A question often asked by small and growing businesses is how to maximise the efficiency of valuable resources. From hours in the day to your budget for staff, increasing productivity and making the most of you and your companies time and money is essential. With businesses finding it harder to compete with ever expanding entrepreneurs, it's essential to grab the best talent on the market and utilise it to your advantage. But is this best done in house? Or could switching your focus from finding rare and diverse full time talent to freelance contractors be the answer?
Before the internet, the access a company had to the skill set they needed from an impartial professional would be hard to find, but not any more. Having a web-based database of freelancers available online means that your company has access to unlimited professionals just desperate for your project, and with websites like PeoplePerHour.com keeping access free and fast, you can pop your job online and watch in real time as people bid for it and have their proposals back to you within hours.
Being the boss of a company is incredibly challenging and the Top Job changes as your company grows. Often, the boss will have started up their business as a one man show, creating the concept and then continued striving to turn their dream into reality. But this turns entrepreneurs into managers, a role that requires a whole other skill set and motivation. And it often doesn't work.
Managers are structured beings, they have to be completely together and motivated by productivity and know how to get it. Whereas entrepreneurs are passionate souls, driven by the quality of their product and, although income is at the top of the list, your passion for your product only strengthens. So you don't want to waste your time trying to inject that overall insight into new staff. People management can be a huge distraction and a drain on your time and energy.
Remember, freelancers are their own bosses. Their reputation for efficiency and quality work is their lifeblood, so they will be driving themselves. Every second a freelancer has that commission in their lap, it's their one and only focus. Their future income depends on it, YOU are THEIR customer. So instead of trying to drag your existing staff's output up kicking and screaming, splitting your workload into bite-sized portions and giving them out to grateful freelancers will greatly improve the quality of work you receive back. You'll be using specialists and, after all, isn't that the standard your vision deserves?
You can now choose the person that is perfect for the job, without making the huge commitment of adding someone to the payroll and spending precious hours managing and investing in their skill set, when all that was needed was their passion in that one area of your business. If you scale your team down, you reduce the amount of hours you need to spend on management, and can concentrate on your next bright idea or moving your company forward as your customer base evolves. You become the customer, and can simply post and peruse as the bids come flooding in from all over the world.
Freelancers are passionate about what they do, and furthermore, they want to impress you. They want you as a contact. They want you to send your next project their way, recommend them to a friend. Does that sound familiar? It's the exact result that you're striving to achieve from your own customers. So change the way your company works, and make yourself the client. Post your projects online and watch the proposals flood in, then pick a favourite and get back to the important work... Focusing on turning your passion and vision into profits. Leave the rest to the freelancers. They'll be thrilled to have it.
Become the client. It's very rare to find a professional who will possess the perfect skill set that suits all aspects of your business. Take that task and post it on a website like PeoplePerHour.com, who have a huge database of specialist freelancers, and you'll have a response within hours from someone far better qualified with experience and passion.
It's not even negotiable any more. No business owner should be spending their time managing an inefficient workforce. If you couldn't cope yourself (not a downfall, simply a welcome symptom of a company expanding), you used to have to employ a manager as your workforce grew who could motivate and train your team, but now you can cut out the middle man. Split the work into concentrated projects and send them out to freelancers. It's fast, it's free and its a far superior approach. Where time equals money, Freelancers equal efficiency. And now that they're easy to find and quick to contact, you can switch your focus back to your business and become the client yourself.