043: Systematize & Checklist-Enable Your Online Business (You Don’t Have to Outsource Everything)

Do you find yourself struggling with when you should be Hands-On vs When You Should Outsource? Robert shows you how the E-Myth can help you make the most effective decisions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFrUselgze8 Robert is the author of Double Agent Marketing-a book about how to do the "day job" while starting up a successful online marketing business. When you're starting an online business, sometimes you have to be in the "Must Have" mode and sometimes in the "Nice to Have" mode and you need to know the difference between the two. Must Have: an online platform and a product. You won't achieve any income without these two in place Nice to Have: attractive business cards, pretty graphics, multiple social media accounts The average person attempting to make money online and failing has nothing for sale. They're focusing on the "nice to have's" which give the illusion of productivity but they are not income-makers. When you're building your online business, you're in one of two places: You want to increase your online income or you want to scale back the number of hours you're working on that business so you can spend more at home and doing the things that you enjoy. People get into online marketing so they CAN achieve having more time to do the things they enjoy. What Robert keeps hearing from these entrepreneurs is that, in order to achieve this, they have to outsource everything. But, you have to start somewhere and even Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, started by driving packages to the post office himself. Let's Talk about Outsourcing You DO have to be hands on when you're first "out of the gate" People can get discouraged at first because they feel like they are doing all the work themselves and aren't seeing much initial progress. The solution to that problem is to go for the first shortest path to making money--making an information product. This will make you a handful of sales but most importantly, you'll start building a list of customers and build a relationship with them. You can start "talking" to them about what they're interested in, i.e. what kind of products will they buy in the future. Then, you make the next biggest product. You start to grow, you start to raise capital. You won't ALWAYS have to invest 100% of your time in this business but as you grow, you can add "outsourcers." Why else is immediate outsourcing a bad idea? You need to know exactly what is going on in your business. You need to know the in's and out's. "Learn enough to be dangerous." Let's say you want to develop an app. You need to teach yourself how to get an app submitted, what it takes to market it, and then source code. If you hired out all of this, what happens if you want to add new features or the app developer you used goes out of business? You are locked out of your own product! This is why YOU need to learn the basics (and even more if possible) so that the future of YOUR business does not depend on an outsourced agent. Most of the time, the outsourced job will never be done to the level that you would have taken it to. This is not the outsourced agent's business-it is YOURS. So, you end up taking even more time to check on the progress of the work, pay the agent, etc. Then,