You want to grow, and you’ve raised your prices (or don’t want to or can’t). You need to hire help.

I am a big proponent of outsourcing everything you can to other companies, before you make the leap to actually hire someone to work for you. I’ll explain why below, but first, let’s look at the steps you need to take to get another company to help.

Here Are The Steps

1. Make a list of all the tasks in your business that you hate. These are the first tasks you need to get help with. The more time you spend on things you hate, the less time you spend on what you love to do, and are good at. In our perfect world, you figure out a way to spend 90% of your time doing the things you’re best at, and outsource or hire employees to handle the rest.
2. Now that you have this list, are there things on it that other companies could do for you? For many business owners, this list contains the words “bookkeeping” and “administrative tasks.” Luckily for us, there are thousands of other small businesses whose business it is to do this work so you don’t have to. Talk to your accountant for bookkeeper and ask around about virtual assistants. There are many other solo entrepreneurs whose sole business it is to do the bookkeeping and the administrative tasks for people who don’t like them, so those people can focus on doing the tasks they enjoy, like serving customers.
3. Need someone to help with your monthly newsletter? A person to clean your office? Someone to enter your new networking contacts into your database, or send out your postcards? Or even an independent sales representative to help you get in front of more potential clients? Get outside help first.
4. Talk to your other business friends to get recommendations of people/companies to talk to. Because you already have the list of the tasks you hate, you can share it with the people you might hire to help you. Get an estimate from them about how much they’d charge to help. If you don’t know anyone using outside help, try Elance, or the International Association of Virtual Assistants.
5. Look at your revenue and spending. Enter these new expenses into your forecast and see what your new bottom line looks like. Can you afford help now? If the answer is no, how much more revenue do you need to generate to get help? Open a savings account and start saving a little money each month toward the goal of hiring someone to help you.
6. If the answer is yes, you can afford to get help, write a contract (or at least a letter of engagement) with the people you’re hiring. Get specific about the tasks and how and when you want them done. Put in a review process so you both know how and when to talk to each other to make sure things are going the way you want. Say how long you want this relationship to last—maybe you only want it to go for three months so you can re-evaluate.
7. Take the plunge!

Why You Should Try Hiring A Company First, Before You Hire Employees

The point of getting your first outside help from other companies is that the commitment to them is not as strong as it is to someone you hire as an actual employee. You can experiment with them and try different companies or different working arrangements, and God Forbid, if something happens to your cash flow, you can more easily let them go if you have to. Hiring other companies to help you will also give you practice in hiring (and possibly firing), so if the time comes that you need an employee you’ll have some experience.

Have you hired a company to help you? Tell me about it below.

Pricing, especially for people who set the price for the product or service, and deliver the product or perform the service, can be very tricky. It’s easy to confuse the price you need to charge for what you make or do, with your self esteem.

You can combat this two ways:

1. Research what your competition sells their work for

2. Figure out how much value you deliver, and set your price at some fraction of that value.

Research is pretty easy to do: the internet is an unlimited source of pricing information; and even in the unlikely event that you can’t find an exact price for what you do, you can pick up the phone and call someone outside your area and ask what they charge for a similar product or service.

If you do this research, you’ll find that there is a huge range of prices for almost every product or service sold. People who go to the local barber shop and pay $11.00 (plus tip) for a haircut may be flabbergasted (or horrified) to know that you can pay $400 for a man’s haircut (and even higher for a woman’s cut). In my field, you can pay a coach $25 an hour, or $5,000, depending on who you hire.

Why would someone pay $400 for a haircut? Why would someone hire a coach for $5,000 an hour? Because they feel like they receive much more value than the cost they incur. Perhaps the $400 hair cut makes you look a lot better on TV, hiking your ratings and securing your contract for the next five years. Maybe the $5,000 coach showed you how to break through a barrier that had been blocking you forever, enabling you to triple your income.

Farfetched? The $400 haircut and the $5,000 per hour coach both exist. More than one person is willing to pay for these rates for that kind of value.

If you haven’t raised your prices recently, or if you simply want to expand your mind on the subject, read these blog posts.

www.fluentself.com/blog/biggification/the-art-and-science-of-pricing/

www.fluentself.com/blog/biggification/coming-up-with-prices/

http://www.shaboominc.com/blog/ (read the November 20th post called “Does Your Pricing Prevent Customers from Committing?”

Do you need to raise your prices? Are you afraid? What’s next for you?

Perhaps I’ve been hanging out in Northern California too much (the land of the woo woo), but I think I actually had some psychic influence over the fact that it took six rounds and 45 days to get an error-free proof of my book from the printer (a process that should have taken two weeks, max).

I was really afraid for the book to come out. I wanted the people who bought it to use it, and to receive tangible benefit from it. Specifically, I wanted them to earn more money by working through the exercises in the book.

As any reader of the Aesop Fables (or your mother) can tell you—you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. In other words, I can’t guarantee anything. Even if 100,000 people bought the book (which would be very cool), I couldn’t guarantee that one of them would read it, or do the work, or earn more money in their businesses as a result.

I can only provide the water. You have to do the drinking.

I experienced a raft of pain while working in some of my previous businesses, mostly centered around not earning enough money. It was awful. I want to save the rest of the world from experiencing that level of agony. That’s why I was so worried about my book coming out.  What if my book doesn’t save all the other people in the world feeling the same pain about their work?

Coincidentally, my raft of pain happened to be the perfect amount, at the perfect time, to get me to change; to sell my IT business and to go into coaching and writing. If there had been less pain, I might still be talking to people about computer network support.

Pain was (and is) my friend.

And although I hope my book does alleviate a lot of pain for all of you out there who are passionate about your work and your businesses, but aren’t earning enough money, the truth is, you might need to be in the pain you’re in to motivate you to change.

And if you are ready to change, you have to do the drinking. It’s up to you. Not me.

I did my part to provide part of the water for all you thirsty small business owners. The rest is your responsibility.

Here’s my question to you: are you standing at the water, but not drinking? Go to your favorite coffee shop and set aside 15 minutes to look around at your life. Are you in pain about something that has a solution? Has someone or something lead you to the water? Are you standing in it up to your knees, or armpits?

What can you do to go ahead and drink?

Business Plans: Great idea or scary tool that will point out things you don’t want to look at?

My book, Passion, Plan, Profit: 12 Simple Steps to Convert Your Passion into a Solid Business, will be out in three weeks.

If I get my wish, this book starts out as a book, and ends up being a catalyst for people to really do their business plans, to talk to each other about it, and even to find other people to do their plans with. After the book comes out, I’m going to revise my website so people who want to write a business plan they’ll actually use, can find other people who want to do the same thing.

Business plans have a (deserved) bad reputation. Small business owners, especially, think one of three things: “Plans are for big businesses,” or, I “know I should do it but I’m too busy”, or “I’m carrying it around in my head; no need to write anything down.”

Because if you actually write something down, you might discover what my friend Fred Hepperle, a talented and funny IT guy, sent me. Here’s what he said about business plans when I told him I had written a book about how to do one:

The South Park Business Plan

“I enjoy the animated series “South Park” on Comedy Central… This definitely-not-for-kids cartoon often weighs in on various socio-economic and political issues, and pokes fun at them while doing so.

Anyway, there’s an episode where one of the usual characters (a 4th grader) keeps losing undergarments. One night he wakes up to catch garden gnomes stealing from his dresser drawers. He follows the gnomes, to find a whole pilfered-undergarment gnome industry, with huge piles of stolen undergarments. He asks the gnomes what they are doing.

One of the gnomes explains, “This is our livelihood! Phase one: Steal underpants! Phase two: Profit!” When the 4th grader asks how they get from phase 1 to phase 2, the gnomes all just shrug their shoulders, avert their eyes, and kick the dirt at their feet.

It seems the gnome’s business plan was missing a few steps. I occasionally use the “Phase one: Steal underpants! Phase two: Profit!” slogan to remind myself that there’s more than just a couple of steps to success. It keeps me from trying too many shortcuts.”

So if any of you out there have a business plan similar to the South Park gnomes, there is a better way.