalk it up to you putting too much on their plate)
• Looks frazzled, consistently
• The worker (or co-workers) gives you little hints that there is too much work (employees don’t generally come out and say what is bothering them, so it’s your job to have your antennas up at all times)
• The quality of work starts to suffer
• Things that were getting done are being left undone

You should not give an employee more work than they can handle in their normal workday. Sure, you want to optimize how much work you get out of them. You can do that with better time and task management systems. Don’t overwork a good person.

Another good rule is to add one thing at a time, and when you do, evaluate the other responsibilities they have. Ask yourself and ask them how this new responsibility will affect their other responsibilities. If possible, take a responsibility away when you add a new one. Many of the duties an employee performs does can be better systematized and rolled off to another employee, automated, outsourced, or completely done away with. This will create room for more responsibilities. If you can take away a responsibility every time you give one, you are a really good boss!

Give Good Procedures, Please

If you want your employee to be able to handle multiple duties better, consider developing better procedures. A good procedure can move a job along and provide your business with better results. Ideally, when you give an employee a new duty, you would also present them with training and a procedure on how to do it. If it is a new duty to your business, spend some time working with the employee and develop a procedure together.

Just remember, the best procedures are frameworks that can be built upon and improved. I suggest setting up a wiki to list procedures on, and then giving employees freedom to suggest changes as they perform their duty. It is almost impossible to create a perfect procedure out of thin air. A good employee will help you refine it into something that works great for them and your business.

Focus Energy on Time and Task Management

One of the best things you can do to help employees handle multiple duties is to invest energy and money in time and task management. Good time and task management helps people get more work done, often with better results. I suggest implementing a company-wide system for managing time and handling task lists. There are all kinds of programs out there, including Getting Things Done, Simpleology, and a new favorite of mine, the Action Method. There is also a very good section on this in Chet Holmes’ book, The Ultimate Sales Machine.

As you give multiple duties to employees, you need to step up your own support activities. Your main job is to make sure your employees are empowered to do theirs. This is difficult when you are just starting out, because you have so many duties of your own. However, if you want to build a strong organization you must learn how to move some of your day-to-day responsibilities to your employees so you can handle the management side of things better.

Reward and Recognize

Finally, if you are going to be handing out multiple duties to an employee, be sure that you are also handing out praise. It is not a good idea to just heap things on someone because they are there. Instead, bring the employee in to the process. Explain your goals, discuss their current workload and figure out how best to make the new duty fit. Showing understanding up front can go a long way.

The more duties an employee handles, the more valuable they are to your business. Show that you know this. Consider giving a pay raise when you add more work. Also, you may want to hand out titles. Most of all, pay attention to make sure that the employee is keeping up with the job and be sure to thank her for being willing to take on the work. This is important even if you are having someone help out temporarily or occasionally. If someone’s job is to answer the phone, but you have them help unload a shipment from time to time, thank them for being willing to go above and beyond their job description. You may expect it, but never show anything but gratitude.

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photo credit: dugsong

In this episode I interviewed Diana Ennen, president of Virtual Word Publishing, on the topic of virtual assistants. Some of the things we covered include:

- Why a small business should consider hiring a virtual assistant

- What strengths VAs have over traditional employees

- How technology has made working with a VA easier

- How to become a VA

I personally believe hiring a virtual assistant to do specific and specialized tasks is a smart business move. Having the flexibility and expertise of a VA can really help a small business grow quickly, and many VAs have a lot of knowledge they can share, so it is almost like getting a coach and a team member at once.

Please consider subscribing to the Podcast on iTunes.

Understanding the bill: There are different factors that play into how this bill will directly affect your business, and as a business owner, the first thing you must do is make sure that you understand how it will affect your company.  For example:

• If your company employs more than 50 people, you must provide all employees with health insurance, or pay a penalty fee for every uninsured employee.
• If your company has 25 employees or less, you would get tax credits to help buy insurance for your employees.

These factors, along with others must be fully understood before jumping into explanations to your employees.

Communicate: Once you understand how this bill will directly affect your business, you must properly inform your employees to ensure their understanding.  For example:

• Send out a company wide memo simply outlining how this bill will affect the company and its employees, how you are taking the necessary steps to fully understand this bill, and how you will keep your employees updated as more information is learned.
• Hold a staff meeting as an open forum with the health care reform as the sole topic, allowing your employees to ask questions freely.  Although you may not know all of the correct answers just yet, simply acknowledging this bill and the changes that may occur is a great start.

Execute: Within the first year of implementation major changes will occur so you must be prepared, and make sure your employees are aware of your plan of action.  Be able to address the following questions:

• Will you provide your employees with health insurance?  If not, are you prepared to pay the penalty-fee?
• Are you going to offer other suggestions of health insurance to your employees?

Don’t Panic: Remember this bill is new for everyone.  If you are having trouble understanding it, explain to your employees that you’re in the process of internalizing how this will affect the company and will issue a statement in the near future.  It is better to have a full understanding of the bill before you explain, then to mislead your employees with false information.

The passing of the new health care reform bill means immense changes for all Americans and their businesses.  It is important for everyone to understand this new bill and how it will affect us, and as a business leader, it is crucial to have the capability to successfully communicate with your employees how this bill will affect their lives.

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National healthcare won’t kick in right away

First of all, there will be no mad rush to kick your employees off your business healthcare plan to a government plan. At best, we are looking at about four years before anything that was recently voted on will be fully enacted. There are political reasons for this, as well as practical. So don’t start counting all of the money you will be saving just yet.

Dropping employees may not be the right choice (or even legal)

There’s more. I am not sure on all of the details, but I know that small businesses will probably not be able to drop employees into a government healthcare pool. It sounds like a great idea, from a business owner perspective. But the government is counting on business owners to help foot the healthcare bill.

Businesses will likely be required to provide healthcare to employees. Sure, there will be incentives for special interest groups of all types, including small businesses, to make this an easier pill to swallow. But in the end, you could end up being required to provide business healthcare to employees. Every single American is going to be required to have insurance, and you can bet that the government will need your help to make sure that happens.

Here’s the thing. Because of this, you may be in the position of being required to pay more for health insurance that offers less. It is very possible. At the very least, the government run plan will not have any kind of flexibility to customize to your employees unique needs.

With this in mind, and if its still an option, you may be better off keeping employees on a private plan. If you are going to pay anyway, you might want to keep some of the control over what you are offering and how it helps your people.

Private options may get better

This one may be a pipe dream. Government regulations and short-sighted laws, plus cost of entry in the health care field and big business group think, have led us to some pretty horrible health insurance options. Health costs are out of control and insurance has a hard time keeping up with them. That is not likely to get better any time soon, since very little out of the box thinking seems to have been applied to the Federal government’s healthcare fix-all.

However, there is a chance that private companies will spring up to fill in gaps and to offer competitive healthcare and insurance options. If this is the case, you may have an opportunity to find and provide better and cheaper business healthcare options for your employees.

One thing a national healthcare insurance does is break down state barriers to health insurance companies. If the government doesn’t pave the way for national companies to emerge and compete on a national level, then they are just creating a monopoly. Unfortunately, the government often ignores its own very real monopolies and instead spends time and money trying to break up imagined monopolies that are just the result of good business.

You can still use healthcare as a competitive edge

If there remains an option for private health insurance, you will likely be able to use it as a competitive advantage for hiring good people. As national healthcare in other countries have shown us, quality of care and attention to the patient often goes way down with a government program.

A private program that rewards doctors can provide a much better level of care. With creative thinking and smart business practices, private health insurance and care can be much better than government subsidized care. So if you can, you may want to be the company that offers a private option, rather than the same government option that potential employees can get everywhere else.

The bill that President Obama is pushing is likely only the first step. We have yet to see the full implications. But, as with any far-reaching government program, there are going to be ripples throughout the country. Perhaps some positive things will happen. Just as likely, some negative things will happen. But this much is for sure, as a small business owner you shouldn’t jump in until you know the score. And you should always seek a competitive edge and seek to take care of your employees the best way you possibly can.

Do you answer the phone yourself at your business? What do you do when you are on the job, or just too busy to answer the phone when it rings? Do you just let it go to voicemail?

You may not be ready to hire a receptionist. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need one. It is very important to answer the phone promptly and professionally. If your calls go to voicemail, there are two dangers.

First, maybe the person will not leave a voice mail. If they were calling  your business trying to get a quote or information, chances are good that they are calling around. If they do not leave a message, you have no way to get back to them. And if they get a good enough answer from another business, you have lost them entirely.

The other bad thing that happens with voicemail is that you forget to return the call quickly enough. As a small business owner, it is easy to get so wrapped up in your job that days go by before you know it. When you do finally get back to the caller, it might be too late.

If you can have a human answering your phone whenever it rings, or at least during normal business hours, you should. And here’s the thing, you do not have to hire a full time receptionist to do it.

There are a couple of ways to go about it. First, you can hire a virtual assistant. This person can answer the phone from their own office. You just need to set up a system to forward calls. Good systems allow you to control when to forward calls, and may even allow you to forward them after so many rings. This means you can set it up to answer the calls yourself when you are not too busy.

The second option is to hire a receptionist company. The great thing here is that they can answer the phone 24/7.  You simply need to set up scripts for the service to use. You can even set it up so they can answer basic questions and so they know when to forward the call directly to you or to take a message. These services can be very affordable. One I used in the past started at only $80 per month then a few cents per call.

With affordable options available, you really have no excuse to let your calls just go to voicemail. Start doing some research and find an alternative that will work well for your business as you grow.

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Hello, my name is Bradford Shimp. Check out my web design services at BroadRiverCreative.com.

photo credit: mangpages