Subscribe to FeedBlogs are not us, uh, I mean they are, but…
by Jeff RosenbergAs a small business owner some of the toughest decisions center around resource allocation. How do I know what to do in-house and what to outsource? For me, it comes down to how best to utilize the creativity of my staff.
We create and manage blogs for clients. If we decide, in partnership with a client, that a blog can effectively help tell their story to people who will care, we blog. But we don’t do the building of the blog in-house, even though we have the in-house capability to do so. Why not? Because I decided that having my staff spend time on building the blog as opposed to doing what they do best and few others do as well — that is, crafting a story, developing the strategy to tell the story, and managing the storytelling — would be a bad use of resources.
We can outsource the building of the blog for less than what we would charge a client for the time, when the client would much rather be paying us for the same amount of time to manage the complete public relations strategy.
And we are skilled at bringing in just the right subcontractors to whom we outsource specific tasks. For example, for creating blogs we bring in Durbin Media. We work well with them. They can grasp what we want to create for a client. They do it at a reasonable price. And that just makes us even more valuable to a client because we can design the entire conceptual framework for a campaign, bring together all the right tools (in-house talent and outsourced talent), and manage it all to achieve desired outcomes within required budgets. That’s a pretty good talent for us to sell.
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That’s quite the compliment Jeff, thank you. Delegating tasks isn’t always easy, but it does make a lot of sense. One of the hardest things we’ve had to learn as a small business is to make the decision when to take business and when to pass it on.
A client of ours recently wanted some Mac training. We’re not experts, but i’ve made the transition in the last two years from PC to Mac, so I had a valuable viewpoint. The problem was that to pay for my time, the client had to pay the same rate that I charge for social media.
I was qualified to do it, but they were vastly overpaying for services because they wanted my time, which is better spent managing their online projects.
Ultimately, I had to pass on the business to someone else who could do the job for much less. By focusing on my strengths, I reinforce what I do well, but also reinforce why they pay us. They still are turning to us for a larger project that is in our core focus.
That’s hard to learn, especially when people think your expertise should cover all areas. While flattering, it’s not in their best interests.
Thanks again for the mention.
Comment by Jim Durbin — January 15, 2008 @ 2:47 pm